Originally posted by Barnius
If you are experienced in single player EU 2, than in my opinion there isn't a real difference whether a multiplayer game is on «normal» or «very hard» difficulty, because your major opponents will be human-controlled countries. Every experienced player (in SP I mean) can handle AI. And if you are such a big peacemonger, than «hard» difficulty would perhaps be the best for you, because with that setting your possible warmonger opponents would have more difficulties with lowering their BB level (it decreases slower than on “very hard”).
And regarding AI aggression level, the usual opinion is “normal” is the best, meaning the hardest. Low aggression level makes AI too “allow” countries to have high BB level without too much danger to be DoWed by their AI neighbors, which perhaps enables warmongers to fulfill their goals easier, at least in the beginning. Later AI countries are probably better prepared for war, because they didn’t use their troops in many BB wars. High aggression level in probably the worst, meaning the easiest for warmongers, because AI countries tend to very often be involved into useless and unprepared wars against high-BB countries. That way (by DoWing them) they spare warmongers a few additional BB points, and perhaps more important some stability hits.
To conclude, for a peacemonger country to have an easy game in my opinion difficulty=“hard” and AI aggression level=”normal” perhaps is the best. Anyway, your main opponents will be human players, so choose them carefully. Usually if there is a group of players dedicated to have a long term game, than there will not be too many wars between human countries, especially not useless wars. I would rather said wars are the last resort, when you feel so much threatened that you see no other way out. Or in case when you estimate you can surely win and gain truly a lot! But in long-term multiplayer games (almost) everything is about human-to-human relations and no nation is ever so strong that could in a single blitzkrieg win so much to dominate the game for ever against an alliance of all other human countries that would surely be formed.
Finally, if you want you can read a thread “Dedicated European Game” under Multiplayer section. That is a really peaceful game. There has not been a single real human-versus-human war yet (the year now is 1630). A few times we were on the brinks of a global conflict, but managed to settle things diplomatically. How long that will last is to be seen…
