i have noticed a bug quite often that i cant figure out how to duplicate, but quite randomly and fairly often, the grain/materials/essence info will just disappear and not even show up when you mouse over the tiles where they used to be, but if i save the game then reload it, they all reappear. So it may be playing into it seeming like the AI is settling where there are no resources, when there really are and that bug has popped up.

I don't own elemetal yet, though I'll tell you why I would maybe increase the difficulty to challenging

the reason is simple: our history of gaming

Generally I tend to play this kind of games on the "AI doesn't cheat & player have no advantage" scale.

the worst AI cheat I saw was on Empire Earth (the first one), if you forgot to kill 1 builder unit it could rebuild its whole base elsewhere in a matter of seconds. So maybe try to not go overboard either on higher difficulties, it's one thing for an AI to have 2x, 5x or 10x more money income (the AI still needs to build up strenght)

it's another thing to be able to rush anything with no cost (the AI has no challenge, it can just build whatever it wants however it wants, not very fun for players in my view)

You didn't read the post I was quoting..

he wrote "I do not care what game you play, when you pick a harder AI or difficulty the AIs "cheats" by getting bonuses the players do not. This has always been the way it was done." Which I responded to.

You totally missed my point

I remember this, but EE is still one of my favorite games of all time. That game was so moddable it wasn't even funny. 

bump - because this thread is important

I'm pretty confident that the A.I just shops around for tech.  In my current game I've out-teched the A.I (challenging) but they always seem to be shopping around for techs so I think they keep themselves in the game by trading techs with each other...which in my book is a competitive A.I

I believe that as of .992 non-aggression pacts and tribute offers had absolutely no effect on an AI ability to declare war.

Given that I have not seen anything about that in the changelogs, I expect the same is true for 1.00 and 1.004

You should.  You can get paid to declare wars, and you can get some cash for your tech.  Also, I find that, sometimes, you can get away with selling horses and wargs.

And of course, once you kick someone's ass thoroughly enough, it's well worth it for make peace, get trade/tech treaties, and even make them pay for a NAP and Alliance. 

Negotiating from a position of weakness does not work, but negotiating from a position of strength sure does.  Just like in reality.

I did auto-run for 12x8 map, setting epic, everything dense/plenty except resource being moderate. all stock factions plus Capitar and Umber custom sovs. Difficulty is Challenging/Challenging. After about 270 turns. I removed the fog of war.

In short, AI cheats on monster aggression. As I said, all AIs have semi-immunity for monsters.

More description : it cheats real hard.

Even more description : it is to the point of laughable and ridiculous (not really 'semi'... more likely 'almost'), and I wish I did not run auto-run, because after I saw how hard AI cheats on monster aggression, I completely lost any will to bother playing this game anymore until someone (either devs or modders) brings significant changes on this.

I suspect you won't notice much since most AI vs monster battle is mostly AIs attacking them first, and monsters really rarely attack anything.

A Magnar, with 250 power rating, with 9 cities completely surrounded by "strong" and "deadly" monster groups, from nearly 100 additional turns I only see 4 cities being razed, and by looks of it, it is most likely because the city was on the path of the monster movement and/or a city was built literally next to the monster lair. Pretty much all the time, monster movements inside of influence zone was nearly completely random, sometimes attacking unguarded pioneers but that's it.

And no garrison troops. Nope. Magnar's capital city, surrounded by three Earth Elemental armies, with just pioneer, not even fortress-type city (it's just a level 3 town.) Never gets attacked.

There is no need to believe or anything. Anyone who has this game check oneself. Do yourself a favor and do auto-run, and you will see. There is no need of arguing about player bias or something, because the evidence is just... right there.

Maybe, MAYBE it's because monsters overestimate garrison troops on city as Tuidjy said to me.... oh wait, all Magnar had was a pioneer unit on its capital city. Well, if those mightly elementals overestimate terrible city militia (level 3 town), well, all I say is all of these power rating thingly is completely FUBAR.

So, in order to comfirm Tuidjy's theory, I am running another auto-run, but this time world difficulty is "ridiculous" and AI is "hard". If I don't see any difference, I will try insane-novice. I will post the result later.

Yes, it is very hard to set up an experiment that shows anything conclusively.  When I said 'Confidence: average' I was pretty much saying, I do not know.

The power rating system is a bit iffy at best anyway.

What you have to bear in mind is that a big group of Air Shrills or whatever, they use up their Sonic Blasts on their first turn and then by the time their third turn comes around they're either dead from arrows/staves, dead from magic, dead from a group of horse riders.

Now against rookie troops and champions, that elemental damage is rarely resisted and can be quite lethal, but against troops that have fought wars and have hitpoints in the triple digits, it's like 'Did you just... attack me?  That was a bit lame whatever it was.'  So the power rating for the monsters is lower than the player's army by a couple of orders of magnitude.  But they'll still attack because they think they have a chance.

My point is, if the rating system doesn't reflect the true power of both sides, then who knows what other barmy decisions monsters are making at the end of a turn.  They see a town and they're like 'bright lights!  bright lights! run away!'

No, and I know that they don't always wander off to find a dark cave to sleep in, but they do seem a bit sluggish to respond to the little folk repopulating the world.  I've lost just one village because I got too cocky setting up near to monsters, so either I'm really lucky, really scary, or I just haven't been playing long enough.

I don't think the AI was designed to be able to do these things on purpose, I believe they are bugs that will be squashed.  

By the way, just so you know, it is not a smart thing to brag about having only lost one village (like I did above).  A group of ogres decided to come in and smash up another one.  Oopsie.