Hello, I am also no expert, although I do enjoy tinkering around with the files to try and have a different gaming experience. At the moment Im working on allowing all factions to build some units (Cuman Warriors, Rus Spears, Arab Infantry, Camels and suchlike) but with the units affecting the religeon of the poulation - so that, for example, a Catholic army could build Camels, but it would increase the Muslim population in his empire if he did so.

Financially the biggest problem is that hinted at above - anything that improves the AI's income also improves the players, and the player can then make the trade income on top of it, meaning the human almost always benefits more than the AI. Short of using your own rules (like not building traders posts) its not easy to do.

If you almost always go the same faction, you could simply reduce costs on all units that you cannot build or give other leaders discounts on certain troops. This can, unfortunately backfire - as sometimes they will respond by building huge numbers of the cheaper units and less of everything else.

During the Medieval era, trade was MASSIVELY reduced outside of the Eastern Roman areas, so it makes historical as well as gameplay sense to focus on making trade benefit the human less, but the effects are just as easily achieved by refraining from using trade yourself. Same goes for making boats cost more, you'll hurt small factions and achieve the same result by simply altering your own bahaviour. If anything, Id suggest making ships MUCH cheaper and more easily accessible. A committed player will rule the seas without much competition after the first 150 years anyway (I generally have 3-6 provinces churning them out asap and have uncontested mastery of the med after 100 years and the atlantic by 150 years when I go for it) - while it's simple enough to sink a large fleet, it gets annoying to have to constantly pick off little ships - and if my 'compeition' could be spawning new little fast annoying ships every year instead of every 3 - while this would not significanlty alter my own approach or dominance - meaning my trade would suffer a lot more, it'd be harder to invade.

If anything it might be worth redistributing resources a bit - give the Danes, Irish, Scots, Volgos (obviously depends what version / mods you use) either more supplies or make only a select few provinces trade points - rather than a region producing goods; just choose the main hubs of trade and make them have more concentrated groups of 'gathered' trade items - obviously constantinople, Egypt, Syria, Novgorod were places that got a slice of almost all trade heading through them.

As I usually play Byzantines, Greece, Nicaea, Constantinople, Crimea and Bulgaria already have great trade potential from the word go; whereas if we considered that almost all of these goods went where they were going via the Capitol; it might make sense to focus all Byzantine trade goods at the City - making the surrounding provinces poorer.

there is, however, nothing to stop the human grabbing all the hubs and ruling the world anyway - but if you gave specifica advantages to factions and territories that YOU rarely utilise, you can make a better game of it - but you could just as easily not build trading posts.


Again - all these things can be achieved by the player deciding not to use his advantage to full - so im not sure that modding is necessarily the best answer.

P