Quote Originally Posted by Meneldil View Post
To be honest, set some house rules, and the game stop to be easy. Early game blitz are not a good way to enjoy a TW game.
Blitzing in MTW made the game easy, blitzing in RTW made the game easy, blitzing in M2TW made the game easy. I'm not surprised ETW is easy if you blitz the game.
Even mods such as EB are easy if you blitz early on. Heck, even Europa Universalis II/III turns easy if you blitz with some factions.

So yeah, as I've said, set some house rules, try to play in a historical way, and the game will be much more enjoyable. I'm not asking you to pretend to suck or what not, but things like not going at war with everybody without casus belli for example, does improve the game.
I'm still a bit baffled CA did not even try to make conquering huge chunks of lands harder. The era saw little territorial changes in Europe, yet you can conquer western europe in 5 turns in game.

I don't say the AI isn't bad. I haven't played enough to give a real opinion on it, and to be honest, I doubt it's vastly better than RTW or M2TW AI's. But still, playing agressively has always made the TW games retardingly easy. No news here.
Some of the previous quirks of the game that made blitzing easy have been removed from Empire. Off the top of my head:

1. It is much harder to hold a region
2. The AI are more prepared to form coalitions to stop the player.
3. No access to another province without military access or declaring war.
4. No loot for sacking a town.
5. Emergent and re-emergent factions make things more difficult
6. No rebel towns to take early on.

It's still a very effective tactic though.