You could always put a few races on normal and a few on sub-normal inteligence, that way at lest everyone won't be better.

On my first game on Challenging with 8 races, I set the Drengin and the Yor with me as a team

It helped for the beginning cause I wasn't alone against everybody...
but if you do that you should choose some other races cause eventually everybody declares war to the Drengin even if they were pretty weak, and I had to follow in war

At one point, it was basically 4 against me... but my good start helping I destroyed them one after the other while holding the other flanks. It was a real good game with good strategy needed

I learned by playing many many games on a small map vs. 4 opponents with default settings. I used a custom race.


My first game I started on Cake-walk. Then I played many games on normal. When it looked like I wasn't going to win, or I realized a made a huge mistake, I reloaded my game to week 1 and tried again (although I didn't metagame -- meaning, I didn't use knowledge that I could only have aquired by seeing more of the map). I kept doing that until I learned what strategies work, and which ones don't.

Then I went to Tough, and did the same.

Now I'm on Suicidal, and I no longer need to reload my games back to week 1