I've read a few reviews of the first game, and seems like the AI is kind of dumb in some moments. I've searched for reviews on the internet, written when the game was released, and the bad AI is always mentioned. IGN even suggested that we should always play using the highest difficulty setting.

The README file, however, shows many updates to the AI, released after these reviews (at least IGN's) were written. Seems like they even added two new new extra difficulty settings. So, my questions are:

1- Did the updates really improve the AI?
2- Considering I'm not an experienced strategist, but at least a quite smart player, which difficulty setting do you recommend?

EDIT: Quoting IGN:
[i]
(...) the computer AI scarcely knows what to do against a built-up town with walls. Since you can see with your own eyes that a city has walls, and won't attack it without a wall-breaking unit like a cannon or giant in your ranks, the game's overall challenge becomes somewhat marred. It's too easy to fortify all your towns, leave a token defender to hold it, and then take the rest of your force out for more conquest and slaughter. Yet at the same time, unless you put the computer AI on its hardest setting, the AI is reluctant to fortify, meaning it's usually pretty easy to take its cities.

Not that I have a big problem with putting all the non-player empires onto the hardest AI setting -- in fact you have to, if you want a challenge -- except for one thing: at this setting, it also cheats (...) Even after the first patch (version 1.1), the AI kept cheating, although the patch did noticeably improve the AI's otherwise lackluster decision-making. [/i]
http://pc.ign.com/articles/161/161983p1.html

The patches definately improved the AI, especially when dealing with walled cities and on the battlefield. I reccommend playing on normal difficulty at first, untiol you get used to the game. It shouldn't take long before you're ready to boost the difficulty.

okariorob, trying to catch you - could you quote the solution in my last post here:
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/ishar_compilation/ishar_1_sword_in_the_stone

so that I can mark you as the answer? (I can't mark my own post and you responded helpfully, so I'd like to give you credit).

[Also, check out GogPM - it's very useful for this sort of thing!
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/gog_private_message_system_up/page1
]

Done. Thanks for the credit! And I'm checking the PM stuff right now...

AoW is a really hard game

The campaign have some hard missions and is generally much harder than skirmish maps which usually shouldn't be hard to win.

The mission Hall of Heroes with The Keepers is one of the most hard levels i´ve ever played, never finished the the Cult of Storms campaign.

The problem with AoW1 campaign missions I think is that they have a "correct" way to be played. You can avoid this by assassinating the enemy leader but otherwise you run into really big problems if you for example expand in the wrong direction.
I suck at figuring out how to best play missions so when I played the campaigns I almost always had to slug it out which took ages. :(

Don't remember Hall of Heroes but I don't doubt it's one of the bitchiest missions.

Edit: To keep on topic I'll mention that the campaign missions ain't harder because of the AI. It's harder because the AI has a huge advantage in troops and cities.

You can bait and control the enemy AI pretty easily in this game. The other day I had a town without walls that was about to be attacked by an enemy force and I didn't have that many units to defend it. If I could just build a wall, it would give my meagre defence force more time to whittle their health down. However, they were 1 turn away from attacking me and the wall was going to take 2 turns.

At the same time, there was a unit I had about 2 turns away from the enemy, in the opposite direction for them from this town. Anyway, in an attempt to slow them down, I built a little wall out of two basic troops blocking their access to my town since there was only 2 squares width in the mountain pass by the town. I expected them to attack these crappy troops and win, but at least it'd slow them down for the wall to be finished.

What actually happened is they then did 180, and went for the other unit in the other direction even though it was too far away. So next turn, I intentionally opened up the troop wall I'd made and move the unit they were going for even further away. They now moved back towards the town. Next turn I moved the distant unit closer again and resealed the troop wall. They went for the distant unit again. It looped like this forever, until I'd built stone walls and more defenders in the town.

I'll agree. I get absolutely stomped in AOW1. I didn't think my TBS skills were that bad, but man...

Yes, it´s true. But the mission were really well designed, playing AoW was a remarcable experience; the originality of the game concept, the beautiful music (sadly, two of the best themes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_0ld2U5X4&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6tdiv_xgu4) were used on real-time based combat system and I allways play using the turn based one), the challenging mission design, and the lack of pretentiosity in every game aspect made that game one of the major 1997 surprises... No one expected anything of this game, and it rocks.

That kind of tactics wouldn´t work in some of the missions.

I agree. The missions are well design, the music really good and its success came from nowhere. A true GOG. :)

Though I still think they made the missions too hard. I played the campaigns only ones and after that have only played skirmish maps.

Note to anyone that read message number 11 and haven´t played AoW:
AoW doesn´t have real time combat, there were a turn based combat on a battlefield and a turn based combat that remembered the HoMM one (without "scenario"). When I said "real time combat" I was referring to the first one. The combat turns cam be played separately (as it is usual on strategy games) or simultaneously.