agree with the guy who said that expert aint much of a challenge, as far as my experiences go (playing the french from early) supposedly harder than expert all u have to do (once u get past the difficult first 60-75 years when your achieving the crusade objectives... also grabbing possibly the richest potential province of the game in antioch and then u solidify and watch the ai smack the bejeezus out of each other while u set up your trade links back home... by the time the ai turns its attention to you the money situation because of the vast trade income has become escalating, and you start getting the richest economy/ technologically most advanced messages ...after that point the ai just seems to play dumd throwing armies in with much inferior quality and the game loses the edge of difficulty which makes it fun in the early years....

an example of this is in my campaign game... got all of france including the german / english parts all of great britain and ireland all the crusade provinces, aragon, navarre and egypt including citadels pretty much every were and a balance of 190,000 florins is it just me or does the trade part of the game just seem to be way too important to the overall sucess, anyone with any tweaks for the trade and/or anyway to tinker with the fact that the ai dont seem to try to go for the best unit upgrades it can as quick as it can let us know????