With all the problems that are well known about its no secret player numbers are declining. It takes a long time to get into ranked games unless you play 1vs1 and even lobby games are notoriously imbalanced. So what about the AI? The opponent who is there immediately and can always play…
Well ummm… it’s less then ideal…
Obviously 1vs1 it’s got no chance against someone decent, even if it cheats, never mind if it doesn’t. The AI constantly walks units into your base without caring about towers, unit composition, strategy or anything. So even if you play against multiple AI to tip the scales (I play on hard because I hate resource cheats) it basically comes down to ‘spam towers and cannons and wait for them to walk into your stuff’ then eventually win with economic advantage, or lose if they overwhelm you with ridiculous advantages. It’s more about gaming the AI rather than playing the game.
To its credit unlike the vanilla/tad AI it will try harder to adapt its units to your composition. Use lots of mercs and its bound to use spies if it can and it will use grenades if you use towers a lot but it doesn’t matter because it feels an obligation to attack constantly regardless of how successful that attack will be.
It’s not as though it’s early attacks are good either, like we aren’t talking Ottoman/India rush. It’s rare that it attacks significantly before 9 minutes, it might send a unit shipment into your base, like say 8 crossbows even if you’ve got a stable nearby, it’ll still try siege something or whatever and get annihilated.
Anyway point is, can the AI please be looked at more seriously? If this game does go down, can we at least have a solid AI to play against? One that does different strategies and actually takes advantage of the civilisation strengths that it has?