This was my first real shot at he game .  There were a few issues that I ran into:

My opponents demanded large amounts of money for a peace treaty but when I demanded surrender they gave up.  Peace treaties shouldn't be more difficult than unconditional surrender but they've been so for me in two cases.

I was in an opponent's territory and they demanded that I leave, I complied and my units were moved into a little valley where they were stuck with some dragon lord fellow.  after I defeated him I found that my unit (including my sovereign) were trapped behind a pair of gates that there was no way to open.

There is a hero tat I can't recruit because he has a recruiting cost of negative -263,546 or something similar, (a very large negative number in any case)