The gold cost would OP wealthy. 

One idea: make pioneers require a lvl 2 city?

AI

1.Still stuck near my border;

2. His expand strategy looks completely irrational, thats one of main problems with AI, he is city and outpost spammer - if he see spot anywhere on the map he tries to take it without analysis of

(i) how he will protect this part of his spread domain;

(ii) are new settlement close to aggresive opponent with supperior army;

3. It looks he is not playing with or against his neighbours - but this is oblivious biggest threat level are coming for him. Arent tactical games is about war and killing your closest threats.

4. He cant predict if he will be attacked with rush or tech rush from his neighbour. Yes this  is big problem AI are not capable to fight against tech rush. Maybe he is not aggressive enough. Its easy to understand if your neighbour dosent build any units and just going for tech rush with 2 lev fortress (+3 move +3 att to units). There always been several rush strategies but tech rush easily can be countered on early stages by attacking weak player. But instead of waging war AI waits for his inevitable death. So AI are not agressive enough on weak player.

5. Never saw him using strategy spells on my cities or armies.

6. Last but not least he is not deathstar user or stoper. It means if you want to win you gather best army and  fight against closest threat. Same way with defence if you see deathstar army  your prepare all you have and give it a fight.

Balance:

1. Cloud walking + Outposts for mana. Thats just insane. Please add cooldown on cloud walking and set it to 200 mana.

2. City protection struggle  because of:

(i) almost 90% i attack city with my deathstar, who should fight against it in the city? Yes main army should protect it, or at least have right to choose to give a fight or to abandon city (or even raze it). This leads to town portal spell (spends mana and all movement) without that all deathstars and unstoppable city takers. This also adds some balance against cloud walking outposts.

(ii) please buff militia and archers or add walls (or streets with building) to tactical map. City defenders must have tactical advantage where it is?  Actually i want to start city protection behind the city walls and not with militia meat in open field.

3. Diplomacy benefits and buffs from treaties should be rised. Its wrong if  agressive player ignores diplomacy and still easily wins the game by clearing with his army whole map without any ally . Key feature here give AI instrument against agressive player, and i never saw real AI alliance with simultaneous attack against my deathstar army or city.

Random map generator:

1. Random generator (balanced) - never saw arctic terrain, swamps, deserts on one map.

2. Recourse placement looks completely chaotic. Maps with no crystal, metal (horses) within 30 tiles of starting point. Still looks like game is not in favor of "build your country and protect borders", instead "everybody settle anywhere you can and grab what still free". Monster attacks are not aggressive enough to stop not protected harvesting. Where is logic monsters logic "if no protection or threat - crush kill and destroy"... even capital city.

2. I saw only one global event in dozen of random games ("everybody goes war against each other") and it was bugged nothing happened and i didnt have any alliances.

3. What is point in starting points without essence? City buffs are part of diversity in early game strategy.

The AI seemed better when I played it on ridicilous though somewhat nerfed tech wise?. Still annoying that they insta declare on the second you are below them in power, makes diplomacy completely redundant, and exploration a bad idea since you want to be left alone as long as possible in the start.

They did some 3-pronged attacks on me and stuff, didn't see those coming before. (they seemed coordinated because they were full armies with heroes in them, before it was usually just "harass" armies alongside real armies) But I still faced full archer armies, and those aren't very good when you have some air shards, guardian wind and wargs.

Also, my custom factions, that I made units for to play better stopped using them and went back to default ones. Coincidence?

If a unit requiring a city level isn't coded (would it be different then a building requiring a lvl), perhaps it should be coded?

I think limiting some buildings (or adding some) to higher city levels would enhance the game as a general balance rule.

I'd love to see world buildings require lvl 3, with a cap of 1 per city level above 2 (so lvl 3 can have 1, lvl 4 2, and lvl 5 3)

I think that would solve another problem with the game (a player exploit)

Maybe traits could be a function of city level and maybe town type (Fortresses could provide better/more varied traits)

Wealthy is one of those problems where its an early bonus compared to a bonus throughout the game, right now I don't think its too much, cause it only gives rushing power at best, and compared to 10% bonus research for the WHOLE game those few rushes doesn't mean too much in my empires anyways.

