An Idea to make RTW harder

[Epistolary Richard]

While it's not possible to make use of the culture penalty as a recruiting conditional, mods such as RTR, the Ptolmeic mod and the forthcoming EB all address cultural differences through a variety of abstracts.

To vary the quality of units all you need to do is define a new unit with lower stats than the original, eg Provincial Legionaries as opposed to Italian Legionaries. This would be primarily done in export_descr_unit.txt but several other files would be affected as well and can be made easier with tools such as GodsPetMonkey's Caligula which you can find details of in here.

[Jambo]

In theory, it's a nice idea, but in terms of making RTW harder, I very much doubt it. You see, the one thing you've not considered is how a change like this impacts on the AI. People complain that the AI always tends to field armies full of low tech units. I fear that limiting the ability to produce good units in an expanding empire of an AI faction will only encourage this. Meanwhile the human player will still have the savy to know to produce units mainly from the home provinces and limit the production of the weaker provincial units.