So far on my 1.19 frog AI improvement game (xxlarge lush, Heavenfall's mod with 7 AI, dense magic/resources, world and all AI set to ridiculous) -- noticeable improvement. AI is attacking more often, with more stacks, and going after mob lairs and unguarded loot. I've had to make 2 basic changes:
-I used to not recruit many troops from the start, instead I concentrated on infrastructure (same settings as above). Now I have to recruit a number of troops very early
-I used to sit back and wait for AI to come to me. Now when I'm declared on I have to go after them and 'roll up' a few of their cities, else I'd get overwhelmed. Rolling up a few cities gets me enough 'points' to get the AI to accept peace if I so desire, cuts back their strength, and lets me hit their sov/champs while they're still recovering from 'dying' in earlier battles (so they're not at full strength and so are easy to kill again).
These are good changes.
On the other hand, increasing AI difficulty levels increases 'strength' more than 'smarts'. AI still is pretty 'dumb'. Yes, it can now send a few stacks my way, but the threat is not from smart tactics/strategy, but from units with big numbers (attack, defense, health, etc.).
Current game I was able to force peace with the angel faction (relatives strengths at war's start was 100 for me and 200 for them, at peace time we were both ~200). At that time the frost giants were strength 1200 -- 6x my strengt! Their advantage reached 7x my strength as we began to fight. They had a stack of 1900 strength (epic) to my best stack's <500 strength. I anticipated a very tough battle, but was still able to wipe out their stack, taking no damage.
Tactics I used (that the AI needs to start using):
-stinking mud to slow down AI so my ranged units can wipe them out before they reach me
-the air spell that adds dodge vs ranged spells (I'm getting +60, making AI ranged units almost useless)
-ranged units (magic or archers) to wipe out advancing AI
-tremor and/or freeze, plus cloudwalk or the other spell to teleport my armies so I only need 1 'killer' stack vs many AI stacks
The above does require a decent pool of mana, but some advance planning and husbanding of mana isn't that hard.
My killer army just wiped out a 'stack' of 6 AI armies, each AI army had much greater 'strength' than my killer army. Combat at this level of difficulty should be exciting/scary, however, once a killer army is available combat is merely tedious.
Yes, I could stop using the above tactics, and will have to. It would be nice tho to have the AI 'smarten up' instead of me having to 'dumb down'. We're given a lot of nice spells to use, and not using them is counter to that. I was hoping that at ridiculous difficulty the AI would be sufficient challenge that using all the tools we players are given would make a good game. While the game was challenging early on, once 3-4 decent cities are up, and 1 decent killer army is available, it's challenge-over.
FE is a great game and has the potential to be even better. Good AI takes time and I believe it will continue to improve, thus my taking time to post here.
PS -- one possibly relatively easy improvement would be to have defeated sovs/champs appear not in the nearest city, as that makes it very easy to hit that city before the sov/champ heals back up to full strength, to make steamrolling the AI more difficult.
