Thanks Caledonian...

I did some research on the subject myself:

1) I can confirm the accuracy of your campaign difficulty information. The actual "difficulty" of the campaign seems quite random...sometimes a cakewalk, usually "not too hard", and on a handful of occasions, a brain buster. This, however, is not in any way shape or form related to the difficulty setting you choose. Random. Your explanation on how difficulty settings effect diplomacy (and that they only effect diplomacy) goes completely hand in hand with my findings. (for anyone reading this back log)

2) It doesn't seem that choosing anything less than VH battle difficulty gives YOUR troops various bonuses. This is the only thing you wrote that conflicts with what I've read.

Easy- Gives your troops bonuses...

Normal/Hard/Very Hard- Strictly strategic upgrades regarding AI. The information I've found (source: http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic...ame-Fixes.html) states that (and upon further research this source has evidence to back it up) there are no AI bonuses at any level. Increasing the difficulty only makes the AI "smarter". Bonuses per difficulty did not carry over from RTW to M2TW. The player on the other hand- Doesn't receive bonuses unless they choose the easy setting. Medium/Hard/VH don't yield any bonuses to either side. Further, the big difference at H and VH is supposedly in morale/fatigue management of one's own troops. Terrain/Fatigue/Morale/etc are more closely tied together and your army is more "fragile" and needs to be more carefully managed. It looks as if this system has replaced the old one...of simply handing out bonuses to the AI as the user hikes up the difficulty.

Now of course, I've yet to have the experience to know personally. I'm also just clarifying/questioning rather than changing your original suggestion. This only makes VH more viable with M2TW indeed. On Rome, VH gave totally unrealistic bonuses to the AI...and therefore was unviable, as was anything less than VH due to the insta-rout of the AI.

I would suppose that I would start the game on M/H for the first go and then move up to M/VH after I have finished a campaign.

Regarding Turns- I think I too will leave it at the standard 2 years per turn- at least for the first several campaigns I do. a) I'd like to meet victory conditions on the level playing field a few times before changing anything myself and b) It seems as if changing the dates to 1.00 (1 turn= 1 year) or 0.50 (1 turn= 6 months) would require the changing of build times and some event's arrivals in order to scale appropriately. I don't want to get into that until I have quite a bit of experience with the game and at least have my own opinions on how I'd like to tailor things. Keep it simple stupid, right?

I have one last question- Promise- What about unit sizes? I am going to use Huge unit sizes. No question about it. Am I really getting myself into a population and recruitment pool issue by using the largest units I can? I could not find any information about this anywhere. Just a few people asking about it as I am followed by no response heh.

Thanks