Honestly, the current AI isn't that bad. At least since 1.30.4. It's often attributed to the player getting better that they 'feel' the AI got worse. But did it really? The fact that stacks run of to far away land is annoying, but isn't it also the best strategy when you're in a war with someone 10x your size? If you'd be in the same situation you'd do the same. Try and cause war exhaustion and try to peace out asap. The only thing that really needs a change is the AI's strength evaluation when relieving forts. You can often siege their forts while they dance around you, even though you're sieging mountaints and you'd receive a -2 roll to all your rolls.
Even though you don't want to play on hard, I still recommend doing it that way. The bonusses the AI receives are almost neglible, but they actually put in more effort in their wars, like hiring condotierre to fight against you and reacting more to what you do. Very hard feels a bit arbitrary where even a France that has not expanded past its borders is absolutely massive. But not the Hard setting.
See wiki:
- When set to hard, the AI will get various bonuses, and the AI will react more harshly to player aggression and vulnerability.
So if you want the AI to not just ignore everything you do, play on Hard. Normal should really be categorised as 'easy, but you can get achievements here'.
The bonusses the AI receives on Hard are:
|
 | +50% | Manpower recovery speed |  | −1 | National unrest |  | −0.05 | Monthly war exhaustion |  | −1 | Interest per annum |  | −33% | Aggressive expansion impact |  | −15% | Missionary maintenance cost |
|
Most of which have no impact on how you should handle an AI. Only the -33% AE makes a real impact, because it will mean that there will be less tags more quickly and the tags that remain will be bigger (because of quicker expansion). I've never had the manpower recovery speed be a real issue, because you shouldn't really fight wars until they're out of manpower. The moment they're out of money to acquire new troops, or have no free provinces to recruit in, they're screwed either way.
Another one that's noticeable is the -20 opinion to alliances, but nothing that a good 'set attitude and rivals' can't fix. As an example, I was still able to ally the Ottomans as Hisn Kayfa even though they were already allied to my rival Aq Qoyunlu and I was only a OPM.
A niche situation, but Mingsplotion doesn't work by blockading on Hard because of the reduced WE.
