[Edratman]

Edi's advice is the easiest to do. You do a map edit using a text editor. There are quite a few that work. You could do it in notepad, but notepad is much harder.

Then you can set up each nation with a good starting province and a pretender with good/great magic (use a immoblie pretender, if you make a SC the AI will send them to arena death matches). You can give the AI great scales and a better starting army, commanders and mages also quite easily.

This will be a great boost to the AI nations and still retain all characteristic's of the designed nation.

I recommend you make a random map (small because it is quicker) name it something like AI mod map and make all your modified nations on this map. This would be your permanent master AI nation file. Then paste them to the maps you want to use, just changing the starting province # for the nation and commanders. (That is the sad voice of experience.)