Quote Originally Posted by FactionHeir
IMO its still kind of easy in 1.2 to cripple the AI early on by offering them: Alliance, trade rights, map information + 1-3k florins for 1-2 of their cities/castles.
Uh... then don't do that? What you're describing is essentially power-gaming; you're exploiting the weakness of the AI to beat it down as hard and as fast as possible.

You want a harder game, but you don't want to impose more limits on yourself. It would certainly be nice if CA developed a harder AI, but as I said before, the only way to do that is to make difficulty levels which handicap the player and boost the AI. That's more convenient than doing it manually, but in the absence of an automatic system made by CA, it seems like the logical alternative.