Welcome to the biggest pond of drek ever created.
I saw a high difficulty for England so I tried it and tried it and tried it. After hours of attempting every variation available one thing became painfully obvious. The AI in Europa Universalis III is one of the most inept pieces of garbage I've ever had the displeasure to experience. I'm curious from a historical perspective when exactly did France and Scotland become bosom buddies or better yet, could France really have survived declaring war on England five times or more in one century?
Here's a tip for you Englanders: It's extremely important to see what France's objectives are early on. If it's to take over territory like Calais, you're going to be fighting protracted battles for a long time that will eventually sap your morale. However, you can use it against them by conquering Scotland (their ally) as fast as you can or before Portugal can get a foothold. Yea, it's a spoiler but you'll need more that just this piece of information.
I can take losing but losing in such a way that all numerical superiority that you possess is easily cast aside for outcomes that just don't make sense is unbearable. And the only real reason? They start out with a national idea of Grand Army which means they can support at least a 33% larger army then those who don't have it (boggle)
Take for instance, you can scroll over France and the country has anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 troops at any given time. Most countries are lucky if they can scrounge up 20,000 and it's usually with such a maintenance cost that it's simply not worth it.
Money is of course vital but EU III has that figured out as well with an inflation rate and absolutely no way to adjust tax rates per province. Of course, there is trade but eventually that won't amount to much as the main trade centers just boycott you whenever they wish. Lovely. Of course you can open your own trade centers but only when your parent trade center grows to a certain point. Yes, we all know how realistic that is.
There's a long list of just silly results and silly reasoning that goes into a long campaign. Whenever you think you're making headway be ready for instances such as "meteor falls from the sky and scares your peasants" or "Your grape vineyards produced bad wine" This wouldn't be so bad if the tutorials worked properly but they didn't. Boot up the tutorial and watch the hourglass spin for an hour. It's more fun then trying to figure out this rotten soup.
Don't ask me what the attraction here is to EU III, it's very hard to grasp why anyone would want to put themselves through this glorified mess of a graphic data base. The claims that it tries to bear some historical traits without actually being held to them is pretty accurate considering traditional strengths such as England's navy are non-existent.
And finally we have rebellions or should we say "what the game is really about". Rebellions from spies, rebellions because you're going to war, rebellions because your underwear aren't clean. OK, not for the underwear reason but it might as well be that as somehow, someway, the population can muster up 1000-10,000 rebels in record time. Good stuff.
But the dirtiest little secret of them all is that you really can't "win" because there is no real end game which is fine I guess if you're just into wasting hours playing just to see how much more slanted the game was toward the computer AI all along.
Perhaps, Paradox will fix the tutorials so that Vista users can actually learn to play but I somehow doubt that's in the works. For me, I'll pass. I've had enough.