Is my perfect game of EB possible?

[QuintusSertorius]

I've been musing now and again about playing EB1 once more. I haven't played in literal years, my game is installed on an old shuttle PC that I'm not sure will actually boot any more (fortunately I grabbed all my files from it the last time it worked). I remember some of the good times I had playing EB (CTDs permitting), but I also remember how much the AI behaviour annoyed me, and resulted in a huge amount of "management" overhead to make it enjoyable.

So are there any easy fixes (ie things that involve little edits to text files, rather than inventing new scripting) to my issues that don't require me to spend half of my play-time managing the AI factions?

First and foremost, how do I slow the game down? By which I mean how do I make the AI less aggressive towards other AI factions? I don't want to see a faction vanish within 20 turns because they've been steamrollered, and I don't want all the Eleutheroi gone within 50. This took up most of my time; I'd be constantly pumping money into the Eleutheroi faction and adding troops to their garrisons in key areas to maintain their freedom. I'd also move stacks of other factions troops elsewhere (sometimes marooning them on that island on the bottom of the map) or use the save-load bug to trick them into besieging another faction's settlement rather than harass the Eleutheroi.

Is there a more elegant way to do this? Can I script giving the Eleutheroi a lot more money? I do play with the City Mod, but this only tinkers around the edges.

Second, is there any way to make the AI go in at least vaguely historical directions? Like making AI Rome go south first, rather than start the Gallic Wars two centuries too early? And make Hayasdan and Baktria go south to threaten the Seleukids, instead of haring off into the steppe?

Third, is there any way to break the battle AI of it's stupid "matching" behaviour which makes it incapable of holding a line? Just once I'd like to be able to win by doing something clever, rather than my attempt to flank causing the AI to break its line and turn its formation into easily exploited chaos. As a supplemental, is there any way to stop AI generals charging into my well-prepared spearmen and acting like commanders? I've tried both Darth Mod and Sinhuets, neither work. Additionally, is it possible to delete the player formation files altogether? I do all my deployment and movement manually, and a few times I've accidentally hit something that's tried to use a default formation and messed everything up.

Fourth, is using bi.exe worth it? I tried it once and I just got all the over-aggressive issues of before, except now the AI would attack by sea as well as land. Worse, factions I had no interaction with whatsoever would drop pathetic little stacks of 3-5 units on a regular basis causing much annoyance but no real threat.