The problem I have is I want to fight the late-period troops of other factions and the the default amount of turns does not let the AI tech up enough for that to happen. Part of it comes from the AI not having enough money to upgrade their settlements to to the highest level, due to the fact that most of them are constantly fighting other AI factions with a bunch of crappy troop stacks and/or mercs that drain their economy when they're better off recruiting a few stacks of good-quality troops (which is why fighting Mongols and Timurids is the best part of the game).

I've been giving away all of my excess money (I try to keep it under 50k) to weaker factions in my game (such as HRE, who got whooped by about 5 different factions at the same time all across their borders, or France, which bascially gets whooped by 5 other factions from all sides), but instead of manning up and building up their military, they became vassals of Hungary or some crap, and then you have Hungary (who hasn't teched up but now has an instant infusion of hundreds of thousands of cash) instantly recruiting another 3 or 4 full stacks of crossbow militia and FFK, it gets a little boring wiping out these kinds of inferior stacks after awhile. I mean, its past 1400 and you're coming at me with FFK and crossbow militia.....c'mon.