I made a custom faction and then picked a Large map on hard difficulty. Then I picked 9 AI players all on hard. The game seem to be going fine but after exploring about 1/5 the map I thought it odd I had not yet found any AI players. Then I started to encounter a few champions with the name DOSID and had the child image as thier portrade. They had 10 Mana on them to and required nothing to recruit so I accepted them into my Kingdom.

As I explored more I only found 1 AI player after having explored over half the map now in a game that was suppose to have 9 AI players. I suspect the AI bugged NPC were suppose to be the champions for the other AIs. Not sure if it's related to playing a custom faction as I've only played once with the custom faction and new saw the problem when I played with stock factions in 1.00-1.05.