Wow. I had just written quite a long reply talking about FE to the thread started by id_est (https://forums.elementalgame.com/441654/page/2/#replies), only to find that Frogboy had locked it. Weak sauce in my opinion. Frogboy says there isn't enough concrete criticism about the AI for him to act on and then as soon as the thread started getting more constructive (including the post by bpalczewski which Frogboy referred to himself as being constructive) Frogboy throws his toys out of the cot and locks the thread?

Which is it Frogboy, you want to find out why people aren't happy with the AI or do you just want to lock AI criticism threads and then complain that no one ever tells you what is wrong with the AI? Because I don't see how you can have it both ways.

Anyway, on the off chance that you are actually interested in feedback, despite the evidence to the contrary, here is what I think the biggest problem is. I had written this up much better in the id_est thread but since my post has now been lost (eaten by the locked thread I presume) I'll try to note it down again.

Plutonium239 raised the example of the Civ series of games (in particular I would say Civ 4 and 5) which have AIs which actually can pose a threat. Sure they aren't anywhere near as good as a good human player but they can and will punish a player who lets their guard down.

Bpalczewski gave the specific example of initial attacks in war and Civ is an excellent example of this. In Civ 5 when the AI declares war they have almost always been planning their attack on you for multiple turns. The turn that war is actually declared is usually the same turn that the AI troops start rolling over your border. This is an extremely effective tactic. The Civ 5 AI can't compete with a good player tactically (largely due to the one unit per hex rules) but they can catch a player napping and inflict heavy losses.

To contrast I have had wars in FE where the AI hasn't ever sent an army into my territory and I can't recall any where the AI launched a serious assault on the same turn they declared war.

This is just one point, there are plenty of others critiques I could make (and will try to once I find time) but this one point goes a long way to explain why the FE AI feels a bit anemic to me.