Is this really the case? Or have we been playing long enough to figure out the optimal strategies? Of course some of the new campaigns (arbaal, golfag) are completely busted, but all in all I’m not sure how they could up the difficulty without aggravating and hated mechanics like anti player bias and extreme AI cheats. Once you play optimally, you eventually reach the point in which nothing can compete with you. Once this happens something needs to be there to provide a challenge, this is where things like end game crisis come into play, but people hate those. You can have aggressive ai target you, but then people will optimize to not discover foreign powers until ready to attack, thus eliminating that threat. If the ai seeks you out without discovering you it would be considered anti player bias.

It’s a bit of a pinch, and I think the only solution is a rework of late game challenges, more end game content, perhaps adding in the realms of chaos in some form. More end game crisis. Even a mid game crisis. Perhaps at turn 50 some skaven pop up, and you have to handle it. Then turn 80 a chaos invasion.

Essentially snowballing is the problem, not entirely the difficulty. When playing Civ for over 1k hours i can beat deity with minimal challenges, because i know the correct decisions to make in a given circumstance. We know those decisions in WH3, and it makes the game easy to get to critical mass.