Newbie questions

[drone]

Talk to me a bit about the command line stuff. I don't know if I did it right. You add the -xxxx after the shortcut address in the shortcut properties? Do you put spaces? I couldn't find anything about it in the mod forum.

Pretty much. Right-click on the desktop icon, select Properties, and edit the Target: entry. Usually it's something like (quotes included) "C:\Program Files\Medieval Total War\Medieval_TW.exe" You want to put the command line switch outside the quotes. IIRC, the recommended Caravel Mod shortcut looks like this: "C:\Program Files\Medieval Total War\Medieval_TW.exe" -loyalty:130 -green_generals. You can find a list of the command line switches in the wiki here.

I would put my spoke in here. The challenging factions of the High I tried are the Byz (through having shredded territory without Constantinople and imminent arrival of the Horde) and the French (through having to split your attention between fighting off the English, the Aragonese and HRE in Europe while trying to hang on to Outremer).The last one ended in disaster known as civil war. The challenging faction in High I'm going to try is the Turks (similar to the Byz).

Indeed, any Eastern faction starting in High is going to have a rough time of it. Although I have never tried it myself, I imagine it's a brutal campaign with the Turks.