[1.004] AIs cheat WAY too much, even considering very high difficulty.

I think that beastlord is insane as it is right now, especially if you do not play 'ironman'. 

I tried it once.  I was not reloading, but I did have Brilliant and I got the emerald cap early.  On turn 6 I had an umberdorth.  On turn 17 I had a hoarder.  At this point I lost interest.  If you make a brilliant beastlord, and have Water magic for the mana, there is no challenge.  And if you reload when your tame fails, then it is nothing but a 'I win' button. 

Yea, beastlord is fantastic.  

It can be insane... only if you are so much lucky.

In my recent playthrough. I literally had NO beast around my town until 50th turn or so, forcing me to build troops in the city to clear area for settling.

Maybe I was just unlucky at that time. Currently playing challenging with similar/better setting (this time I got Stealth instead of Betrayers) and this time I got quite lucky with 3-essence enabled starting position with Cave bear to be tamed.

Well, something really has to be done with starting positions really.. Too much difference each time (last playthrough, my capital had zero essence. So that also contributed the difficulties.)

I agree entirely. The insta-build in particular is a complete kick in the face and shouldn't have made it to release.

I haven't experienced the insta-build yet but what i noticed so far is that the AI seems to know where all the resources are going straight for them and yesterday on my game with Gilden (not custom race, still learning the game) i meet Karavox, i have 4 cities he got 1 and i have about 1000 gildars and he got more that 10.000 with just one town

Yeah I have to agree that the AI bonuses aren't handled in a reasonable way even considering the high difficulty settings. I'm curious to know if anyone has won something on Ridiculous or up without using something like Beastlord or completely lucking out from a random event or loot (collars with favorable beast spawns for example).

It's one thing to be behind the AI and trying to play catch up, but to have them popping wonders, fielding hugely upgraded armies and the like out of 2-3 cities 30 turns (not seasons) into the game all the while having complete free reign over the map is too much, not to mention their ability to establish treaties so quickly to compound the snowballing.

Say, let them start the game with a pioneer, a scout and a level 5 mounted sovereign and a 25% hp bonus but they should still operate within the framework of the game's rule set. Don't just give them "Game Genie" powers that the player can't hope to compete against. :/

Might want to change the title to "cheat".  "Chest" way too much confused me, although most people probably aren't as dense as me.

I agree with the sentiment and reasoning in this thread, and I do agree that you should spell-change the title like Xia said.

You can beat ridiculous... with right components (i.e stacking dodge and defense) and probably some good luck in positions. I found it is very hard to play anything above Expert as Beastlord due to massive HP boosts in general. It's better stick to army building with good dodging and defense abilities.

Thank you for pointing out. Fixed!

While I no longer play on ridiculous, after release I came up with a race/sovereign that I took to 2 wins in a row, without even restarting.  Here it is:

Krax blood, Empire, defensive, enchanters, light plate, lucky, master scouts, weakness to magic

General, Death, Water, wealthy, brilliant, hardy, clumsy

This race relies on stacking dodge, and the sovereign uses blindness for extra safety.

Wealthy provides a starting army, and the first one-two AIs are destroyed without too much trouble, especially if you get their capitals before they level.  As a matter of fact, the problem with winning is not the various ways in which AI cheats, but the five extra traits that all AI units receive.  AI sovereigns get extra traits on top of the five.

On the other hand, if you manage to get one of the defeated sovereigns to surrender, all of a sudden you have a superunit (lucky negates the broken spirit, and he keeps the extra traits)

IMO the amount of these "bugs" left in the final release is disturbing. It suggests that the game does not treat the AI and the human player the same way - many games internally use the client-server architecture and the server does not care if it receives move orders from human controlled GUI or some algorithm. That approach has the benefit of rooting out similar problems - the AI cannot suddenly do something that violates the rules, because the parsing and validation mechanism is the same for AI and the human player - the engine does not care. If a player/AI is to get bonuses/penalties, it's done via transparent, globally set modifiers.

Here, however, it seems that the AI is handled in a different manner, suggesting that the system was built with AI cheating in mind.

@Tuidjy

I can see how that could work, very clever combo. I'll certainly try it out sometime.

Personally though I'd still prefer to have a chance with the default sovereigns instead of creating a custom combo that stacks copious amounts of the best defensive stat or lucking out on an early super unit. I just wished they went with the Civ paradigm of difficulty boosting (AI starts with more and has some economic bonuses and diplomacy biases but otherwise plays by the same rules) instead of, to use a Civ analogy, letting their Spearmen dominate your Tanks. Ah well I guess I'll just stick to expert and below where their unit bonuses aren't borderline ridiculous, more than being hard all those bonus traits along with the ludicrous HP multipliers just makes battles tedious.

You raise a very valid point.

In another post Frogboy commented about the AI settling where it shouldn't be possible, noting that human players get an "inactive" settle button. If such checks are indeed generally made at the UI level, then we might be looking upon dozens of hidden situations where the AI cheats with no easy way to spot it.

This would also explain why it is possible for an AI player to raze a city without waiting 5 turns - because it doesn't get stopped by the UI block that players have until 5 turns after.

This is not a "knowing where the resources are" bug.   That is an entirely different one.   Not that the AI doesn't know, it definitely does, but what you described is not related to that.

