First of all, the game runs way better on my computer with alex than it did with BI or RTW. The battles are smoother. I also rarely get crashes after battles. Plus, that annoying phalanx bug was fixed in it.

Second, the campaign map AI is noticeably better. With more retraining (as far as I've noticed, I could be wrong) the AI actually makes decent armies. There's still the silver shield and pedite spam, but I didn't expect that to go away.

What I really enjoy is the diplomatic AI. On M/M on both RTW and BI, I've had long saved games with various factions, and unless I had huge amounts of money, the AI would always refuse just about any logical ceasefire. On Alex, I can actually finagle regions out of the AI for a ceasefire, and not have to pay unreasonable amounts. They're still hesitant when you border them, but it is totally possible to get a ceasefire most of the time. You can go up to them and offer a ceasefire, and they'll tell you what they want for a ceasefire instead of just flat out refusing. Protectorates still require huge amounts of money, but they're more possible on Alex than the other .exes, from what I've seen.

I'll post pics of my fun Roman game later to make this thread better.