The game is EASIER on hard difficulty

LOL.  I never thought about that possibility, but I certainly believe you, now that you mention this.

Combat AI (and AI in general) will be improved in the long run, I think.

Try XL or XXL maps with Ecomental.  It'll be harder to reach your opponents in a decent amount of time before they build up.

After you have played several games, "hard" becomes too easy and "expert" boring, because you have to use strategies that drag out the game and fights, but eventually you will win anyway.

Next you try "ridiculous" and get angry about the unfair cheats they gave the AI to remain competitive (extreme beelining, gang bang of your former warm friends, etc.), and the gaming experience gets more worse. That's definitely the wrong way to "improve" the AI.

But even under this difficulty setting the AI makes horribly stupid things (5 unwinable attacks in one turn only to give you 3 levels for your champs).

Fortunately the devs are constantly improving the AI but IMHO it's still a long way to go.

Yeah, I too just had a Hard playthrough where I found myself rushing a nearby AI.  Didn't mean to, but they settled a city in that great spot RIGHT ahead of my settler.  Infuriating, they had to die.  Anyway, yeah as the OP says the AI never gets any better at protecting itself against an early rush (or any kind of a rush, in my experience) so I rolled right over four cities before I even founded my second one.  I too couldn't believe how quickly these cities had developed, and now they are all mine!  Kind of ruined the rest of the game.

Giving harder AI difficulties bonuses to their starting cities is NOT a good way to boost difficulty.  As the OP says, it just makes the game that much easier once the player takes them.  I second the recommendation that AI units get bonus levels (including city defenders, if possible), and AI heroes should be immune to injuries.  The AI needs help managing its military.

All this seems to come from early rushing. I've seen some other posts stating the same. I have tried attacking soon the AI, with a beastlord tamed army (well it was sov+harridan spider, the rest of beasts were with my other champ) and it is true: easy win.

The solution cannot be "give time to the AI to grow"...I like taking time to build and research, but if I make a strong army and find the AI cities are weak...temptation is so big...

I'd like some solutions could be given to this.

In Civilization IV (and Fall From Heaven), cities typically will lose a little over half their structures each time they are captured.  Having myself been astounded at the goodies you can capture in FE in a high-difficulty game early rush, I can see why that mechanic exists.   

I play games with the 8 standard factions all as challenging, then I have @12+ custom factions that are all on easy - mid-way through tha game one can't tell which is which by the power ratings

If you move the challenging factions to hard, you'll probably notice a difference.  Hard is where things start to take off.

A military conquered city should lose half to three quarters of all built improvements, regardless of who conquers it. Spells that allow you to take the city using influence should not be affected by this, since they aren't really able to be captured that way until mid to late game, or at least I have never had the influence to do it until then.

ha, in ffh it was more like 95%. almost nothing is left :p

but structures aren't the only thing here. There's also the base attributes of the city, values that a player just can't get in my experience

for what it's worth, i don't quite agree with this. i think lategame conquest is already a bit too boring and repetitive, and having to rebuild every city almost from scratch after taking it, would get dull fast.

Perhaps an idea could be lifted from the Total War series. There, buildings in a city are damaged (but not destroyed) after capture. Each building is nonfunctional until it's repaired, doing so takes far less time than the original construction, but it can still amount to 5-10 turns of rebuilding in larger cities.

You're doing it wrong.  You should try a "Heroic" + "Wanderlust" + "Betrayers" combo.  It's ridiculously overpowered in more than one way, but in this particular case I'm talking about:

1. Spend Gildar to buy quests maps

2. Use quest maps to generate quests

3. Solve quests to get influence

4. Use influence to have cities join your side

5. Use cities to generate more Gildar

6. Back to 1.

For bonus points, pick 'Men' as your race, and make solving quests trivial by stacking your sovereign with as many henchmen as you can.

Each henchman should start with "Bard", "Shieldwall" and "Potential", wield a lightning hammer, and prioritize the "Potential", "Trainer", and "Tactician" lines.  Those stack, and henchmen do not reduce the gained XP.  So by turn 80 you see henchmen with levels in the mid 30s, and a stack of those can kill three ashwake dragons before they can act ONCE.

By the way, you can do the exact same thing with scions, but you will have to spend twice the influence on them.

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Ah well, I just realized that you cannot stack all of these anymore.  Good job, devs, that one needed to die!  Just modify your strategy to get quest maps from Altar.  Make them sure you scout them early and keep them alive.

@Tuidjy - LOL! I'm not doing it 'wrong', it just isn't the specialized way I play. It is still time consuming though because you have to go on the quests and do the research. It isn't as if you rush out and are able to get the AI city 'influenced' by turn 20. Though an easy fix is just to increase the amount of required influence by difficulty level.

@NanakoAC - Once you start rolling up an AI, the fact that you need to rebuild their infrastructure before being able to use all their facilities makes sense and it would only slow you down if you want to use those conquered cities to build your new armies. It seems to make sense to me.

It's less time consuming than you think.  By turn 80, you do 2-3 quests per turn on average. By turn 100, you are flipping a city each 5 turns or so, with one stack.  I was too lazy to get more than one stack doing the quest loop, but there's nothing stopping you.

Can you build a Heroic+Wanderlust+Betrayers?  That would be super powerful, but it would take 5 points and I think you can only take one disadvantage?  Isn't heroic 2, wanderlust 1, and Betrayers 2?

Hey, I actually corrected that BEFORE your post.  (I tried to do it in 1.02, and realized that now some of them have higher costs)

Still, you can do it by using Altar's quest maps.  I actually found this strategy with a custom Empire, by using a subjugated Altar's maps and my scions. 

That's a good point, always nice to make friends with Altar and Pariden for their nice gift shops.

Tuidjy just got himself nerfed !

Although the title of this thread is totally paradoxical and quite funny, it only exemplifies the common ground which is that the AI can't handle all in strategies early on when playing under ridiculous diffculty. This is link to the way the AI behave by expanding in a suicidal fashion and the fact that is only vary rarely produce units early.

Make them produce a couple of spearmen, militia, mages with ice staff, trogs with spears. But please make them pick up items after they clear lairs before anything else.

I don't mind, Atan.  I have been posting my favorite strategies since Beta 3, and no one is happier than me when they get nerfed.

My pet candidates for nerfing right now are beastlord, juggernauts, and the quest loop.

Damn you lucky beta tester! Welp you just got yourself another supporter of your cause.

Yes, this is why I feel playing higher difficulty on AI level is nearly pointless, because once you got their cities and got their sov by demanding surrender, well, suddenly all become cakewalk thanks to imba unit and several level 4~5 cities, and it's only 100 turn has passed!

At this moment, playing AI level higher than Hard is just chore... really, really boring. Make monster spawn 'dense' and increase world difficulty to 'insane' gives you far more challenging.

Making monster spawn dense is part of the problem, with the game on hard the AI pretty much sucks at handling the monsters. Part of it is AI pathing of their heroes. Don't want to lose your city to a pack of 3 assassin demons or a big group of ogres? Well, you need Fireball, but more importantly you need Freeze to keep them in place long enough to get to them with your relevant hero. The AI doesn't seem to get that.

I like dense monsters because I am addicted to leveling my troops and heroes, for no particular reason they are mostly demi gods by level 12 anyway and I could plow through the AI at any time after but it's just fun to see how powerful you can get. I like to create a melee god and send him after all those magic immune creatures and well, dragons as well because there is no good ice damage spell for individual targets.