Empires of the Middle Ages - Background

This is my favourite board wargame, an overview on the background and development of the game can be found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empires_of_the_middle_ages).  I originally played the game at Coventry Wargames Club using the original version and we often played the shorter scenarios.  Over the years I collaborated with various people to develop many variants overcome some of the many ambiguities in the original rules.  This culminated in my probably over ambitious "Age of the Sword" variant which added major complexity and was playtested in 2000.

I put the game aside for the best part of a decade but last year I purchased the new edition of the game that Decision Games released in 2004.  I found a lot of information on the new edition on this site (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/911/empires-of-the-middle-ages).  I got this out a couple of weeks ago and decided to revisit my revised rules with a view to creating a new version that deals with the ambiguities but avoids a lot of the complexity of my previous efforts.