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Yeah they start cheating really badly once you go past normal difficulty. Like I've wiped out their army before and then a couple of turns later I see an army of similar strength show up. They just pull units out of thin air so it seems.
I really hope the dev works on making the AI smarter so that they don't need cheats to be competent. AI archetypes would also be a nice addition to the game. I wrote more about that in here https://steamcommunity.com/app/1656780/discussions/0/3266807987607374524/
Likewise, AI handicapping is a low-investment way to let the higher skilled part of your playerbase have better replay value. Its a lot easier/quicker to implement. I hate it, but understand why its this way.
However, from what I can tell playing nearly exclusively on Hardcore/+, its less an issue of overwhelming handicaps and more that mistakes add up a lot faster, mistakes that the AI won't be making due to how their combat resolves differently (and if it didn't, there'd be even more whining about long AI turns from those on weak PCs). The AI can be thought of as an extremely conservative player that struggles to expand, yet never blunders its units away against fights it shouldn't be taking (per its own combat auto-resolves).
So once you learn one or more ways to play consistently with some form of snowballing, typically via leader skills or building/unit orders, the AI ceases to be a challenge regardless of setting. But if you're not there yet and frequently give up a large chunk of your units without compensation, well, the AI can beat that even on lower difficulties.
I have this reoccurring problem where the mobs guarding resources are quite tough for quite some time and the exits to my territory are "Near Impossible" to "Impossible" for the longest time. I feel like my only options are to turtle up for weeks gathering troops or suicide my armies into impossible battles to wear them down. Oddly enough, sometimes I just don't have this problem. The mobs in my territory are simply much more reasonable and I can take them out just fine. I honestly think it has to do with which map I pick.
There were a few times where I was dealing with the perpetual impossible mob problem so I was hanging out for weeks gathering troops. Since I usually play on maps with one castle per player and maybe an odd neutral castle to seize, I assume it's logically impossible for the enemy to have a bigger army than me. And since the AI would have to fight through "Impossible" mobs to get to me, there's just no way. But that's exactly what happens. An AI with a bigger army than I've been able to produce shows up and there really isn't anything I can do.
Again, this doesn't always happen and I can't tell you why.
I made this post immediately after having that happen and then when I retreated my main army back to my city that I had just upgraded to Citadel, I was able to get the achievement for beating a Near Impossible army. I used the Wilder spell caster (black panda skin) if you're curious
So I guess the AI never fight battles other than the Human and therefore accumulates a lot of troops over time.
An optimal non-cheating AI would be a bunch more work, and super annoying anyway. Can you imagine every single enemy hero moving just out of the movement range of all your heroes with a larger army every turn? And that's not getting into if you dared to enter combat with less ranged units and they scattered in every direction to kite you.
Heroes of Might & Magic 1 though 5 do not cheat. The cheating in that series started with version 6.
No they don't. They play by exactly the same rules as the player in 1 through 5.
Changing the difficulty settings only changes the player's starting resource amounts, and the strength of neutral armies. It does nothing to the give the AI players an advantage. They start with the same reduced resources as the player on high difficulty settings. And they face the same increase neutral army sizes.
https://heroes.thelazy.net/index.php/Difficulty_level
You get less resources and the AI gets more, works that way in all of 1-5. They also get income bonuses in at least 3, probably the others, don't feel like tracking down the info right now though.
EDIT: Looks like no income bonus in H5, but they do start with triple your resources on max difficulty. Which isn't to say that there isn't a point that AI here is particularly weak and could use work - AI in 5 doesn't cheat on hard and actually gives you advantages on normal. Where this game's AI on normal struggles to capture a second town over the course of 7 weeks. But it's also hard to tell because there's a big power imbalance between strategies here so that strong ones are far far stronger than weaker skills, where in H1-5 the hero skills weren't quite as impactful as quickly.
No change/handicap, doesn't cast many spells and is ridiculously easy to beat, usually avoids fights.
Uses more spells, gets a slight buff to growth and resources, by far the best difficulty although it begins to use a maphack and bumrushes towns.
Heat-seeking missile with an impossible deathstack, will get a massive amount of units every week and the only way to reliably fight them is cheese or lucky map seed. Spams spells and has close to infinite mana.
Unfun. Take the above and multiply by 20.
Addendum: I find it hilarious when you're playing a 6 player FFA and nuke the inevitable impossible doomstack sent your way, the AI CANNOT recover from losing it and will usually be the first faction eliminated as the other ones behave like hyenas and devour the weakest one. I suspect they get full army composition info along with location, so they just glide on over to the newly-bankrupt faction and grind it into paste.