Good'ol TW not some console crap like R2. Great that this game is making its return like FOTS (Shogun 2). IMHO: LME4, DM and NTW the same place, btw there will be NTW 4.0 with more emphasis on SP campaign so could be also interesting. In LME I manage to loot few AI cities, grab them and take a peace for few turns, rebuild and ally with AI, so its more reasonable. With DM playing some emergent factions is juts boring, ok there is a chalenge but it looks like this : Ai will never take peace, it will swarm u with their great units and u just fight battle after battle until u can not anymore or expand, but still with few units u have.
The only weird thing I have noticed with LME is that trade spots were empty, but maybe that was just the phase. Try LME 4 as someone said, they use similar AI that DM, have more units, looting is realistic, challenge is quite interesting (not artificial like with DM and some factions).With LME u can play every faction and it has lots of usefull units, u can create economy and just rebuild your empre/country.
