How do you deal with AI on higher difficulty of conquest

[kass]

Hi, I actually try to do the hard / extreme difficulty in conquest mode and the Ai is extremely frustrating.

It is well know that Ai "cheats" and it's surely needed to keep some sort of challenge but at this point, it feels like fighting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ zergs : you kill its army, it reproduces it, and again and again and again... within less time than it needs to heal my units ( == seconds ). Because of that, guérilla seems totally innefective and after some time / if AI are in a team, frontal attack too because they never, NEVER have less number than me.

In map when you must win by domination ( for ex : sea at the center of the map ), how do you deal with that ? Any technics / strategies ?

[brainless]

specifically for the 3v1 maps, you cant ever out macro them, and if the map is conquered by them (they even work together to clear tough tiles), they will do nothing but camp their armies at your borders.

So you have to kill at least 1 ai early on. It requires a hyper focus, but is in otherways easier than it seems. On extreme, you can kill the first ai in 802-803 depending on clans, the only major annoyance is the two upgraded towers in their camp. Rushing works well for a few reasons, low pop means faster new citizens, you can make only a 4-ish size warband plus hero to kill even extreme ais. Low food,wood and gold is needed to sustain.

Benefits are that the map isnt cleared yet, preventing other ais from helping defend. The ai under attack often has wounded units from clearing their own areas, making them easy to focus down. Neutral tiles block counter attacks to your base.

hyper focus on only the resources you need to sustain, mine the iron for the hero, destroy the mine, get only the wood and stone for camp and scout. you dont need to over macro, +1 food and +1 wood prevents starving or freezing.

My success, you attack tiles without towers (they dont have many early game), this causes the ai to try to defend, you can swarm single units as they come with your 4 warband. Check their main camp, it doesnt work to attack it when they have 12 civs in it, just keeping hitting their other tiles, they will throw civs to defend them when they run out of soldiers. When the main camp looks empty, take a shield bearer or other good resistant unit and run it into the camp first (this gets the towers focus). if there are other units they also agro that unit. you can run the shieldbearer around the edge of the tile and the other units will chase while you focus down a tower. Depending on the clans involved you might have to back off and regroup for each tower.

For what its worth, i have bought the game after the free weekend, played on extreme only, and have fully finished each conquest for the 11 clans. I never played against the trivial, idle ai ive seen in older videos of this game.

on non domination lvls, it helps to have a buffer or harass anyway. Run into tiles, kill the civs, run out. It keeps the ai busy and delays them from having nothing else to do but attack you. A buffer tile is one you could own but leave un occupied. The ai sends a few units to claim it, immediately raze it, and their ai gets in a loop trying to take the tile instead of move on into your land. Have your units idle in the unclaimed tile so they try to fight for it. Units cannot move past military units into other hostile tile.

[kass]

Well that's very interesting, a great thank you for your answers ! Rushing one AI is always what I try to do in 3v1 situations but sometimes I end up stuck anyway - and some clans like the bears can be painful to fight even in "only" 2v1

Anyway, I totally did not know about the strategy of the buffer tile even if it doesn't surprise me given the poor intelligence of the AI. I'm very impressed by all the extreme conquests finished tho :o