Aimlesswanderer, when you have a chance, could you try again on "normal" campaign difficulty? I'm always suspicious of the "harder" difficulties, because often "harder" can mean everyone hates you (and goes to war with you). One thing that CA has *not* made clear is if DoW triggers are influenced by difficulty settings. Other games (non-CA games especially) in the past have done the "gang up on the player" routine on the higher difficulties (e.g. DoW you, but ally all the other AI's). Call of Duty 4 had a habit of making all the AI preferrentially target you when you were in a firefight if you played the hard difficulty, but were "normal" in the normal diffuclty.

The reason I ask is that I want to get a feel for how the AI is w/o the "hard/very-hard" influences. The other day, someone was complaining that a sloop took out his fifth rate in a boarding action, but mentioned that he was playing "very-hard" difficulty. Well, duh, of course the AI crewmembers would take out a crew twice their size on VH, they have such huge benefits in combat/morale over you, and your guys have morale penalties. I don't doubt that it's similar on the campaign, and I doubt it's simply limited to giving the AI huge cash bonuses. Why wouldn't the AI be more "aggressive" and reckless to you on hard or very hard?

So to get a baseline, we *really* need to test on "normal" difficulty. Anything else is just a waste of time because what we might be seeing is simply the difficulty level modifiers on diplomacy.