What is your experience on medium difficulty?

[merc234]

I usually play Medieval on Hard/Hard difficulty. But after a long game playing as Pisa I've decided to go for Medium/Hard on my new game. I was slightly frustrated with seemingly random rapid rises in unrest in my home regions despite them receiving a lot of happiness buildings and having large garrisons. The other issue I had was the inability of forming alliance later in the game. There's a sort of vicious circle where I'd do my best to occupy settlements so as not to reduce my reputation, then I'd have to deal with large amounts of unrest, then I'd be drawn into a war and even when I crushed every army my enemy sent they'd refuse to accept a ceasefire along with a large gift of cash. So my reputation is plummeting the whole time. Added to this is the fact that factions often break their alliances when there's a new faction leader and then I could not form a new alliance because of my reputation, despite conducting myself fairly honourably.

This isn't me slamming the mod, I think a lot of this is down to me choosing the longer assimilation time Stainless Steel option when I installed it. I was just wondering whether I'd still be facing competent enemies with large armies on medium difficulty, but allowing me to form alliances etc

[BuTAJIuK]

Personally I play the VH / VH, but turn off the rebels / pirates and that your troops could not be rebels. For me as interesting. Try it and you will too.

[nvm]

I've played Lithuania and it was kinda easy., I had a crusade declared on me in the first few turns, which almost ruined my game, but I was fortunate enough that only 3 nations joined it and only one sent troops to take my city, so I wound up beating them back. After I took all the rebel regions it was pretty much smooth sailing. Nobody actually bothered attacking me unless I did it first, and even then, their armies were small and easily beaten back. It's like everyone ignored me and thought I was a non-threat, and they wound up paying dearly for it, culminating in me snatching 4 very highly developed, but incredibly weakly defended settlements from the Rus in just 2 turns.

On the other hand, their ally has attacked me just fine for declaring war at them, even though their army was still rather easy to beat back. Maybe it's just my experience, or I was doing a little too good on my own...I think it's better to go for H/H. I was playing on M/VH.

Also, yes, longer assimilation is likely to be your problem. This submod appears to make religious unrest a much weaker factor, but it makes you have constant unrest which you can't get rid of in certain regions, depending if they are a core part of another faction, or their capital. Longer assimilation will probably just make it pretty much impossible to take huge cities without exterminating population every time for you.

[Larkin]

Don't choose longer assimilation. SSHIP changes the way public order works as it is, it will just mess things up.

SSHIP is more challenging than most mods. I'd say medium difficulty is equal to very hard vanilla, but in different ways (VH in vanilla just means the AI builds endless stacks because it gets crazy benefits).

[merc234]

Yeah, I think longer assimilation is the root of a lot of my problems. Even in another Italian city like Milan there was enormous amounts of unrest despite my large garrison and talented family member. Cities that had been mine for more than 50 turns would start to riot even with a public gallows and low tax rate.

Playing as Novgorod on M/H has still been fun though, Lithuania declared war on me and rebel armies have still been aggressive, trying to ambush my troops etc

Ahhh! Suppose I'll have to reinstall then