This ONE. RIght here.

This one could Explain a lot. if it's the UI that is supposed to regulate the rules of the game, somehow the ai is bypassing it - allowing it to do all sorts of weird things.

Where are u guys getting the update from?

Here, but keep in mind, that it is a beta-version. 

Thems fightin' wurds. I believe Frogboy has made it quite clear that he wants the AIs in his games to be treated equally to the human player. If we can do it, they should be able to do it as well. Now this goes for the normal/challenging difficulties, the lower/higher settings do play by different rules to provide challenges better suited to those individuals that play on those particular levels. Galciv2 is probably the best example of this philosophy. But to say that the AI was built with cheating in mind, parish the thought!

And I don't know about the rest of you, but the AI does in fact use global spells on me as of the Kitten update. Gilden uses Earthquake EVERY DAMN TURN on any town that I take from him as I'm marching my army down through his lands. It's kinda odd.. Take over a level 4 city, with over 500 population.. Next turn, my screen quakes, 200 population and improvements are decimated. Two turns later, all I have left is a level 1 city-sized ZoC and my army standing there with Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot expressions on their faces.

And as far as the AI insta-building things, they do not do that in my games that I have seen (on towns that I am about to capture, they are building something, the next turn, still building it with 1-turn less to go). I play on settings no lower than challenging. Usually on epic as well, no smaller than large maps. And sometimes just a total of 5 factions on board with set starting locations. I like the AI to be nice and built up before they encounter me and mistake my faction power rating of 200-500 less than theirs as me being weak. A mistake that is usually rewarded with Tidal Wave on their 6-stack of 5-unit armies. Tidal Wave, a beautiful spell.

And a personal plea to Frogboy if I may.. If there is a way to tie in a factions mana reserve into the power equation.. Do it. Please. Being a mighty channeler should have some representation other than my imagination and grinning stare at an invading army as it is chilled, withered, burned, drowned, crushed. Repeatedly.

So far playing on Challenging like I said in the first post...

1.) Quickly obtained couple of Umberdorths and a Hoard Spider. Like many things in elemental, this is too much random-based. If I had gotten same setting in last game, I would had so much easier game indeed.

2.) Unlike last game, AIs used global spells, but only on city-related spell. Nothing is surprising as Krax managed to grab one of my cities instantly using Broken Loyality, and only to realized half of my city got city curses.... Maybe it's something with AI sov level, where in last game, for some weird reason, many of them were so low-level (7 and below)

3.) Speaking of curses (or negative city enchantment ) they are not viable enough ... Had to go to city detail screen to check out curses and dispel them. It should be viable among side of essence slots.

4.) While my army of dragons sweeping all of AI around, this time, first time ever, I managed to get an level 5 city (research one), and was utterly unimpressive by choice of unique improvements. So, one is giving 1-water power and 3 mana, other makes city research points immune to unrest, and another just 30% unrest reduction. I mean, at this point, with buildings built alone this city alone got nearly 65% of unrest reduction. Two of them completely useless (I mean, by stats, they are far fitting for level 2 city improvements) for late game, and other one is just unimpressive.... Even Fire Tower gives far better things (3-fire powers and mana) and it comes at level 4.

Other than this new patch massively increased performance (a big thanks to Brad and Stardock people), I still see AI being broken as hell. I still see AI insta-building things and semi-immunity for monster aggression.

That said, I am now done with stock game, trying Heavensfell mod...

I'm going to quit arguing this because there is no way to change the perception of this: The monsters attack the AI just as much as humans. It's a placebo effect when players think they are attacking the other way.

Only at difficulty levels above challenging (on world difficulty) do monsters start to look at the players differently. But on challenging or less, it's a random roll without knowing who it's going after.  

If people want to say the monsters aren't giving the AI a hard time, there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise. But it's not happening. I've spent enough time on this particular issue to determine that it's all perception and not reality. In a typical game, the AI loses a lot more units (pioneers especially) to monsters than a typical human will (mostly because humans are more careful).

I am willing to accept that this is literally true, even in 1.00.

But in 1.00, on challenging, I have seen a particular monster army attack a player army rather than an AI army 7 times out of 7.  The monsters could attack both, and the player army was a match for them.  The AI army had no chance.

On a separate occasion, in the same experiment, with two AI armies and one player army in range, monsters chose to attack the player 8 times out of 10, while only one of the AI armies got attacked, and only 3 times.  I have the saves for both turns, and I have written a lot on the subject here.

These probabilities make me think that if the monsters treats players and AI the same way, there is definitely some logic that it uses that is not self-evident, i.e. that makes them attack a stronger army instead of a defenseless one.

(And if I am mistaken, it's not placebo, it's selective perception, also known as perception bias)

Agreed. In all my games I've noticed that the AI does get attacked a considerable amount of time by the monsters. Honestly this has been done to death and shown inconclusive either way. I'm going to side with Brad and Stardock here unless, they show me the mathematics behind the randomness, I've got no reason to doubt the results. There are a few bugs that are being shown and Stadock is doing a great job of getting rid of these problems, but the AI getting monster immunity; I just cannot establish the validity of anybodies argument, except for the AI programmer himself.

exactly.