[0.981] Difficulty

I'm scratching my head over overall difficulty at the moment. When we were still in Beta 4 (or even 3? .. so much gone by) i used to have big trouble even on normal difficulty. Enemies used to have 2 to 3 full armies fairly early on. Nowadays i just steamroll the whole world with my sovereign and nothing else on hard/challenging. I first thought it might have been my custom faction+sovereign (money/hero-oriented), but i really didn't need anything else besides my sovereign, a trace of mana, riding tech and some healing items. I played fully random maps and twice got no additional hero setting (which removes any use from betrayers and no hero cost).

Anyone had similar experiences?