Difficulty fix (Definitive Edition)

Most people will agree, the difficulty here wildly vacillates between incredibly easy to crushingly difficult, irregardless of difficulty level the player selects. It often seems that if (it's a big IF) the player manages to survive the initial onslaught, then the mission becomes trite. In fact, most missions aside from limited troop missions I win by mere attrition, running the AI out of one resource or another through pure defensive play.

Let's take one such mission, Rise of Rome mission 2, Phyrrus of Epirus. You start with a base, plentiful gold and stone. You also start with a batch of villagers, many scout ships, as well as some archers and swordsmen. Also, a priest. Additionally, you start out with many towers already built.

However, you start in Tool Age while Phyrrus starts in Iron. Uh oh. You have around 10 minutes before you're attacked by a stream of elephant archers, heavy cavalry, centurions, AND CATAPULT TRIREMES. They're all maxed out in tech. They will outrange your towers, so they're essentially worthless, and their ships will annihilate your navy because you have no hope of upgrading them. The more time you spend micro'ing your navy to sink the endless catapult triremes, the less you can continue to build. Not to mention the endless drain of wood such a navy requires. Phyrrus' primary target is always villagers, and there's nothing you can do to prevent them from suiciding in to kill a few.

Is there any chance the game will be balanced? Are there any mods that address the balance issue? I feel like AoE2 had excellent difficulty - the player had to be aggressive enough to secure resources, particularly gold and stone, or the AI would take them. AoE2 had much more potent defenses, even in Feudal, by virtue of using garrisoned towers.

The game is great in every other facet, the graphics, the animations, the history, the overall mission goals, all excellent. It's only marred by the impossible difficulty.