I am currently playing on H/VH and I am enjoying it a great deal. Regarding battle difficulty, I agree with the other posters. The AI does not seem to be getting much, if any, stat or morale bonuses. I simply feel like I am fighting normal enemy troops, so any difficulty boost must be to the AI. I would urge all TW veterans to play on this difficulty.

Regarding campaign difficulty, I have found Hard to be rather fair. So far I have had major wars with Scotland and France, both of which I started. Scotland I never tried for peace with, but I made several ceasefires with France at various points after trouncing them. The AI was entirely reasonable and paid me tribute for the ceasefire in a realistic way (since I was winning). However, I have now reduced France to two territories in Iberia and they absolutely refuse a ceasefire, even if I offer to pay them 10,000 gold. This makes no sense to me, but is the only unrealistic diplomatic problem I have yet encountered.

I have had a few other unintentional wars with Venice whose origin I cannott seem to figure out. Sometimes I am just randomly informed that I am at war with them. I suspect they are failing spying/assassination attempts and it auto-declaring war on my behalf. This has happened 3 times and each time they immediately accept a ceasefire and pay me for pleasure of it (which makes sense since they are excommunicated, at war with several other nations, and I have a huge military). I have also been at peace with the Turks and Egyptians for almost the entire game, even though I took Antioch from Egypt in the first crusade and have been converting the whole area to Catholicism since then.

I have had very long-term alliances with Denmark and HRE and many shorter alliances with other nations. I have shared a border with Denmark for nearly 80 turns and they have never made an aggressive move towards me and generally have been great neighbours.

My relations with the Pope have been pretty bad, but that\'s my own fault for attacking France when there was a French Pope. I was actually excommunicated for a good 20-30 turns, but no one took advantage of the situation to attack me.

I have noticed that my Relations with all nations are pretty poor, even with my allies. I think this may have something to do with the difficulty level, though it may also be due to the fact that I tend to train my assassins on allied princesses. That said, even with low relations levels, my allies have been rather gracious.

So, all in all Hard campaign difficulty seems to be pretty decent. Other than the near-dead France being unwilling to negotiate (when the not-dead France was willing to negotiate), I haven\'t noticed anything that looked wrong.