Some guy here explained how successfull is he when attacking with his merchants. This is simply not true even on medium. My merchant 7 points vs enemy merchants 7 points has only 21% chance of win. So I decided to wait the enem yattack. Well, from 6 attacks all the 6 were successfull. So with equal merchant or even close point the enemy merchants are killing machines.
Of course you can spend half an hour reloading until you win - but it is much quicker simply to activate the cheats.