Has anyone formed a view on AI improvements in 1.2? I've just finished my first 1.2 game, and it's hard to be sure because I like to choose different nations each time, but the AI certainly felt a lot more competitive in the early game. I played as Pariden on a medium randomly generated map with default parameters and four Ridiculous AIs (evenly balanced between "good" and "evil"). I started off in a good corner of the map with lots of good town sites. The early/ middle game (after I met the AIs) was hard though. The AIs seemed further ahead of me in development than I was expecting, given my good starting location. Also, my two closest neighbours were Resoln and Yithril, who liked each other and disliked me, and the map was not particularly kind in terms of good quests or bottlenecks, so I was always having to worry about fighting the AI, I didn't have much chance to gain levels questing and lair clearing.
Even after I got a halfway decent stack I had to be quite careful attacking the AI; I had to reload twice when I underestimated the strength of an AI stack. The first time I got crushed attacking the Resoln capital when the Oracle was present; I couldn't hit her high dodge troops, and she very effectively killed my troops with long range troops. I used Guardian Wind but it made very little difference, I assume because her troops were very high accuracy (85+). The second time I lost to Yithril with Verga present. Basically I couldn't deal with his high damage and high initiative troops (including two Juggernauts), not to mention Verga himself. Both times I had to reload and bide my time slightly, picking a weaker city to target for Resoln, getting an extra unit and using Freeze before attacking Verga. Even then the battles were close (I lost several units), and in both cases the following battle was quite tough as well (i.e. Varga came back with an army nearly as strong as his first army).
It's hard to be sure exactly what the difference was, especially bearing in mind the difference in faction (so this time around I had no Beastmaster, no free mana from Consume Shard, and limited offensive spells), but it certainly felt harder. One of the biggest factors was that troops seemed to be more buffed than I was expecting. I'm not sure if this is from extra unit buffs on higher difficulty levels, or from using fortresses to build troops, quite possibly both, both are mentioned in the changelogs. In general Resoln had quite scary dodge values, Yithril had much higher initiative than I was expecting, (in addition to the normal high armour, damage and hitpoints).
I became allies with Tarth and Altar, but this was partly because their armies were quite scary too, and I felt I had more than enough to be going on with fighting Yilith and Resoln.
Has anyone else had a similar experience? Do people generally think the AI has taken a step up with 1.2?
