As you both describe (Slaists, anweRU) I also saw this in my Prussian campaign.

I took France in 1780...it had 4 fully developed churches...that is just nuts. They could have been a real powerhouse if they had (The French AI) done a better job of managing their resources. And that's what it is really. Managing resources and al the variations available to it. If they can get that done well then we can would really see the difficulty levels come into play. Or if they could just get the AI to work properly and then allocate money or take it away to provide a difference in what the well tuned AI can spend money on. That seems like the simplist way to provide for difficulty levels while keeping the AI logic flat and standardised throughout.

In the end game there were stupid trade stacks of 2 Indiamen with 5 to 6 warships. That would be very pertinent if the AI sent military flotillas to the trade regions to reek havoc and then take over the trade nodes, but it doesn't do this.

It was so funny in my campaign. Pirates dominated the sea lanes by 1765. There were 3 or 4 full stacks of Pirates romaing around with no one to kill. They'd literally killed off most of the worlds shipping except the ships that made it to the trade nodes in the opening few decades. It took my best Admiral two full stack naval engagements to get rid of them. The make up was 2x1st rates, 6x2nd rates and a few 3rd rates. It was an amazing battle.