dont forget that the difficulty setting is there to customize your experience. If we made the game very hard for Lothos and other veterans that know all the details it would be unplayable for beginners, so if you have problems play on easy, and if normal difficulty is too easy go with hard difficulty (maybe this one needs to be hiked up a bit) The german AI can beat France in reasonably historical timeframe so you could turn that on and observe how it plays and manages to win as a guide before trying yourself.