Any suggested house rules to make the game more challenging? (VI expansion)

[Goalum]

I haven't played in ages but wasn't there a way to turn over to the AI control over which buildings your faction builds and which units it trains? I never tried it, but I imagine that would raise the difficulty level a notch.

Hi Brandy Blue, there is, in fact. You can open the 'drawer' behind the mini-map on the top left corner - if memory serves, and the option is there.

I really liked that option, it basically made you a 'servant' of the AI - you could think of him as the king and yourself was like his minister or something, so you had to make do and manage with the things that he decided.

That made the game considerably more challenging - and it also gave me very good insights to the workings of the campaign AI, how the AI made decisions, what he builds, trains etc etc which eventually got me into seeing all the glaring imperfections and omisions the vanilla game has.

Many of these imperfections were really easy to sort out, with small alterations with the basic files of the game, and as time went on, like many others, i started to do them.

It was the fact that so many of them were needed to be made and coordinated in order for the gameplay to really shine, that ultimately got me into modding.

The fact is, that the workings of the campaign very seriously influence the quality and significance of battles - as the game is in the vanilla state, the game can be won through sheer force of numbers and/or exploits of features.

If you blitz the AI early, you can either win outright or reach very quickly and easily a point that you are set to win no matter what, through exploiting the many 'badly implemented' game features.

Mercenaries is a typical example, they are so cheap and so good, that in the early stages of the game, you'd typically have no competition over and over. Once you take a break from expansion, you can disband them to lose the weight of maintenance, and re-buy them again once consolidated for another cycle of expansion. In this manner, you can conquer 3 or 4 other kingdoms very quickly, basically you've won, and the game becomes a drudgery.

The very same reason applies to the idea of iron man rules: they are a workaround to the imperfections and omissions of the campaign game, that make the game more on the same footing as the AI, hence they bring out the need to better strategising in the campaign and better skill on the field of battle.

The whole idea, is to enjoy the game more

In my book, this was done by bringing myself on the same footing as the AI. Sure i wanted to win, but win not steal a victory. That's the reason behind the 'deadly sins' and my modding efforts