1.1 Hang bug report, one other lesser bug and some comments about difficulty

[Winter Warrior]

First of all, I love the game, money well spent. It's rather easy though, I've researched everything by the year 1466. Nearly 200 years to go and no new technologies to discover. Please concider slowing down research.

If a plague epidemic starts in one of my cities, is it the black death? Or just some lesser disease? If it's the black death, it's way too easy to get rid of. Or at least the quarantined city should suffer for a while before things die down. I don't think I've ever seen it spread from city to city. Two groups of refugees reached my Marienburg from a plagued city, they didn't bring the plague with them, I guess I got lucky?

The general's ability to hire mercenaries is maybe a too good way to gain soldiers for cities. Hire them, move them to a city and disband the divisions. Voilá, close to a 1000 more soldiers to turn into tier III units. Same goes for the governor's passe-volants(?) ability, though that makes more sense since the units are recruited off the civilian population.

One more thing that's bothering me, the neutral states do not retaliate (cross inside my realm) if I attack them, they only retake their villages if I leave them unprotected. That would bump up the difficulty, which is sorely needed.

With all this talk about difficulty, I guess I should start a new game at the most difficult setting, that might alter my views on the game.

But on to the hang bug description:
If I try to remove a character from my service who is inside a city, clicking on the confirmation message causes the game to hang. The mouse freezes on the spot. The only way to get out of it is to hit ctrl-alt-delete and end to PSP.exe process through the task manager.

And the other lesser bug:
If I activate the experiments ability near one of my cities (Kalmar), the +10% research bonus is applied to another city (Stettin) as well. Stettin is not within the character's sphere of influence.