Okay....emotions are wayyyy too high here it seems

Anyways, to each his (or her) own. Its a game and should be treated like one. IMO, given the state of M2TW multiplayer, I doubt anyone who plays M2TW can truly call themselves hardcore (compared to those WoW, Starcraft, Warcraft, ect... players that is)

For me, the AI is ridiculously easy to beat against in almost any circumstance so I think neither blitzing nor turtling is particularly hard at all. The only way to get a half decent level of difficulty, methinks, is to use a mod that gives the AI a horrendously overpowered starting position or something like that