Just played against moderate AI for the first time.

By god was that a horrible mistake. Not only that, but I decided, "Fuck it, I'll put it on TURBO RANDOM, too! No way this'll backfire on me!"

What proceeded was a 4-hour long trash war between the Teutons and Saracens. How the hell did this happen? Well, it's simple.

So I'm not a fantastic player. Hell, I'd call myself below average, but I still stomp the standard AI easily. I wanted a bit of a challenge and decided to go with a 1v1 giant Highland match with a random civ, playing as Teutons. Wanted to see how they played. My usual strategy with the AI is to just turtle until I get all of techs and resources in order, then amass the biggest and baddest army I can possibly assemble to crush the opponent. This probably would have worked, under better circumstances. Unfortunately, I took things a little too slow and the AI snowballed before I could thanks to the fact that they got 3 of the relics and somehow got more stone than I had available. They managed to build up a MASSIVE fortress, and all I could really do in response was wall up the shallows in the center and put up a few castles with bombard towers to defend. Also built three barracks around the area just to have a steady defense going. By the time I got to the point where all the stone and gold on my side was mined, they had started sending hordes of trebuchets, cannons, and hussars at me with unrelenting force. Switching between the main base and the fortification frequently meant I lost a lot of knights to the cannons, but there was hardly anything I could do about it. Eventually, I figured, "Why the hell am I spending all my gold trying to counter when I can just make them waste THEIR gold trying to attack me?"

So that's what I did. I set up the three barracks to constantly generate dozens of halberdiers, killed off a quarter of my villagers to make even more halberdiers, and let them all run rampant in the shallows, which for the past hour had turned into a constant hellscape of death and war. By the time the AI started running low on gold, they had thankfully decided that just spamming hundreds of hussars was the best tactic against me. Halberdiers counter cavalry. Match made in heaven, right? Well, no. You see, I may have been able to supply a constant 70 halbs to defend with, but they were sending in not just hussars, but MONKS, too. They had like 4 monasteries set up in their fortress. This led to a situation where we were both locked in a stalemate and completely unable to attack each other. It was just a fire hose of trash being blasted by both sides with no conceivable end. No onagers could make it through, trebuchets were too slow, ballista are useless against hussars. What am I to do?

Well, after 4 hours, I figured it out. I had initially run out of gold, and my only real option was to go after the only 2 relics left on the map, then sell most of that 30K food I had stocked up for gold and then stone. I built two more castles, then figured out something amazing: The AI cannot handle rams to save its life. Now that it was just using trash, monks, and the occasional trebuchet, the capped ram's 200 HP laughed in the face of their entire army. So what did I do?

RAM SPAM.

I made 40 of the fuckers, filled the rest of the pop limit up with halberdiers, and then just charged forward. They had foolishly chopped down a forest that was protecting a castle of theirs, leaving a gaping hole in their defenses. I sent my 40 rams into that hole and smashed the entire south end of their city while the halberdiers distracted their army. I repeated this process until their entire city was in ruins, chased down the remaining 30 monks smashed the 4 monasteries they tried to erect, and then they gave up.

Five hours. This was the longest match I have ever played in this game. Granted, I just got into it last month, but it was still pretty absurd. Lesson learned: Never underestimate the AI.

Here's the timeline and score. For reference, we both entered imperial age around 40-50 minutes in. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna try that again.