I found these setting to be a very fun way to play H:WOAG.

I made the recruiting far slower. This means if you completely destroy an enemy they will remain weakened for years(also loss of your own troops is more important) For me, this was way more fun than fighting the illyrians, athens, and thrace endlessly for years and crushing them every time. In order to make this feel balanced, I also reduced gold and supply. I then went a bit further on supply and made the normal supply level challenging, I found it fun to actually be hampered by food, you have to actually have slaves or sheep trail behind a large army, and their much slower rate adds historical realism. To add a touch of realism, the catapult fire damage is doubled, so you really want to use ballista to take towns. Also, farm burning is faster.

The details:
RECRUITS -
off mode to 0, medium mode to .002 (my favorite), high to .004

FOOD
Increased food consumption of all units by 50%
decreased food during winter and spring heavily, slightly decreased for summer, fall untouched

MONEY
mine income down by 50%
city income down by 33.3%

SIEGE/RAID
made farm burning take only 25% of the time it used to take
made catapult fire do +100% damage

my mod file
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3pQ-jSlS4PkZDFOc1BwOXJodDQ/view?usp=sharing
please share comments and we can tweak the balance with any good changes. I am especially interested if anyone has good AI changes.

I think this may totally kill AIs like the Danubian one. The Danube and Dalmatia especially are areas with low food production and guaranteed -90 gold per 100 food/week road. It might seem like a lot of food now, but you would need a ton of roads from Pella to your border/garrison cities to take and hold anything near the Danube, and you also have to add the slave/sheep train you need to actually move your army into siege position.

Also, food "forwarding" is not as strong as it is in Rome, full stockpiles in Thessalian cities do not mean everything the farms produce is forwarded to the nearest city with low food supply. If there's a bottleneck in road capacity, everything above that limit is lost since the farms cannot dump it anywhere.

Also: Burning crops isn't as fast and easy as it may seem to you. You can of course quickly burn down some parts of a field, some farm houses etc, but to really get an area so devastated it does not produce food anymore takes a lot of men or quite a bit of time. I mean, the food ingame is everything the population needs to sustain itself + whatever leftover remains for the army. To compare it to RL, let's say 10 peltasts would amount to ~100-200 raiders. 200 raiders can of course pillage and burn the farms that sustain thousands of people, but not in a day or two.

Thanks for the feedback! These are good concerns, it would really help me fix the mod if you could provide save games or more detail showing the issues. Also, do you know if there is a good in-game debugger so I can see what all factions are doing all the time to aid in balance testing? The Danube AI and all AI I'm sure need testing. Taking the Danube area is challenging and requires a real, slow sheep/slave food supply train to do it. Once you have the area it is super easy to hold, as catapults are stronger and there is no concept of edge raiders, as Danube tribes are the last raiders up there. Try the mod, you'll see for yourself. I wanted to share this mod because I thought it enhanced supply difficulty and combat importance, and I personally found it fun. I do shoot for historical accuracy, and since I am not a historian, I'm open to endless suggestions from anyone who enjoys this mod style and can provide good feedback on what to change.

I actually prefer the food forwarding system in Greece, I like being able to pay to upgrade the pieces I want. The losses over distance thing in Rome is hard to control, since it can double pump supplies through lossy paths if you change settings.
Do you have a save game or picture of the Thessalian roads issue, I've never run into troubles there before?

It's hard to tell exactly how hard it should be to burn a farm. It is certainly easier to burn a farm than it would be to harvest the crops, and and my main goal was to reflect that. Currently the normal game setting shows 240 man days to capture and the same 240 to burn it, and harvesting takes far longer. Harvesting is a complicated process, merely cutting down and collecting wheat would take longer than burning it, not to mention threshing and winnowing to get down to transportable grain.

I'm fairly certain the food in game has nothing to do with non-combat population, cities with no food don't lose population nor is their recruit growth rate affected by lack of food. Please let me know if that is wrong. A unit of 10 peltasts is abstract and not related in any way to the population of a city, it could represent any number of troops. It would be really cool if cities actually did eat, and had to be kept alive, we would actually have even tougher supply lines with cities like Athens that couldn't supply enough grain without importing it.

I see you thought it through better than I presumed from your first post. 240 for both burning and harvesting really seems unrealistic. Regarding the food shortage I just remember making a huge supply train of I think 200-300 slaves to pick up food from Thessaly and deliver it to that city south of Getae on the southern edge of the Danube valley already in vanilla. All the while my ~150 (perhaps 200) men would have starved if not for a direct road border city <-> Pella (the -90 gold upper limit is nothing else than ridiculous there). And I'm not talking green recruits that only know which end of their weapons to stick into the enemy and eat a whole farm's production, but 3-5 logistics troops with 4-5 log generals attached. The march distances there are simply too long to get from one city to the next even with full food stocks on some occasions.