[Verjigorm]

What I do a lot of times is to create pretenders for the nations I want to play against and then set them to AI on turn 1--It keeps them from selecting crappy scales and the like.

I once had an AI pretender for Mictlan with 3 Turmoil and 3 Misfortune--His main castle was beseiged by Knights on an early turn and he never escaped his castle. Of course it's not to say that 3-Turm, 3-Mis is necessarily a bad choice...I suppose you might be able to handle such a thing as a human perhaps with Ermor, but the computer doesn't have a good enough strategy to work out the problems.