if you could read, you would have read.
it was on hard / hard - but the AI does not get much smarter from medium to very hard. It has some serious flaws.
1.) Generals are hardly protected and die early, even if you do not go for them directly
-> especially low morale units are immediately running away
2.) Cavalry Charges are insanely powerful
3.) The AI waits patiently for you to encircle / flank it.
4.) Imagine what would have happened if I would have had 1 unit of war elephants.
Infantry vs Infantry battles are a bit more complicated, but still:
The battles are fast and dumbed down. There is no working counter unit for Cavalry except some Chariots (!) I did not see much in the Campaign so far.
With 44 provinces Micromanaging reminds me of Civ, more tedious than in MTW.
The battles in MTW also gave ridiculous results, but there were usually at least some survivors... and Cavalry was not faster than light.
But well, this game is 109% or something like that, so how can I complain about it? It is a VERY GOOD game, but I doubt it will catch my interest longer than Medieval: TW. The Medieval Period would have been much better suited for those Cavalry Monstrosities.
All my MTW battles had much more tactics involved than this, and the defending AI was a bit smarter in defending their hill and did not wait forever to be encircled.
The AI is also terribly bad at defending towns, you can win even if you are outnumbered by breaking the gate and just hitting CTRL+A and klick the unit behind it.
The more you play RTW, the more these flaws become obvious.
I also bought all armies of the Scipii, bought three complete stacks in the last three turns for some 3000 Gold maximum each...