How weak is the AI... really?

[elbnar]

For an example of the good and bad of the AI...

the other day I was playing SP and was closing in on the TC capital. It was losing pretty bad, so it launched a desperate "battle of the bulge" counterattack with every unit it could find along with its SC god.

Its SC was an E9 clops with some wind. It buffed itself with air shield and mistform, and then proceeded to go on an ***-kicking tour through my troop formations.

Now the bad: it didn't put any items on its SC! At all! The clops weapon was "Fist"!

I really think that with boots of the behemoth and a good weapon and shield, or even just a trinket weapon + shield and no boots, it would have won. But the AI is unable to really use items and thus fails at SCs. He only killed one guy every other round or so. My troops swarmed him and after a while, one popped his mistform and then it was all over.

[SelfishGene]

I've lost even moderately powerful, borderline thug/SCs to random AI armies, if they just happen to have the right casters or right units.

There are a few situations where fighting the AI is hard, but the main ones are when you take sleeping/imprisoned Pretenders, non-combat Pretenders, vs. water nations (or vice versa for EA water) and/or sloth scales. To fight effectively vs. the AI's masses of chaff you need either efficient, high resource units, or some force multiplying units like spell casters ect. Unlike in multiplayer the AI is suicidally aggressive and there are no negotiations or alliances till the end. And even good players might have a tough time getting into the water vs. the AI if you haven't got an easy route to good water strategies.

You can make the AI reasonably difficult by building your nation thematically, btw. Rainbow pretenders et al are great for the end game but don't do you much good if you're getting thrashed at turn 15 by huge waves of chaff.

Honestly, though, the AI seems somewhat .... variable, as to it's effectiveness, as well. Some games, it's like i outbuild them 3:1 and crush them easily on the harder levels, even if i take time to pause between provinces to raise dead. Other games my 3-sloth Tir gets swamped by enormous numbers of chaff, and if the map is shaped in just such a way, 4 thugs might be holding them back at four provinces, but then the AI always seems to find a way to break through somewhere else and progress is very difficult. Generally though i do poorly vs. the AI with sloth/low resource national troops/thematic Pretenders, and beat them easily with prod/high resource national troops/SC Pretenders.

[NTJedi]

Raiel...
If you're playing Orania then you need to either change your AI opponents or switch to a different map because the many water provinces will provide human players a great advantage over most AI opponents.

If you're playing a map with water you need to remove the nations which rarely attack water provinces... such as

Ulm
Sauromatia
Abysia
Caelum
Pangea
Tir
Fomoria
Vans
Kailasa
Yomi

MA:
Pythium
Marignon
Pangea
Vans
Bandar Log

The AIs have a major weakness of rarely attacking water provinces. Water mages use to be able to enter water provinces and carry troops with them allowing more AI nations to attack the water provinces in DOM_2. Now in Dominions_3 that's been removed and the AI is extremely weak at expanding into water provinces.