I have experimented with disable_ai to slow things down but teh emipres get filthy rich in the process, so i counter that by taking money away and adding money to the smaller factions. Even still, this only does so much.

There is nothing I can do to stop Armenia from expanding north instead of south. pontos also likes to cross into byzantine adn then create an empire in bulgaria, romania, and ukraine and ignore their homeland.

There is nothing I can do except move_character and add_money -40000 to stop luso and germany from having empires early on. and even this doesn't seem to work unless they die early.

out of 50+ campaigns i have only twice seen parthia do any thing relevant other than die or get confined into one city with 8 fms making it nearly impossible to take. it seems they start their reforms but then screw it up rendering them unable to recruit any units.

I have also upgraded the pontic and armenian specific infantry and it seems to help a tiny bit, very tiny bit.

i have found almost no naval invasions using alex.exe. bi.exe uses them but as it has been said they are uselss and annoying. The punic war always starts with a stack of peasant skirmishers form sardinia or corsica landing in italy. But i do miss "shield-wall".

i have found that ai rome and makedonia have the least historical armies. they both like to spam out cheap foreign levies with random faction troops mixed in. AI rome is only fun to fight if they are in marian era. At least then you are mostly fighting roman units.

what makes me unhappy is that some of the complaints in op are still being addressed in rtw2.

whenever i do the faction swap via Hax's guide, all my governments break and the game starts crashing.