On difficulty levels and historical house rules

I invariably play with a whole host of historical house-rules to constrain and indeed guide my behaviour when playing EB. With the appearance of a non-retrospective bug fix (unit sizes), I'm starting to consider that I might need to begin anew if it's going to mess things up later on. Although I'm going to wait a little longer for some more bugs to come out before I do that.

So with a new game in mind, I'm reconsidering my default to the Hard campaign difficulty setting. Not because I'm struggling with it or anything like that, but because the AI is more aggressive amongst itself. Given that I like to play powerbroker and use Force Diplomacy and console commands to preserve the smaller factions and generally prevent anything too ahistorical happening (Baktria wipes out the Seleukids in 220BC!), a less aggressive AI would make my life easier.

Is the AI noticeably less aggressive on Medium campaign difficulty compared to Hard? I can't say I've noticed much by way of a difference, but it has been a while since I last played on Medium. Will I see slower AI expansion and less of the green/blue/brown/yellow death?

Thoughts and observations welcome.

just curious,

how do you use the command consule to give factions money?

Like you give money to yourself but with the faction's internal name listed. For example:

give_money eygpt, 40000

...would give 40,000 mnai to Carthage.

Just in case you need a list...

seleucid - Romani
greek_cities - Koinon Hellenon
thrace - Epeiros
macedon - Makedonia
numidia - Ptolemaioi
romans_julii - Arche Seleukeia
romans_brutii - Baktria
romans_scipii - Hayasdan
carthage - Pontos
pontus - Saka Rauka
armenia - Sauromatae
parthia - Pahlava
dacia - Getai
germans - Sweboz
scythia - Arverni
gauls - Aedui
britons - Casse
spain - Lusotannan
egypt - Qarthadastim
saba - Saba