In spite of some really annoying technical issues forcing me to play on the cloth map only due to awful fps, I've completed several games (win and lose) on various difficulty settings, so I thought I'd share a few very important points for the more experienced gamers out there looking for a challenge

1) There are TWO difficulty settings in Elemental, one controls, I believe, map difficulty, the other controls AI difficulty

I can't actually confirm the first, because the first difficulty setting doesn't have a tooltip

2) AI difficulty is set PER AI

If you bump the difficulty on the factions screen up to 'Ridiculous' but don't do it for each AI, you're playing vs one Ridiculous AI and a bunch of Normals!

So, before you believe the AI is totally incompetent, be sure to adjust both difficulty levels.

3) On a medium size world, 4 AI is TOO FEW

With four AI present, you will have huge tracts of open space. The AI does a decent job of expanding, but not that good, so you're given too much free room to build up. Add more AI players to get closer borders, and thus, more early to mid game conflict (or at least, force Diplomacy research!).

Be sure to fill up the map until you start experiencing early contact/conflict, or you may be in for a long and boring game, instead of one where you need to use a mix of might and diplomacy to survive.

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By adding a few more AI civs to a standard size map and bumping all AIs and map difficulty to Ridiculous, I lost four games in a row. In the last one, the AI expanded around my main city grabbing nearby resources, decided I was too weak, declared war, and squished me. This is with me using a cheesily built custom hero that was 100% into fast movement/combat stats with all other stats and irrelevant weaknesses taken to aim for maximum early game AI blitzing.

Now with that said, the AI still needs plenty of work. To experiment, I dropped down to Normal 'Map', Hard AI (difficulty goes Normal, Challenging, Hard, Extreme, Ridiculous), and was still able to plow through the entire game - I believe because I didn't add enough extra AI civs - by the time I made contact, I was stronger than the AI, and consequently, it never declared war. This is a problem, because without at least trying to wage partial war against me (or even team up with another AI against me), it let me grow out of control. As a result I was able to finish each win condition to check them out with no opposition. I _never_ had to use Tactical Battle, and I didn't research a single Tactical Spell. I won the entire game with instant autoresolve. Very boring.

There is another serious AI issue - at the very very end of that Hard test game, almost seven hundred turns in, two of the AIs still had not made contact with each other! The AI did a pretty good job of filling out the map and expanding, but it did not continue to scout around the map. There were two other civs in the game before I wiped them out, but they too had issues with full map exploration. Here's a pic of the two AIs having not met each other:

And here's the world map, you can see they were *close* to each other, but after hundreds of turns, there's no reason they shouldn't have met

I think that part of the problem *may* be that the AI can't cope well with the raving hordes of monsters that get unleashed with high levels of adventuring research. I'll make a separate post about that, as the respawning is completely absurd

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This is another area where the lack of documentation/in-game prompting may be causing them some bad PR (I don't understand why that first difficulty setting doesn't have a tooltip, and the factions screen is VERY important for setting up the game world, but also unintuitive - I know some people have actually accidentally removed AI from the game!

In any case, be sure to tinker with the AI settings before you go declaring it completely braindead. It has some problems, but you can in fact create a challenging game of Elemental, as long as you configure it correctly first!

edit: Based on this abuse https://forums.stardock.com/392812

I would strongly recommend you do not set the WORLD Difficulty above Normal right now. It's screwing over the AI disproportionately. Ironically, the game is being 'fair' about this, but I don't think the intent of higher world difficulty was half the AIs dying to ravening bladder beasts in the first fifty turns.