I don't know about you guys but 6.1 isn't challenging enough in the ways that it should be. The ai simply isn't aggressive enough and this limits the amount of factions that are fun to play as.
It seems like all the focus has been on making the ai smarter, but this seems to be impossible, so I suggest giving the ai large forces and making them super aggressive. I just want to have the feeling that I can be wiped out, or at least a large portion of my empire could be wiped out if it is not adequately defended. I end up only playing as factions such as Ireland or Norway because they don't start out with large empires that are already semi entrenched. I mean it is no fun to play as the Byzantines when a jihad means 5 full stacks will stand outside of Constantinople, but no action will be taken against the rest of the empire besides the normal siege of some random thing every 5 turns. I just wish there was a mod that made it so when a nation declares war on you they send at least 2 full stacks against every city that you have. I have grown tired of games where you are sieged by 1 full stacks then maybe every 10 turns by another.
Considering the stupidity of ai, without large forces they never pose a credible threat. Even if they do manage to take something there is no follow up. I mean it is just ridiculous when you take a boat full of deisi javelinmen to Jerusalem and manage to carve out an empire in the middle east. I mean it is enjoyable to do so, but it should at least take effort.
It seems like the orthodox now is to make the game harder by increasing build times and dissent, which does make it harder, but also makes the game even more boring because battles are more scarce and you have fewer of them.
Basically I want to feel proud when I kill an enemy, I don't want to feel like I just cheated a mentally retarded child out of Jerusalem or something like that, and i just thing the best way to go about this is through making the ai have greater numbers and rampant aggression rather than making units take excessively long times to build and cities just randomly rebelling at high rates
So I just wonder, is this possible? Is anyone working on it? I don't mean to sound so critical, its just that i the only time the game was really challenging was my first time playing vanilla, when I didn't know how to really play the game, and I didn't know the ai so well, and I crave that feeling again!
So what are your thoughts, would you rather have an ai that just goes around wantonly attacking things with huge armies or an ai that is lukewarmly intelligent with mild armies, but greater build times and increased rebellion?