Is it just me or does the AI behave rather cluelessly? Specifically, there does not seem to be a real benefit to having allies (near you, at least).

For example: on the campaign level vs Phobius, you start with Fangir as your ally in a nice corner spot. However, Fangir keeps leaving his perimeter city and recource caches undefended, choosing instead to send dozens of little stacks around in loops through allied (mine) territory chasing relatively useless targets that would take 5-10 turns to get to anyway. Thus his perimeter city gets taken as do his mines, which causes him to run out of gold.. at which point his army deserts him and now there are half a dozen neutral vestiges of his army floating through allied territory..

Eventually he regroups and retakes stuff, but then chases the neutrals from his former army instead of actually making a push at a common nearest enemy (karissa on this map). Once he recaptures his second town, he repeats his stupidity again. In sum, he was completely useless on this map, having basically donated many resources to the enemy. I would have been FAR better off declaring him an enemy and taking/securing his stuff myself.

Does the AI always behave so ridiculously (in both campaign and scenario?). Im not sure why there isn't code in place to have AI leave a decent amount of units on its perimeter cities permanently?? That would seem to make sense rather than loops of abandoning retaking. When conquering an enemy, all you need to do is wait x turns for the enemy AI to abandon its perimeter cities as well..

Not to sound too harsh because this is a brilliant game in really every other respect, but with the high scores for this game the expectation was for some decent AI which.. if it's there I havent seen it. Is it there anywhere? If not I dont really understand the high scores for the game as it seems near game-breaking. Truly a great game in every other respect. The AI seems to be missing some very basic logic that at least a couple other civ-type games did much better

Ok so part rant but.. any suggestions on how to make allied AI less of a liabilty during playthrough? Do i need to guard every ally's perimeter cities personally? Maybe guard some chokepoints and clear more neutral 'treasure spots' to keep my allies focused on important things?

I'm running the Upatch 1.4 vers

Thank you! I will definitely check out this mod or possibly others to help custom tweak the AI a bit. Hopefully my OP didn't come out too harsh as your first sentence sums up exactly how I feel about the game. It is truly an incredible game in really every possible other respect.. pretty blown away actually. But wow a couple AI tweaks from the original design team would've really put this puppy over and beyond the top.

If only the AI would protect its secondary/tertiary bases more permanently.. and had a better algo for sending armies towards resource spots prioritized by distance/strategic value. There literally doesn't seem to be any sort of logic behind the implementation of prioritizing targets.. if there even is any

DId AoW III improve the AI at all in similar respects?

I dont' know about AoW III since I haven't played it recently, but I think some of the reason for the AI behaviour in SM was that the AI tended to "turtle" in AoW 1. But SM is an improvement on AoW 1 anway.

You're both making me miss my PBEM games of AoW:SM. All the benefits of a fun game with much smarter opponents. Well, sometimes they were smarter. :-)