I always do it that way. Maybe I'm just stupid but I never found a way to tell the file to just increase the recruitment cost automatically. So I usually spend 2 hours on manual editing.
By the way: just increasing the recruitment costs does nothing significant to change the number of units/stacks the AI factions field.
I did a test campaign with Saba and tripled the recruitment costs, while not touching anything else (left the number of available units, upkeep, AI money script etc all unchanged).
The only consequences of this are two things:
(1) Smaller factions (especially all the one-province factions) need longer to do anything, if they do anything at all and get destroyed by the larger factions even more easily.
(2) The AI generally needs more time to build up the first full stacks.
But once you're 200+ turns into the campaign the situation is the same as if you didn't change anthing, just with the difference that you have less factions alive and those factions are a bit larger usually (given they were large at campaign start - i.e. Qart-Hadasht, Rome, Seleukids etc).
I have little time at the moment, I'll get back to this topic later and share what I found out in the last weeks. :)
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