I second many of the comments already mentioned, but the one AI issue that stands out for me is the other factions' passivity. Maybe it is my charming personality, but as long as I don't do something extremely aggressive the AIs seem to watch /allow me to get stronger and stronger - and then they offer me money! I just finished playing "hard" world" with "hard" intelligences of AISs and the same happened. boring.

Wait till 1.2

Things are about to get harder.

It would also be nice if the AI armies would actually destroy my undefended outposts and capture my entirely undefended or extremely poorly defended cities. Currently, I can play without any defenses, since, apparently, I do not need them, as wandering AI armies come within 1 tile of my city, but never attack.

Not to get too far afield, but I am not bagging on Civ 5 for having mid/late game tedium (mopping up is a plague to the 4x genre).  My issue is that Civ V is tedium from the word go.  IMO, they boiled out all the decision making and refined the game to the point that there's very little left.  Polish is a double-edged sword; Civ V is living proof that you can polish a game until there's nothing left.

The way the game is structured, you're supposed to finish clearing out the monsters just about when you are ready to wage war with the AI.  Unfortunately, the AI kinda sucks at preparing for and executing a war.  It's terrible at recognizing that things have changed and adjusting to new circumstances.  Which means that if your stack can beat the AI's stack, you're going to conquer their entire kingdom.  After you've cleared out the monsters, there's really nothing left to do.

I am not so concerned about whether they fix the Autosave bug or pathing around rivers or make the hotkeys consistent (all those being worthwhile concerns, mind you).  To me the far more important question is whether Brad & Stardock can get the AI sorted out so that it can offer an interesting mid/late game challenge; so that conquering the whole continent requires diplomacy, strategic and tactical skill, and some creativity.  Of course, I've been asking that question since FE's beta and I am really not sure why I still expect it to happen.  GalCiv II, I guess.

I just wish 4x computer games could find a way to cut out the fat and end the game while it's still interesting.

Board games have solved this problem already. 

We should be playing a fantasy version of Eclipse, not a fantasy version of Risk. No 4x game should ever require conquering the entire world.

the 4X games are usually fine in terms of design

the problem is AI

developers are absolutely clueless about how to play games, let alone write AI for them

you cannot have a rewarding symmetrical game where your choices matter in the beginning and in the end unless you play on crazy difficulties (which make the game asymmetrical)

if you made the right decision, you should be rewarded for it with a huge advantage... taking that away trivializes the strategic elements of a game

the only way to keep it is to make sure decisions are so hard that the player never gets that huge advantage... that needs good AI

i've never played a 4x computer game that did not turn into a slog end game. That means that the design is not fine.

Er, Legendary Heroes doesn't require conquering the entire world. You can win by quest and you can win by building the towers. AI players will surrender if you're overwhelmingly more powerful than them. I agree it can be a bit a slog at the end, but I actually think Legendary Heroes does reasonably well at reducing the slog. If nothing else, there are normally a few Epic quests to give a bit of variety as you're crushing the AI players.

We obviously disagree about how good Civ V is which is fine, everyone likes different things. But I take strong issue with the idea that Civ V's problems come from over-polishing. We must be using different definitions of the word. Civ V's problems (relative to Civ IV at least) are that they tried to simplify too many elements, happiness being the most glaring problem but there are others, and ended up with a game which has some poor core mechanics. Simplification is NOT the same as polishing.

I would define polishing a game as making so that the game design is taut (ie decisions are such that multiple choices are valid and the choice made does make a difference), the game is stable (doesn't crash), core mechanics and systems don't have any visible bugs or major exploits (LH problems in this area include the save/load problems, instability after generating several maps and the growth/food mechanic being broken by queuing pioneers) and visible minor bugs or UI glitches during typical gameplay are few and far between.

I think Stardock have done a good job of making the game stable, a reasonable job of making the game design taut but a poor job of eliminating major and minor bugs and exploits. I say the last partially in the context of this being effectively the 3rd release of the game (whether you view it as 3 separate games or a base game with 2 expansions makes little difference) and many of the major bugs/exploits have been known for a very long time...

I used to play for PGL and used to be in diamond league in Starcraft and was the top ranked player in Total Annihilation's Boneyards's service.  I like to think I can play.

