What difficulty are you playing on?

[nikolai1962]

H/M.

I dislike the stat thing with battles above M and so try to make the battles harder by limiting my tactics to be more realistic e.g min camera height etc.

If you want the rebels to attack your cities you have to have H or VH campaign unfortunatley. Personally i think making the ai more aggressive doesn't always make the game better as the ai wastes it's time attacking places it can't take. Ideally the game should be set up so that the ai has advantages built in that balance out the areas where it has flaws, e.g retraining units, depopulating its cities, naval stuff etc. EB has done some cool things with scripting to do this and there are probably a lot more things that could be added to this. I think that is a better approach than the ai just having more money and being more generally aggressive. But the rebels not attacking cities is hard-coded it seems to H or VH setting.

I use large sizes out of habit as my old pc couldn't handle huge but when i remember i make it huge. Huge-size battles are way more fun (except in seiges when they are a total pain).

edit: mines. Is it possible to have a hidden resource, exceptionalmine, or something that has a mines+2 upgrade. That way the few special mines that really did make a huge difference (i think macedonian power was built on them?) while keeping the rest as just very useful but not unbalancing. Or having the mine capability section giving different cash depending on the presence or absence of certain hidden resources.

e.g

capability
{
mine_resource 8 require hidden_resource nomalmine
mine_resource 60 requires hidden_resource supermine
}