[HJ]

And the suggestion about special debug mode is also very useful for trying out/balancing mods.

In any case, yesterday I was playing iron faith Ulm with 5 normal AI opponents, indies on 5, and I've encountered several big armies. On turn 39 Mictlan showed up on my border with an army of 280 men. I know they are not of the highest quality, but still, it's decent size force. Btw, I'm not suggesting that the strategical AI need not be improved (the AI can never be improved enough).

What I found, and I don't know whether other people have noticed as well, is that the AI is constantly moving its armies back and forth in the border provinces. So, if you want to take the province, order an attack when there is an army present - it will leave, and you'll take the province undefended. If you want to wipe out the army instead, attack when the province is empty. And this is almost exclusively the case as far as I was able to see - armies never stay in place on borders to defend them or move unpredictably, they keep on pacing and exploiting is easy because of this. I don't know what's the reason for this behaviour(maybe they are running out of supplies in the border province or something), but it's very predictable, and a possible target for improvement.