Slitherine

When playing multiplayer I see the options to set the difficulty of the AI, however it would be nice if we could apply those same modifiers to ourselves to give better players a penalty and new players a bonus to help make the game play more equally.

I could not find any discussions on this. Are there any plans to release this ability to set player difficulty on a future release, or perhaps I missed it?

Very interesting idea. I support this!

Maybe some kind of handicap/bonus for morale or unit strength.

"Arena Wars" had something like that. It was a great idea in my opinion.
However, I didn't use it that often. If you lose while having a malus compared to your mates it just feels unfair. :\

Well, if you lose to cheating AI you can have the same feelings. The point of this is to provide a challenge and it would be optional anyway.