Games

No, it’s not. The problem with bad AI in strategy games is that ultimately, what ends up happening is the AI doesn’t follow the same rules as the player and gets a ton of unfair advantages. If you were to play a total war game on the easiest difficulty, it’s just CA’s brain dead AI on equal footing with the player, which allows the player to stomp them out of existence with ease. But when you scale the difficulty up to normal or higher, the AI doesn’t get smarter, because it’s limited. So instead the AI gets a ton of money and resources for free even though it would be otherwise impossible for it to given its position.

For example, if a player was limited to one province, it would put the player on the back foot and is very tough to recover from. If you beat an AI back to one province however, the AI will be able to field an otherwise impossible two full stack armies in an alarming amount of time.

This hurts the experience beyond just “difficulty”. Strategy games are often intended to be deeper than just being about military power. There are often economic and diplomatic mechanics you can use to defeat enemies with, but those often break in these cases because unlike a player, even if you deprive an AI opponent of all of one resource, they’ll probably still have it anyway because it just cheats.