I have been playing the total war series since shogun first came out and have realized that every version always has some massive exploit that the player can take advantage of and practically never lose the campaign.

There are alot if you play the games repeatedly. I modded some of them out of MTW2, like making every settlement a city to make seiges easier for AI, restricting missile troops, giving almost every unit free upkeep, decreasing build times/costs for all constructions, increasing recruitments slots to max. These did make the AI alot more dangerous if simply making him able to field more stacks and upgrade his towns easier.

Empire has a ton of exploits:
1) The AI never knocks down your walls in a siege first THEN attacks ... it always tries to scale my walls THEN blows them up. Makes it really easy to defend towns.

2) The diplomatic "hate" is too easy to manipulate, they will never attack you unless they hate you and you can control whether they hate you or no VERY easily. Also the strange case of euro nations not caring if you kill eastern allowed me to take over all of india, N africa, middle east as persia(love that mod) and all of europe was like "We love you".

3)The larger intercept zones at first looked nice but then when i realized you could run your cavalry out of your infantry stack, touch the town, and seige it will all your infantry you left behind it was a bit mean.

4) The necessity of getting military permission to walk across territory is good but it means that if russia is fighting the ottomans but does not fight the crimean khanate + georgia, they NEVER fight. This can happen at many places on the map.

5)i was able to trade Goa in india to 3 different euro nations for new technology, then take it right back, then make peace with them instantly. Since the AI is pretty bad with naval invasions it would have mattered little if they did not make peace with me. But since thier "hate-o-meter" was not high they accepted my peace offer. Alternatively, no matter how hopelessly weak a nations is, if it hates you it will attack you and NEVER make peace.

So how to fix these. Ofcourse i could just not do these things to the AI but self-imposed restrictions to make up for holes in a game is not really my style. So if someone knows how to mod any of these solutions please tell me the pack file.

1) Shrink the intercept range back to MTW2 range: I would rather fight many little battles than one big one that i am just going to auto-resolve anyway thansk to the fact that your reserve stacks cannot be AI controlled anymore (unless i am missing that button in the preliminary battle screen). Also it will keep the AI from walking into range of my settlement, getting intercepted and forced to bash thier heads agaisnt my walls.

2) Re-work diplomacy to make it less manipulative and more realistic. I mean when morrocco, the last muslims nation left after i conquered all the others, declares war on me rather than becoming a protectorate it is just silly.

3) Somehow get the computer to use its cannons first then scale the wall. Aslo has anyoen noticed that walls DO NOT REPAIR.

4) If someone can explain the values in the AI behavior files in main.pack it would be a big help in making a much more aggressive AI. When is see the behavior "HELP_ALLY_AT_WAR" followed by 1500 i have no clue what this means, whether i go up and it triggers more or down.

5)I would like to increase the frequency of rebellions and increase the severity of the attacking army just to spice it up. Maybe make happiness harder to manage.

6) Something i do with all my TW games after i run it through once or twice in vanilla is to make all units recruitable from any level settlement. In thecase of Empire i just removed all the research pre-requisites, reduced build times to 1 and cost to 100 for everything, upped recruitments points by double, and reduced research points for all techs to 1. I got tired of waiting until the campaign was already won practically and then FINALLY seeing some of the more advanced units. I have beaten the entire MTW2 campaign without ever even recruiting any advanced units, no guns no super elite knights. This way the AI and myself can feild much more exciting armies early on when victory is not a sure thing.

7)i am also trying to individualize the euroline infantry to make them more varied.

I love the TW games, and it always takes awhile to get them sufficiently difficult for some real excitement, but eventually it will be good.

And does anyone know is someone is working on a translator for all those "unknown" variables in the pack manager? the earlier TW games seemed alot easier to understand once you opened them up than this one.