New Player. Absolutely love the game. AI disappointing though.

[PillowCushion]

I'll start off by saying this is a brilliant game. How differently each clan plays is genius.

That said I can't get over the poor AI performance. Had one game where Stag AI was just sitting in a neutral zone as I raided their base, there doesn't seem to be much map awareness from AI. I've also noticed how the AI doesn't seem to take advantage of Jotun units, always just leaving them in the town hall zone. AI doesn't heal either. Rat doesn't take advantage of sorcerers etc. They don't recover from starvation leading to poor economy.

I've been playing against hard AI. Hoping that extreme fixes some of the issues. Just seems like the AI simply doesn't use each clans bonuses opting for a generic approach which worsens their performance.

Hopefully this gets fixed soon. Might try MP even though I'm more of a SP player.

[Rurik]

AI was dumb since the game release. Nothing will be changed.

[Chaosblade83]

Yeah this game desperately needs an overhaul of the AI, I'm a pretty new player and have been playing conquest on hard AI, when the AI (rarely) attacks me with a big group on an empty tile, If I can just kill one of their units they will usually retreat even if their army is much larger than mine. I can't tell you how many times I've attacked a tile and the enemy just lets me take it with a bigger army sitting right next to the tile. So many times I've seen the AI expand early on and then start to starve even on hard difficulty. Fun game but it would be that much better with a good AI.

[Steb]

I have to disagree that the AI was always bad. I came back to the game recently after a few years' break. I have a memory of the AI being much better back then. Conquest mode on hard used to actually be challenging but now not so much.

[[NewNet]*Akiyama]

Yes, I agree with Rurik. Four or five years ago, the AI was very strong on the highest difficulty level, and Conquest was challenging. However, because all players claimed that this difficulty level was impossible to beat, the AI unfortunately got weakened. This pacified the masses and was, of course, a disappointment for all professional players. But in recent years, especially with the latest update, more and more AI bugs have occurred, making them not a challenge even for newcomers. "Extreme" is not really more difficult than "hard", so feel free to play the next games on extreme.

[Hollow]

The AI cheats anyway, which removes all strategy against it: You can't take its happiness or food zone(s), forcing it to adapt. It all doesn't matter as it gets those resources for free. Only if the AI has to finally play the game instead of making this an optional element for it some proper gameplay could take place to start with.

I'm okay with it getting better productivity the higher the difficulty, that it can hire its hero units for free (at least for any difficulty past 'easy'), that it gets a population growth bonus adjusted to difficulty after unit losses.

The problem with the cheating AI is the pacing: If it's super aggressive it just spams 1-3 military structures in every zone and converts as much population as possible (up to all of it) into military - something that a player actually bound to the gameplay mechanics can't compete with. This just creates a stone wall that you either can't get through (frustrating) or smash through and then the AI folds, with the rest of the game being unspectacular cleanup (boring).

What you'd expect from higher difficulties is the AI playing more aggressive, but also better. Sadly most games don't have any high difficulty scripts at all that make the AI play better by having it start using advanced tactics or more micro control for its units. Instead higher difficulty typically only translates into "more free resources for the AI" or "less for you, player". The AI in strategy games and similar ones hasn't really evolved despite experiments with such, constantly highlighting the possible potential that devs are never interested to tap into as much as the audience is.

The bugs represent a good opportunity to put the AI on a good foundation, rooted in actual gameplay instead of a cheated economy that make it either frustrating or boring. I doubt this is on their list though, given the fact that the AI wasn't even mentioned in this patches' "known issues" list.

[Kапитан Kакао]

Same. Bots go passive and do nothing after colonize few territories.

[psybu3]

Originally posted by Hollow:

The AI cheats anyway, which removes all strategy against it: You can't take its happiness or food zone(s), forcing it to adapt. It all doesn't matter as it gets those resources for free. Only if the AI has to finally play the game instead of making this an optional element for it some proper gameplay could take place to start with.

first of all if a dev team has difficulty implementing a system that doesn't keep losing progress every major patch for years, you can confidently say there is absolutely zero chance you will ever see a better AI, due to limited human capabilities.
second, they don't even have control on their own codebase to be assured they don't break something they previously implemented. this suggests the code is spagetti which is impossible to implement proper ai system on even by an expert.