However, writing "good" AI for a game like this is very difficult because players often play the game in drastically different ways and often times, spells and other game changing effects are added that I'm not familiar with (the tornado spell for instance).

It's not a matter of knowing how to play the games. It's about making the choice between designing a game with many many different strategies that causes the AI to have blind spots or one with a very very narrow range of player decisions.

Ultimately, since FE/LH is a single player game, some of the onus (imo) is on the player to choose not to make use of exploitative strategies.  For example, you can exploit the game by training pioneers and then canceling them.  Is that going to get "fixed"? Probably not because it's a single player game and that's a self-inflicted exploit. 

There are a lot of straight forward AI strategies that can be enhanced (and hopefully v1.2 will help on that).  There is generally little motivation to go and address things in the game that players intentionally and willfully do for themselves that make the game "easier".  Players have a lot of say over how challenging the AI is for them.  

None of what I say should be construed as me saying that AI work shouldn't continue to be done to the game to ensure that it continues to challenge experienced players.  I am just emphasizing that player exploits tend to be low on the priority queue.

Correct me if I'm wrong on these two points, but the AI only surrenders if you are beating them up and the AI cannot use the master quest victory.

That's not really that important though. I think my terminology was inaccurate, and there is less maintenance per turn than a game like Civ late game. That's a good thing.

What I meant is that in every 4x game where the goal is conquest, there is a point where the balance of the game tips from challenging game play to effortless cleanup. This is due to the snowballing effect of power, and it's something that games like Civ try to design around with systems such as happiness, corruption and war weariness. In the case of Civ games, this means that you usually end up conquering, consolidating, conquering, consolidating, etc. It's not perfect, but it does keep the ramp from going insane.

The only system that tries to affect this at all in LH is unrest, and due to the ease of overcoming it, it's mostly a non-factor.

As a result we have a game where the player has effectively won after 2 hours of playing, but must spend 6 hours cleaning up (on large maps), which is very bad. Granted, part of this is due to AI not wanting to quit and not being nearly as strong as its score suggests, and the AI improvements earlier mentioned will improve both sides of this equation (takes longer to effectively win, and less time to clean up).

Ideally I'd love to see some sort of mechanic cause the game to be over by around 4 hours, with 0 hours of cleanup.

The game should end quickly when it is clear who is going to win. I only say one thing: Singularity Planetbuster

Noticed a bug, a screen shot would have wrapped it up, but...yeah sorry.

Anyways I assume everyone noticed this already but...

If you line up your troops  all right next to each other and there isnt space to walk around them.  The AI does nothing and constantly passes on their turn.

And epic army can be defeated by a single archer doing 1 damage a shot if they have a line of whatever in front of them.

| = border, X = Troop Square

|XXXXXX| = AI stops doing anything and just skips turn and lets you pick them off at range.

Its a common tactic to line up your troops like this due to swarm tactics, and I hate having to do...

|XXX_XXX|

|___X___|

In order to not have the AI sit there and die to ranged.

What do you mean? That an exploit that would give you, say, unlimited population growth, would not be a prioritized fix? If you are hoping to get any sort of competitive single player community (GOTM and the like), game-breaking exploits should be fixed (or, at a minimum, detectable/loggable).If, however, you mean that one can increase growth somewhat by tactically queuing pioneers at the right points in time (which you currently can) I agree they can be left in.

For this reason, I would also like to see autosave fixed, and ideally the seed for the RNG should've be taken from the save file so as battles and drops are repeatable (as in Civ).

I have to disagree with this approach, serious exploits should certainly be fixed as a pretty high priority IMO. Particularly the pioneer exploit which is so easy to use and so powerful.

You're giving the player an awful lot of credit if you think they can sit there with their capital not growing due to maxed out food and NOT think, mmm well, I might want a pioneer in the future, would it hurt if I just queued one up, I'm not doing it because of that exploit of course. However maybe I should queue two, cause you know, there are lots of places I could put outposts down...

Abracadabra! Magic, suddenly the capital is growing again. And then you are sitting there wondering why everyone is finding the game too easy and trying to find ways to improve the AI to match... fix the exploits (even if players are only using them accidentally) and you'll help the problem.

It's your game but obvious and overpowered exploits are a big turn off for me...