[Edratman]

NT Jedi makes a good suggestion that I never heard before, start everyone off with 3 to 5 provinces. I think I'll try it next time.

I've tried making pretenders for the AI, and this was an improvement, but as a rule I think that the impossible setting is a much tougher opponent than a good pretender on normal difficulty which is what you get when you switch from human to computer control. I do flip flop on this when the AI self destructs in a few turns.

Probably the best way is to make a pretender god for each AI using map edit. You can ignore the normal scale points cheat the AI into great scales and magic. It is slow and tedious, but once done you can just copy and paste these pretenders into each subsequent map. I haven't tried it because I am too lazy but I do a lot of map editting and it it should work. I have cheated my own pretenders and I've found that you can use any unit in the game for a pretender.

In fact we could all make a couple of AI's in text format for map edit insertion, submit them and accumulate a bank of map edit AI's available for download.. We could make rules for how many points to cheat the AI, and other issues.
Also someone needs to define the format. I have 4 or 5 text editting programs that all work and all easier to use than notebook. They all make good map edits that work, but I do not have a clue if they are mutually compatable in a reference pretender bank like proposed.

Speak up.