The AI simply doesn't exsit

Just played with 7 "hard" AIs, "challenging" world, and the game is still a joke. After 70~ turns, the AI didn't even expand beyond 1 city, and had no army at all. with a bunch of recruited heroes, 2 summoned units and some Guardians, I conquered the entire world in a few dozen turns. The game's AI is not only flawed, it simply doesn't exist.

And besides that, I think the game is also very shallow. The city management aspect is very very lacking compared to other 4X games like Civ. Too few city improvements, and 90% of the world consists of empty tiles (unlike civ where each tile has its own production properties and has different yields which you have to take into account)..