Experiment to see how hard game is...

[Sentinel]

I think the point that the original poster was making is related to the difficulty setting.

The game provides easy, medium, hard and very hard setting for both campaign and battle maps. A total of 16 different levels of difficulty. In addition this can be fine tuned by choosing harder (e.g. Scotland) or easier (e.g. England) factions. This should enable a suitable level of challenge (with a risk they could loose) to any player, irrespective of their intelligence, experience or playing styles.

Easy / Easy settings should be suitable for

my semi-retarded cousin, 12 years old...

Medium / Medium settings should be challenging for most, average intelligence, players coming to the game for the first time.

Hard / Hard setting should present a challenge to players with a few campaigns experience. That have learned the how to use all the different element of the game.

Very Hard / Very Hard settings should be for skilled, experienced players that know how to effectively use all the elements of the game to achieve victory conditions.

The fact that the OPs friend (despite military training, good intelligence) was able to easily complete a VH/VH campaign, whilst ignoring the advantages that some of the main elements could give him, is proof that game gives insufficient challenge at the higher settings.

Currently the higher setting difficulties are set too low. I have played several campaigns on VH/VH and have never felt that I was about to loose this campaign. The worst situation I have experienced is that I have made a series of blunders and said to myself, this is going to set back my campaign 10 turns to recover.

I know that by turtling for 50 turns, never blitzing, adopting a host of house rules, I can make the game more of a challenge, but this seems to be the complete opposite to the principle of the game.

As a leader you are to use your skill and experience to conquer the other factions as efficiently as possible. You should be aggressive and use any weakness in the enemy’s defences to your advantage. Your enemy should be trying to do the same to you.

If you adopt the strategy that because the enemy is stupid and makes a stupid move.
E.g.
He camps a full stack army being paid to do nothing, for ten turns, next to a rebel settlement.
He charges his cavalry at your archers, sat behind a row of stakes.
He tries to siege your settlement, garrisoned with a full stack, with 4 units of peasants.
Then I should not exploit his stupidity and should likewise make equally stupid moves.
E.g.
Not take over the rebels yourself, but allow him plenty of time to attack the rebels if that’s what he eventually decides he wants to do.
Position your archers in front of your stakes to prevent his horses getting a nasty splinter.
Sally forth with only your peasants to make it a fair fight.
Is completely at odd with the principles of being a good General. Of being smarter, more skilled than your opponent.
You shouldn’t be asked to increase the challenge by matching your opponent’s stupid moves with your own stupid moves.

I accept that the AI is never going to give the same challenge as a human opponent would. No game with this level of complexity could every be cost effectively programmed to do that.
Most games of this type have to “cheat” in some way to give the computer an advantage to increase the challenge.
Most gamers accept that harder setting will give the computer advantages to compensate for the lack of AI. Most experienced gamers hope / expect that setting the difficulty to VH/VH will make the challenge very hard with a good risk that they might loose the battle / campaign, if they make too many mistakes.

CA have used some factors, but not enough, to make the game more challenging. They seem to have aimed to game too much towards the casual player and forgotten to cater for the full range of gamers.