Quote Originally Posted by Martok
Yes, very. Which is another big reason I don't train a whole lot of them.

@sbroadbent: I admitteldy have nothing to base this on other than my own gut feeling, but personally I think it's more that a couple AI factions just get lucky in one or two key battles. After that, it becomes relatively easy for them to steamroll the other factions since everyone's less expansionist on Easy (even though the "steamroller" faction itself isn't overly agressive either). That's only my impression, though.
I have quite a bit of experience playing on Easy, and these are my broad conclusions that I recall.

- Either the Spanish will defeat the Almohads and then proceed to sweep the map, or the Almohads will do the same. This happens in probably 9 out of 10 games guaranteed. Whoever wins that conflict will likely become your main enemy. Note: The Almohad result was more likely in vanilla MTW, while the Spanish result was more likely in MTW VI.

- The Argonese, Danes, Polish, Hungarians, Novgorodians, and other small factions usually are completly docile, and it will only be a matter of time before they are eliminated.

- The French and English will fight it out, but it won't matter because by the time one wins out over the other, the Spanish or Almohads (whoever won between them) will sweep the English/French territories.

- The Germans collapse in rebellion/civil war (usually after being excommed... The only time the Germans don't get excommed is if you're playing them and you avoid it).

- The Sicilians since they are on islands won't suffer the fate of the Argonese group because they'll never expand outside of their islands, and no one will bother to invade them.

- I don't remember much about what the Italians did because I usually played them. If they were AI, they might survive to the end, as long as they can defend against the Almohad/Spanish invasion.

- The Egyptians always swallowed the Turks.

- The Byzantines would maintain their provinces, and expand a bit.

- The horde you would think would make a huge splash. Very rarely are they able to keep the momentum going past the first couple provinces.

I've also played a number of games on Normal, and my general conclusion is that the weaker factions tend to not get eliminated as early. On Easy you can easily expect 3-4 factions to go down within the first 20 years.

I don't play unmodded MTW anymore as I tend to play XL games now. I like the increase in the number of factions, and I've seen a number of interesting strategies by the AI. Steamrolling does tend to still happen, but not as quickly. When a vanilla MTW faction would be eliminated after 4 or 5 years of battle, it can take 20-25 years of back and forth struggle in XL before the scales get tipped enough for one faction to succeed over the other.