I've heard how people can complain about certain aspects of the game like the ai or bugs, but seriously, all of those things can be compensated for. All the game needs to do is make the campaign a little bit more lengthier and action oriented. I mean all that happens is one major battle that decides the victor and then the losing side gets crushed. Like if you manage to defeat a major army, you can quickly run right into a city and trash(exterminate) it the following turn (or just sneak behind the army and then lay siege and make that army fight you using the main army and reinforcements and then you can take the city right away). Then just use the facilities to retrain your units and your army will be 75%-100% of its original strentgh. Then fight the other enemy large army and that faction is just about toast. Or it could be the other way around and you lose your main army and then you will just lose everything except the lands in italy or wherever. The main point of all this is how the human player spent so long building up his cities, managing them, and then training an army just so the game could be beat in a few turns of fighting. I remember reading about how italy was invaded many times and there was a lot of fighting and fort usage and stuff, but where is that in the game?? I mean fighting with forts is almost useless, there aren't frequent skirmishes(like its almost always one big battle against a huge army, either that or you are messing around with the ai and picking off the smaller armies which is cheap), and there are no "alliances against the greater opponent". The game just seems to end when you take all the cities of an opponent and then you are almost invincible because you are twice as powerful as any faction and no one is there to stop you. The game is totally decided when you manage to have 10 cities because the ai rarely ever has that many cities. Whats the use of playing if all you do is become scared of bleeding the enemy too much that they die and there is no challenge left???