I had somewhat of a baffling situation in a game i'm currently playing with 2 friends so if anyone could explain it to me, i'd really appreciate it.
Situation: I were playing as bourbon (had 4 or 5 counties at the time, i think i were still at rank of count though). The friends were toulouse and ireland and besides 2nd coming in as ally to the last assault didn't participate in this. I manage to get claims to 2 counties in independent brittany (i thought they would lack in some of their levies after their previous war against someone they had so thought i'd grab those 2 easternmost ones) and proceed to press both claims and attack.
Only war for both me and brittany at the time. I raise my ~3k personal levies that i can and crush the troops brittany got (yay).
France starts a holy war on some emir in spain, and both me (being part of france after all) and brittany are pretty much just onlookers but on france's side on that war. France suddenly just marches his 10k+ stack into my troops who've sieged those 2 counties with only ~300 brittanys troops attacking me and those french troops actually Beat the shit outta me.
I'm never in war with france, he still likes me, i like him, yet whenever his troops are in same county as brittany's, they massacre mine.
This happens a 2nd time (bought mercs so had some 6k troops that time), again france goes after some random shithole in spain, but does a little detour to ruin my day and war.
3rd time i get some allies in there with me and while france Yet-Again starts to wage war in spain, this time he doesn't detour to brittany so finally i win the stupid, loooong war that drove me nuts.
We never understood what made France work like it did so...any insights?
The names of troops did read as french so shouldn't be mercs or holy orders (not to mention i were a good catholic as was whole close dynasty so no worries on latter for that reason either)