Temporal Expansion of Factions in EB2

[Sir Edward]

I've seen a lot of threads about accurate spacial expansion of factions. Eg. Trying to keep bactria out of the steppes and delaying romans from going into east central europe. I was just wondering if for EB2 there would be more of a focus by the team to get faction to expand at a more appropriate rate. This is not to say I would want to see the Roman REpublic expanding as it did in history, I know that isn't EB's thing. It just takes away from the immersion when everyother game I see the british Isles, spain, and germany becoming united. I actually like to see the moderate or no expansion by Getai, Pontus, Armernia, and it's always a treat when in the 1/10 game they actually do grow. I mean not every barbarian or civilized faction in EB should be conistently growing an empire in 50 years ever game. They should have the ability to do, but there should also be a strong chance that they don't end up expanding. I'm guessing that the inclusion of more factions may help this problem a bit but I was wondering if the EB team would be doing more making the rebel stronger through scripting or something. Thoughts?

[JMRC]

Actually, this is always one of the areas where the team has more debates. Fortunately for the human being, but unfortunately for the game, the AI still hasn't the capacity to beat the player through intelligence only.

We always have the usual drama of trying to balance historical accuracy (which is our main goal) with playability&fun (prevent the game from being a walk in the park for the player) and with AI expansion.

So, much effort was put into EB1 to balance those things and surely the team will put more effort into EB2 for the same purpose.

As a sidenote, making the rebels more powerful turns the game a little bit more difficult and slow for the player, but surely makes the game far more difficult to the AI (which relies on automatic calculations) and thus more easy for the player. So in other words: making the rebels stronger only makes the game indirectly easier for the player, and we don't want that, do we?