Arrogancy

The AI gets absurd production, research and gold bonuses on higher difficulty levels; however, they mostly use these bonuses to make terrible troops which they crash against each other. It's quite rare that the AI will make units from a heavily-enchanted fortress, and they consistently undervalue initiative. This is how you kill them. A troop of warg-mounted archers with Heart of Fire and Aura of Grace on the city that spawned them will eat through QUITE a lot of enemy

I played with 8 AIs on a huge map.

Here's what I've got to say. 1. The AI should probably harvest crystal and metal faster on higher difficulties. They unlock the tech to use it for things VERY fast, but aren't able to make strong armored units because they're still harvesting material very slowly. Yithril gets a big advantage for a lot of the game simply by virtue of having access to juggernaut

Wealthy is pretty reasonable. You get a couple of free rushes early, which is, no doubt, really great; but it runs out rapidly. Scholar is better over the long-term. That said, yeah, I can't win on ridiculous or insane without it. Beastlord really is very strong. There aren't nearly as many "lone monster" groups, which is what really made it crazy before; but it's still strong enough that I don't use it in order to make the game more interesting

So, in general, LH is a lot of fun. I'm really enjoying the game, especially the fact that there's now a good reason not to have like forty cities in my empire. That's really great; managing a big empire is a lot of work, and it's nice not to have to do that in order to manage to survive the AI. The effect swarm has on tactics is AWESOME. I was skeptical of giving units weapon specials (especially sort of silly stuff like "oh, spears can impal

I've been trying to beat the AI on insane with a particular custom strategy. It's difficult. I managed it on ridiculous without much difficulty. I suspect with some refinement, insane will fall into line.

There aren't any available engines for strategy games? Well, I stand corrected and educated; I was wrong. That sort of surprises me, though, given how many strategy games there seem to be on Steam, many of which don't really look all that different. It seems very inefficient that people are duplicating each other's work to such an extent. Has there ever been talk in the industry about making such an engine? The point about screenshots and their

The question I have is why aren't you guys using a game engine that will just do the shadows out of the box? Is there no such engine?

I've been a programmer for a long time, and one of the things I've noticed about people in this industry is that there's a powerful desire to make things "correct" - except "correct" is usually an ideological thing, like the way a very old English teacher will tell you that you MUST NOT use the word "quote" to refer to a quotation, but only as a verb. ("To quote", yes, "a quote", no) I'd like to suggest that maybe shadows are something like this. Maybe not!

So the wildlands are currently kind of silly to open. If you've got an army strong enough to kill one of the big bads, you could just as easily take said army and kill all your enemies dead. What's more, if you do decide to kill them, the benefits of doing so are very minor: some resource nodes (which I probably already have plenty of) and some land for settling - and why settle on new land when I can take my enemy's great city that he's so courteously built up for