Quote Originally Posted by Julius_Nepos
I personally find the 1.1 AI to be anything but "too easy." As always I'm handicapped by being a superior field commander but not all that good at waging a campaign on the map itself. I've found playing on hard/hard that the AI is so utterly aggressive that the only real way to survive is to blitz blitz and blitz everyone so they don't have a chance to overwhelm my positions. I don't really like that style of gameplay but I'm finding I have no choice but to engage in it.

The fact that the AI is suicidal, will attack at every opportunity and will do nothing to preserve itself or "win" the campaign in its own right just makes things harder. In my latest failure of a Hungarian campaign I survived by blitzing the Byzantines early but at the end I was under siege by 5 elite armies at every corner of my domains with no hope of holding the line.
Try playing on medium campaign difficulty instead of hard. Medium normalizes relations every turn towards neutral. H and VH normalize to worse relations every turn, unless you do something like constant bribery to stop it. I've found that a medium campaign difficulty makes the diplomacy more predictable for my style of play, with fewer crazy moves by the AI just because our relations have bottomed out, due to a constantly sinking relations meter.

Also, try a starting position like Spain, England, or the Moors (although the Moors have poor units to start with), where you're not surrounded on all sides. That makes it easier to expand at your own pace, and turtle for a while between expansion pushes.