Quote Originally Posted by Cheetah
Yes, but how can you get a challenging game without house rules? The AI is just not good enough.
As mentioned above, some of these problems with the Ai have been partially fixed in Kingdoms (well, at least the britannia campaign I am playing atm) where you get rebellions and more 'scripted' events ie: emergence of barons alliance/william wallace/extra 'rebellion' troop spawn when you take a settlement etc which basically gives more free stuff for the AI to throw at you, and all within a fairly compact time frame.

However, in the long M2TW vanilla campaign I dont think the Ai is the biggest problem. If you buffer your borders with strategic allies it prevents most of the 'stupid' strategic AI moves, especially if you keep your allies hale and hearty. The biggest problem is once you have 10-15 geared up territories you are basically invincible, no matter what you do or the AI does. Any 'cunning' Ai move can easily be neutralised with a 2-stack autoresolve if you are that way inclined. Even the hordes you can fly into the teeth of and fight open field for <20-30k a turn, and by the time the timurids arrive you probably have all the territory you want, a sizeable warchest and multiple fully-teched citadels ready for a subtle cannon-up

So yes, houserules are needed for a more challenging game, agreed!