Quote Originally Posted by TinCow
For anyone looking to increase the challenge of the game, I highly recommend downloading and experimenting with various mods. LTC, Stainless Steel, and Ultimate AI all succeed in increasing the challenge significantly. Plus, you can still layer your personal house rules on top of them.
Well there are two problems with the mods.

1, First there are just too many and it is not clear what kind of advantages do they have over the 1.2 patch. It would be nice if there would be a pinned intro thread about the major mods.

2, I am not sure that the tactical AI is that much better. I just downloaded the Stanless Steel and started a hungarion campaign on H/H. The byz AI (i) kept throwing all spearmen armies against me, (ii) which were defeated just as easily as the same armies in the vanilla game. I like the other changes (more provinces, more factions, etc) but I am not sold as yet on the improved startegic/tactical AI. I played 3 major battles, won all three with ease (despite the fact that archers seem to be much weaker) and I know for sure that would have lost all three on autoresolve.