Experiment to see how hard game is...

[alpaca]

I second Didz opinion, the game is much too easy if you blitz. Sacking is just too powerful, it should be dropped altogether or at least the AI should defend their settlements more effectively.
This is definitely a design flaw, together with the fact that difficulty settings barely scale at all. On vh the game plays very much the same as on medium.

If you have a sound strategical and tactical understanding you'll have no problems with the battles, either, because CA removed the stat bonuses in M2TW. Add to that the exploits that even new players can easily find and you get the situation you describe above.

If you can afford to wait a few months, I'll try address as many of these points as possible in Italia Invicta. The game will be much harder on the higher difficulty settings because I'll introduce more meaningful asymmetries between the player and the AI, for example regarding restrictive features (a glimpse of that has already been revealed: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=87295) that aren't imposed on the AI.
This could turn off a few people but since I can't make the AI better I think it's necessary to have it cheat better, like in Civ4 for example. There, the AI gets huge bonuses on the high difficulty settings which provides a challenge even for very good players.


By the way: Even though the game is quite easy for good players, there's a lot of players for who the game is difficult enough, or even too difficult in some cases. The problem here is, as I said above, that the difficulty levels don't scale well.