Re: Darthmod Platanium 8.0.0 vs 8.0.1
You mentioned the cavalry suicide charges. Bran Mac Born has worked to improve the AI even further and you can find his mod in the DarthMod Sub Mods forum, if you haven't found it already.
You wrote that you heard a lot of bad things about DarthMod 8.0.1. I tried 8.0.1. I was astonished by how good it was. I was in Total War heaven for a day. The next morning, I was in Total War hell - my save games were corrupt. Even uninstalling Empire Total War and reinstalling it didn't fix the problem, which continued even when I tried re-installing the game and playing it without mods. Eventually I learned to fix the corruption problem, but I still don't know how to use DarthMod without the save game corruption bug from happening. (Looking at the number of people who have posted about similar problems, it seems this happens to a lot of people. I've posted the fix that I used on the DarthMod forum.) It seems that some people do play DarthMod campaigns without save game corruption. I don't know whether there's something which they do to avoid it, or whether some computers are immune.
This means that my response to 'Who could play this game without Darthmod' is that I do. I use Empire Total Factions, which includes DarthMod campaign AI and improved battle AI. Bran Mac Born has made a version of his improved AI available for non-DarthMod players, Bran's Empire Campaign AI mod. I get the impression that a fair number of people use Imperial Destroyer or Imperial Splendour; some people use their own mods and/or combinations of mods available on this forum. So, if the bad things which you mentioned make you want to try something other than DarthMod, there are some good options.