Well what me and a friend did to make up for the AI is this.
designate certain races for AI only. Then I would edit the units and give them enchantments since the AI didint do it much.
I would really stack the AI also since they did a terrible job upgrading, and often you get hordes of level 2 units, and dumb things like 7 karaghs with 1 slow unit like a cannon. So all the towns in thier areas were instantly able to make level 4 units.
Also took flying off alot of units because they ai has no clue what to do about flying units.
Had to edit movement of alot of units also as speed was very powerful in the game and the AI had no idea how to leverage TI so most units were either 36-40 movement.
In the end just couldnt do enough things to make the AI play smart enough. They would just get immense amounts of units to through at us which in turn levels are units faster/heros faster.
Either they overwhelmed us with numbers or we mowed them down. Could never get them to play remotely smart, and it was just to hard to balance where we made the AI units strong enough ( by putting on strike types and boosting stats to make up for the fact they dont buff units ).
I mean we had some sick things come at us like battalions of 80-150 level 4 units, but in the end we could whittle them away most times, because the AI is stupid. Like they will take over a city with 80 units leave 2 units behind and split up the entire army to smaller parts while you got an army of 40 units a few steps away that you then use to pick apart those 80 untis the AI just for no reason split up into small armies.
Turn based needs a bit of work also because in the end we always waited for the AI to commit and make all its moves then we picked them apart, spread out as much as we wanted to, and because the AI takes soo long to make its first moves we could regroup and stack big armies back up that we split at the end of the last turn.
Essentially you get 2 turns to the AI's 1. Unfortunately setting a turn timer doesnt help much as the AI seems to be able to ingore timer length on turns.
The last straw for us how came as we would develope these monstrous games and reacht he 80+ turn mark and the game became unplayable.
AI turns would take over 40 minutes to complete and it just got boring watching them take forever to move units back and forth serving no purpose.
Then the few times we perservered those extruciating long AI turns, we finally would get to the point our gamefile got corrupted. Meaning 80 hours wasted away.
Anyone else every have this problem? Would love to know a fix. This happened everytime, was big maps, long games and alot of units out, always multiplayer with us vs the rest of the AI.