IMO, it's not the AI, it's the game. If your primary army is crushed and the AI is marching on your cities, you'll also find it very hard to 'recover' as well (crank up the difficulty and you'll see). This is doubly so since all the other factions will pile on the weaker of the two. The game just doesn't have a mechanic for you to recover from a devastating loss (losing your stack of doom). Once you hit that tipping point, it's game over.

If you'd just make the ai shoot lightning bolts shoot out of its eyes and throw fireballs out of its azz it would be much better.

Give it the ability to Lycanthrope that was probably the most overpowered spell in Master of Magic. It could build the lowest costing melee unit (spearman) and then turn them into werewolves that the WHOLE STACK regenerated if just one survived. That would make the endgame AI a LOT harder. Only thing i think that thwarted this were Paladins who if they killed one it didn't regenerate even if one survived. They were a lot of fun to play with as human player but as I said waaaay overpowered in the hands of a humaan.

Eh, I balanced things so that losing your main stack is not the end of the game. The vanilla can probably do the same thing, but their design seems to want the game to be over as soon as possible. That is probably why they make SoD's so powerful and irreplaceable.

They could really use some help with the use of strategic spell casting as well as tactical. They tend to spend their whole stack of mana and mana upkeep on their champions (tutelage, tireless march, ironskin and so on), heroes they stack in the same group (or 2 groups) so they don't generally get past level 10.

I have never been frozen, tremored, burnt etc entering the AI zone of control. Maybe the AI should save some mana in case of intrusion into its territory.

AI champs usually spend 3 turns+ in tactical battles buffing each other. Sometimes they could win the battle just straight up fighting or casting offensive spells instead of haste/ironskin/obscuring fog (especially obscuring fog when you don't have any range units).

Their is probably a soft spot to hit between making the AI too offensive and too defensive.

In terms of brute strength the AI takes a long time upgrading its armies from the leatherworking tech to the armor tech, which makes timing pushes based around mid game units extremly effective against them. at which point they never recover.

Good luck with the balancing! This game is really awesome btw, Thanks!

Asking me, that soft spot is randomness, I would much prefer the AI to take a new approach once in a while to trying to go for that same soft spot again and again.
What bothers me most about most game's AI is they always go for the same approach, so its a matter of learning how the AI reacts and how you should counter that, and not learning how the game works and how you play well.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Maybe it's my settings (Epic speed, small map, monsters as hard as the AI), but I've never even seen this mythical Stack of Doom you all are talking about.  I WISH the AI could put together a stack of doom.  Seems usually their sovereign is just wandering around with another hero or a single trained unit.  The one time I actually got attacked by a sizable army it wasn't even big enough to beat the militia in my city.  So I get war declared by an AI, and I can comfortably go about my business assured that nothing bad will happen until I'm ready to deal with the war.  Then I launch my attack, and the AI cities are generally undefended.  What has he been DOING all this time?

Suggestion: Make unit costs cheaper.  Right now, they cost about as much as a non-special building, and it's hard to justify cranking out army that might just get killed when I could rely on my more powerful and immortal champions.  I don't really blame the AI for not having tons of units sitting around - the difference is I'm better at raising and leveling champions

Crank up the difficulty for the AI, that'll give the AI some bonuses and you should see armies. The AI is never going to be able to compete with a competent player on challenging when it is constantly losing stuff and you aren't.

It helps NOT having monsters on dense,
and generally the AI is decent at grabbing heroes (I think) but not too good att managing them, (So dunno about hero or quest options), if the AI difficulty is higher than the world difficulty it ofcourse helps the AI, but personally I can't beat the Insane level of difficulty without saving/reloading 35 times each turn. (And I generally  try to "iron-man" when playing elemental).

Setting the "Magic" to dense (so it spawns more elemental shards) is bound to be better for the PLAYER, since the AI isn't as good at understanding the best use of the magical resources, or abuse if they get 1 trillion fire shards.

Other items all depends I guess, try mixing it around, most players have an easier time due to using the saving/reload feature, and designing they're own custom factions.

Custom factions is fine, but the premade factions or sovereigns is in no way optimized, so one can always create better sovereigns and factions.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

They will have all the basic units with the custom sovereigns, plus all the ones you design.

And yes there are, any custom sovereign that is an improvement over the old ones would be better also if give the AI a sovereign that is decent/good at the earlygame, they should do better.

Taking Might, Hardy and using a shortsword really helps the earlygame, so if the enemy has that they have a decent chance to kill mites

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

In most 4x games you struggle to survive until you reach the winning point when you can outproduce your opponents and your leaders/heroes/champs have leveled up enough to ensure the win for you. The key for a good game is to let the player in the dark as long as possible if he really reached this point or if he could still loose despite that fact.

I know that FE uses such good approaches like "let's all unite against the leader", but at least until now they are poorly implemented and not working. You wait for the declaration of war from everyone at the same time and if you manage to survive some twenty rounds of heavy fighting (with some experience this is nearly always the case), the rest of the game is as boring as a "Plenarsitzung des Deutschen Bundestages".

There is no end game! One weak stack after the other comes along alone, makes a suicidal attack on your now battle hardend veterans or cowardly stands around to be attacked, whereas you conquer one enemy town after the other with ease. Autocombat rules then.

Unfortunatly on the next higher difficulty level (for me ridiculous) the chances to reach this breaking point in the game are very slim, because two or three lost battles mean game over. And if you manage it anyway, well, there is still no end game...

Actually, as long as high level cities can produce veteran enough units to compete with those high level Stacks, it all balances out. I too have thought long and hard about this and I am of the opinion that cities just need to be able to match unit levels of the game long XP lords you raise by leveling a Fortress and specializing your general empire in warfare. The vanilla game has yet to do it. I am close to perfecting it. I hope it catches on in vanilla and spreads to all games that have this issue. CIV IV never really even acknowledged the problem. Not sure why.