This game doesn't exactly have a huge amount of room for sophistication in the first place.

I find the AI does alright for itself on the higher difficulties, but don't go in expecting to square off against Zhuge Liang or something. There simply isn't that degree of complexity to the combat in this game. You just get the lads together and send them into enemy areas as a mob to take them one by one.... or pick one of the non-combat victories (much easier).

The AI isn't the smartest, they don't really do much on normal difficulty. The real issue with the AI in this game is that they cheat on hard and extreme, they're still dumb, but cheat really hard. They get a huge amount of free resources, meaning they frequently just make all of their units into military units with zero people on economy. Then they don't (usually) starve because they coast along on their free resources. They're not following the same rules the player does. This means occasionally they'll show up on your doorstep year 1 with like 15 units, and there's not much you can do to stop them. That said, I think the game is still worth it on sale. The campaign is pretty good and conquest is decent.

Originally posted by Ateya:

The AI isn't the smartest, they don't really do much on normal difficulty. The real issue with the AI in this game is that they cheat on hard and extreme, they're still dumb, but cheat really hard. They get a huge amount of free resources, meaning they frequently just make all of their units into military units with zero people on economy. Then they don't (usually) starve because they coast along on their free resources. They're not following the same rules the player does. This means occasionally they'll show up on your doorstep year 1 with like 15 units, and there's not much you can do to stop them. That said, I think the game is still worth it on sale. The campaign is pretty good and conquest is decent.

Thank you very much for your honest thoughts, I highly appreciate it.