How is anyone competeing with this AI?

[Mr.Swan]

no matter what i do i cant enough of anything to come anywhere near having the ability to put up any kind of fight at all.

im convinced that either.. A, i have to play in a very specific way with some kind of meta strategy or B, the game is broken, all the you-tubers are using footage from testing and the version we have now is completely different.

seriously is anyone actually beating this? Whats the secrete? is the Ai taking over the whole map by the third year really the way its meant to be?

[Fatum]

I turned it off, it's totally broken. I see people claiming they beat it but I call BS on that. Even if you absolutely rush full on into producing arms and making an army it takes HOURS (on max speed) to get the population to field even a basic unit. AI steamrolls them anyway. That's assuming you don't run into one of the multitudes of bugs that prevents your citizens from finishing any tasks along the way.

I just got wiped out by a random bandit camp spawning next to my town in my latest game. Couldn't do a damn thing..was only spring of the 2nd year. As much as I hate to do it I guess I have to disable bandits too...Kinda ruins the entire vibe of the game but when it doesn't work what else can we do?

The bandit AI is just as broken as the enemy lord. Just steals your stuff, nothing you can do about. Can't protect yourself, can't guard your storehouses. Nothing? You'd think in a village of 10 people you'd expect someone to notice the strange group of people that just walked into the storehouse..Hell that nearly wiped me out in an earlier playthough. Went from having 6 months of food in January to 1 month because they stole most of it...

It's really sad when the biggest sell of this game is the biggest fail. Without them it's just a city builder...which I guess is still decent but not at all what this game was hyped up to be.