how is this compared to hecleas. in terms of cai? not the difficultty cheats

I would recommend to start at easy or normal progressing to hard around an empire size of 15-20 regions and very hard at around 30 regions.
Supply Lines: Easy: 20% Normal: 28% Hard: 38% Very Hard: 50% Legendary: 55%

Bigger Update:
I decided to increase the difficulty in a different way aswell, also in purpose of difficulty scaling. Feedback would be very appreciated.
Ever since Total War suffers a lot by progressing the campaign, in terms of getting way to easy and collecting unsums of money, I decided to do sth about it thx to the option to increase campaign difficulty within a playthrew of a campaign.
There is now in general a huge increase in terms of supply lines cost, which increases further more by climbing to higher difficulties. The Idea behind is that campaigns kind of have rather that sort of roman empire dilemma, the bigger you get the harder it gets to cover all your borders. The differences between the difficulties are rather high, so you can still feel free to rather remain even at a certain difficulty at all or to not climb further more.

Recommended mods just let you play the the races in a classic way like any other race, so you get rid of other race based handicaps, tho in those cases it should be also rather playable without using those, being in the end maybe just a little bit more difficult, or just having to play in an alternative way.

Since this mod is increasing difficulty by very a lot, some races realy suffer by some handicaps which make them unplayable on those difficulties, so those mods are required to be able to play the faction unless you come up with some sort of cheat mod anyway. I can see tho that for the difficulty easy you might not need any of those required mods, since its rather a starter difficulty anyway, but I mean you are free to tryout yourself without them, Id rather not but in the end its up to you, they are just listed there since I dont wanna ruin ppls experience using a certain race on a maybe already played on difficulty, without those mods afterwards ppl might be very frustrated since they cannot relate with the difficulty in comparison and might even find their race of desire to play very unplayable in this mod.

Why are those other mods "required" or "recommended"?

sex

When you look at my linked Improved AI mod, it leads you to this Warhammer 2 mod, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1168578106&searchtext=better+ai

What does this actually do? I clicked the link to see what the other mod did but it was also vague and not helpful

For everyone who never played Insane AI nor Extra Hard AI of Warhammer 2, I recommend to use my improved AI mod and you better dont touch legendary unless vanilla legendary is like rather way to easy for you. Dont get frustrated by playing this straight ahead, it is like multiple difficulty stages ahead of vanilla legendary.

I just patched the mod, making the AI a bit more agressive, nobody is supposed to play this straight on legendary, prob. even not at all. I added it for the reason that you realy never know +... Normal and Hard are already way enough and yet its usefull to add some flavour increasing difficulty late game.

you already know when someone tells me i cant be a god imma damn well try to be xD