Well said. I hope this helps motivate someone to improve this.

Right on. Warhammer: Mark of Chaos was pretty much unplayably bad on release, and there was a desperate cry for improvement on the forums. Official response never came and eventually the cries vanished leaving empty echoing forums.

I agree with the OP 100%.

Played 3 games so far: 1st one with 4 AIs all on "challenging". 2nd one with 7 AIs on "Hard". 3rd one with 7 AIs on "Extreme" (finished that one 2 hours ago).
In all of those the AI was ridiculously dumb. It's simply not there. After 70 turns most of the opponents didn't even expand past the 1st city, and they all had very very small armies. Kinda wiped the floor with them in all of my games after 150-200 turns. The AI in this game simply does not exist.

And yeah, I'm fully patched.

Right on. I appreciate you not getting pissy.

I have not tried to win a game yet, still trying to figure out what everything does.

So, do you think the game would be better against human opponents? Is, in your opinion,  the mechanics and concept broken or is it just dumb AI?

Thanks!

I too fell that you need more control over your cities. I am hoping it comes in time. I never purchased a TBS game on opening day before, tons of MMO's over the years though, and you know how they are at launch.

I've been a Stardock customer for just two days and I feel a bit of a bond too.

Also, the game is great.

I stayed up late last night (ONE MORE TURN!!!!), and I'm here posting before going to work.

There are definitely some MOM vibes, and more. Never thought I'd see the day, I mean, I'm 34 and I've seen games pass by.

Still need to learn alot about mechanics, strategies and all, but I repeat: there's no telling how great this game can be with more work and expansions.

I wish I had something closer to your experience.  About 100 turns into my games I'm attacked by one of the fallen empires (doesn't matter which one(s) are in the game, they find me) and crushed by armies much bigger than I can field.  I can't collect enough resources, I can't afford to recruit all (or even many of) the heroes who walk by, and I can't get my cities to grow fast enough to justify building new ones.

My last game, I had four cities 70 turns into the game when an enemy showed up out of nowhere with an army of parties of guys with maces and killed my concentrated army (all but two peasants in other cities) in my forward-most city.  My best unit was using oak spears, since that game I couldn't find any metal to mine.  My stone giant and blizzard killed off most of the enemy, but he had some guy in the backfield who was casting an unknown spell for 10 damage per round to all my units.  (No graphics on that spell, or I'd take a stab at describing it.)  Also, his sovereign wasn't there, so I have to assume he had other armies of equal or greater combat rating.  It was ~250 to 150 in his favor at the start of that combat.

After hearing your description, I wonder if the AI is simply turned off on your machine, the way some people's GPUs are not being used...  Or if 70 turns into the game I should have expanded beyond 4 cities and level 4 spells.  Or is the problem that while I'm trying to play on Novice difficulty, and you're trying to play on challenging difficulty, we're actually playing on the opposite due to some sort of bug in the difficulty switches?  Something to try anyway.