Quote Originally Posted by Rothe
The odd part is that this sort of skews the game against the player, but I suppose it must be so to level the field a bit.
Well, taking into account the huge amount of money you can get by:
- map selling.
- extortion.
- selling trade rights.
- selling alliances.
- selling your princesses.

etc...

I usually receive tribute the first 30 turns from 5-8 factions (about 1000-4000/turn). So, spending a small part of this to have only one opponent can work very well. I'll try next time.