correction: awesomely disapointing AI experience

the AI making a settlement for each individual resource is horrible. Makes conquering them annoying if you cant find their sov.

AI in my game last night declared war on me after parking a sizeable force on my border and demanding tribute several times, around the time 3-4 other AIs randomly declared (and never saw one of their units).

It waltzes up to my completely undefended city, I bring my horribly weak sov with his also weak imp over, and die trying to attack against the odds.  Enemy proceeds to kill one caravan then leave my territory, ignoring my completely unguarded cities.  No clue where he rushed off to, but never saw him again.

I just finished a somewhat puzzling AI game as well. I was probably around turn 125. I had been going back and forth with one of the AI's. He declared war. Took my third smallest and newest city. So I took it back a few turns later. Then I hit one of his cities and won a decent battle. Then I pushed my luck and hit another one of his cities....

The pre battle thing showed me having a overwhelming advantage so I tried auto resolve and somehow I lost lol. But my Sov it said got away to one of my cities. So Im bumming because I just lost some decent units etc. So Im in the city healing and with my Sov and like 2 of the axe units (forget name...observers I think or something). 

Next thing I notice....the Sov who Ive been battling with is coming towards my city. Alone. He attacks. I kill him fairly easily. At that point I had like 4 cities. He had maybe about 5. But he walks over solo right up into my city and commits suicide against my sov and 2 units. 

Ok......

AI just seems really weird right now.

On a positive note the game seems to be running alot better. I was having a great time this being my longest game so far getting into more stuff with the researching etc etc. I didnt look at the last patch changes closely but they must have done something with money as I noticed it seemed a bit harder to try to buy equipment etc. Which I think is better as my first couple games it seemed a bit too easy.

I still think the game at this point is 3-4 patches from being where it needs to be but it has a lot of potential. I still think they also need to makes some changes to the UI. The way they have the tabs on the bottom for getting to stuff just seems clunky and I hate the "more" button to get to the building and training screens. There has to be a better way. They need to go steal from Sins or something.

Actually it's probably that the AI became self aware for a moment, and was trying to do the good thing. End the misery T_T

The AI sometimes does get cruel but mostly I find it is with critters and brigands taking on my weaker resource outposts.  It varies a lot from game to game.  I play on challenging or hard and one game I assigned all hard to all the AI factions and the critters were intense, all over the place.  Other games, I hardly see any.  I wonder if it is because the AI is researching the critter spawning adventure techs first?  I know I avoid them now until I've got substantial defenses.

I must say that the AI still has a way to go and we all figured it might be like this if we followed the beta and Brad's commentary.  But if I bought the game cold at retail and sat down with it without knowing SD or Brad's plans, I might be really disappointed in the uneven quality of the game at this point. 

As a fan, knowing what I know and having the trust and forewarning I have, I can live with this situation, but I can see where retail buyers might be put off and not be as understanding or willing to wait.  Thank goodness that the updates are coming fast and furious and I have a hunch that AI is going to receive a lot of TLC pretty quick.

The game displays Non damaging hits as a "miss" making it rather confusing as to whether or not you attacks are landing.

Sounds to me like her city was destroyed by another faction and she was desperately trying to claim a new city.

My most relaxing moments with this game is when i take my ship and sail the open seas. I just lie on the deck, open a beer and watch a mix of AIs, and NPCs roam aimlessly on the shore. That's probably how rich people feel when watching the rest of us on the beach from their multi-million yachts.

Hold on a minute, what's that? A harbor?

Oh, silly me it's just another outpost near a stranded goldmine on the shore.