It only becomes a problem when rushing out to grab each damn city spot is the ONLY viable strategy available... Well you get the idea.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

In my opinion the AIs should try to ally against the strongest player, not go for somebody who is somewhat weaker but not a walkover.

Why? If you are wasting your power fighting somebody who isn't a real threat to you, then you are going to fall back even more from the most powerful opponent. Of course, if you know you can just take the cities of the weakling without much cost then it is beneficial action. But this isn't usually the case.

So, instead try to ally with the somewhat weaker player and attack the strongest player. This would lead to natural balancing, where the strongest player will get attacked instead of left alone.

What you are saying works if the only victory condition is military conquest, but if you want to go for a Spell of Making or a Master Quest, you'll want to ally with the strongest player to make sure you're safe until you complete your objective. I don't know if this philosophy still applies, but I think Stardock goes with Drusus' idea, so the AIs will work to bring down the strongest player. I don't actually know what they did for FE, but this is how it works in GalCiv. Here's an article about it:

https://www.galciv1.com/encyclopedia.asp?action=showpage&page=https://www.galciv1.com/docs/criticalmass.html

The thing is that in GalCiv you could establish trade and pay tribute and improve your diplomacy skill to the point where even if you didn't have a serious military force, the other civilizations would leave you alone for the most part, except if there was some other factors, like lingering racial grudges etc.

This has to be implemented in Fallen Enchantress too, because otherwise diplomacy is next to useless as it is now. Everybody you meet will immediately declare war on you. Establishing trade routes should improve your relationship with other factions more, and paying tribute and signing NAPs should ENSURE peace for the duration of the pact, so the AI shouldn't break them. Declaring war on their enemies etc should really make a difference. There will of course be factors like different allegiance and leader personality which will impact relations.

I'm playing Caveman2Cosmos now for Civilization IV and it has brilliant diplomacy. Of course Civilization IV is a 8 years old game and had many expansions and patches, and the Caveman2Cosmos mod had more people working on it then Stardock has employees, but it shows that it can be done. I'm not saying I expect FE to get to that level, but at least to GalCiv standards. That being said, FE is still young, we'll see...

Just brainstorming here: What if instead of making Pioneer units cost gold, charge gold for the founding of a city. Maybe 10 gold per rating (so a 3/2/2 would cost 70 gold).

Problem is not with speed of expasions but in its core concepts.

Tactical AI:

- please fix mosters they dont use their AoE damage specials (swipe, fire breath) when surronded.

- are ranged dodge taken in to account when AI choses to shot in champion with it.

- are initiative order is taken in to account when AI choose his target to attack? If we have two same units but one is slowed and didnt act yet and other already acted which will be chosen by AI?

Tactical spell balance:

- Why heal and curses dosent scale from spell damage?

The #2 AI should in general be looking for a partner to gangbang the #1 player, or should try to rush down the #1 player if he can do it.

Well maybe that's the problem? Make population count for something other than just levels and Sacrifice fodder for mana? You already have the faction prestige limiter on growth, so linking population with production/research/economy could fix a lot. If needed add some buildings to make use of population better in the early game, so going tall is a good option, because that is what I think many are after here. Going wide works fine atm obviously, so nerfing it just cause AI spams it isn't a good reason IMO. 

Also, getting AI to play tall well, there is your challenge

Clever AI's are awesome. I loved the BetterAI project on Civ4, if you can get anything remotely similar to that, we will love you

Also, it could be helpful if you said what to look out for regarding feedback. Most of us is stupid regarding AI code after all ^^

My dream would be for the AI to be a separate DLL so I could hand out source code and other people could make their own AI.

Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 had its AI as its own DLL so peoplpe could see what I did right (or wrong) and make their own and share it on Usenet with other players.

Civilization IV (and now V) actually provided a lot of source code so you can do a lot more modding with them.  Unfortunately, we just don't have the resources to componentize the code so that the licensed bits aren't so intermixed with our bits.

Move outpost creation to scouts and do the -pop thing for pioneers IMO. Though 30 seems low, I'd go as high as 100, perhaps have it scale based on game speed (like 30 fast, 50 normal, 100 epic).