I play strictly single player and have seen a lot of massive flaws with the AI that are really not acceptable. I can dig up replays for pretty much all of these (or gather new ones), but they are so blatant that I think they can be reproduced with no effort.
In order from most severe and most frequent:
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The AI cannot play King of the Hill, it completely ignores the monument.
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The AI is basically inept at mixed and water maps, and it’s basically like playing on 1-2 difficulty levels lower than a full land map. If it’s a 95% land map with a few small ponds, the AI will build several docks in every pond and spend half of its resources on navy. If it’s a water map which requires using transport ships, it sometimes does a perfectly good job expanding and attacking, and sometimes just proceeds to herp derp on its starting island for the entire game and you see a confused army standing on the coast.
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The AI seems to ignore if you start building a Wonder. I remember even the classic CD version AI going bananas on you when you started building a Wonder, now it just plays as if it was business as usual and building a Wonder is basically autowin if you’re not losing hard.
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Hard/Hardest AI places castles completely randomly and doesn’t account for where enemy players are. It can place 7 castles pointed at the edge of the map. Enough said.
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AI players also have completely random strength and feel extra buggy in games with more than 2 teams. I had multiple games where my ally got roflstomped by a post-imperial army while he had 3 hussars. Combined with the castles issue above, “free for all” type games (which I really enjoy) are almost unplayable.
This is just the beginning. Will the AI get some proper attention? It really feels it was made with just dumb maps like Arabia in mind and the most basic settings, and no one really tested how it works with anything even slightly more complex.
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