add_money AI Optimization

[TinCow]

I've noticed that a lot of people have started using the add_money cheat to make the 1.2 patch AI harder. However, the amounts given and the frequency of the donations appear to be all over the board. I thought it would be useful to have a discussion to try and figure out how to make this process the most effective.

First, for those who have no idea what I'm talking about, you can give money to any faction in the game (including your own) by typing the following into the console:

add_money FACTION, AMOUNT

where FACTION is one of the following:

england france hre spain venice sicily milan scotland byzantium russia moors turks egypt denmark portugal poland hungary papal_states aztecs mongols timurids slave

and where AMOUNT is the number of florins you want to give them. As an example, if you wanted to give 2,000 florins to sicily, you would type the following into the console:

add_money sicily, 2000

In my latest game, I gave 100,000 to most of the factions at the start of the game, and have been giving further donations of 100,000 every once in a while to those factions that have chewed through all their money. Obviously, the immediate result of this is that the AI factions assemble much larger armies. While challenging, this can actually backfire, because the AI then has such a large military upkeep that they quickly go bankrupt. This means that a one-time donation won't work, because the AI will cripple itself with the initial high upkeep. So, if you give them tons of money, you need to do so regularly.

Doing this manually can be slow and you can often forget to do so. One alternative seems to be simply editing the King's Purse for each AI faction, so that they have a steadily high income. However, this would require manually editing that file every time you wanted to play a different faction, which is annoying.

So, for people who do this, I have a few general questions:

1) Is it better to use add_money or edit the King's Purse?
2) How much should we be giving and how often?
3) Should the Pope and the Rebels also be given money?
4) Should the Mongols and Timurids be given money before they settle?

Hopefully we can figure out a good standard system for this play style.