The Extreme AI is terrible at reacting to any kind of unusually early pressure.

We all know that the key to beating Extreme AI (at least as a scrub like me, ~900 on the 1v1 ladder) is to fast feudal and get archers into their base about 45-60 seconds sooner than you normally would. You can snowball from there (if you can pull that much off) with relative ease. If you're someone like TheViper you can do it to two of them at once even on the current patch.

What I learned yesterday is that they are even weaker to initial pressure at 20 minutes... if you do it on Arena. They almost always anticipate an untouched boom, and if you let them do that they'll be at your gates with a dozen rams and infantry less than 30 minutes in. Based on my observations they start making military on the later end of that 10-minute window.

I went for a standard Spanish 27+2 FC into conqs build. Immediately after hitting castle, I got loom and sent six vils forward for a castle drop. Start building my second TC around the time the AI hits castle age, a minute or so later. Queued up two petards and 3 conqs, busted in, and started vanilla castle age raiding while booming behind.

The extreme AI just kind of stopped trying. They seemed to be playing like a moderate or hard bot, except the APM on their town bell micro was higher if not effective. Their score was still under 2500 when I hit imp for a bombard cannon/cavalier switch and they didn't resign until I got spies.

So devs, if you're reading this, now you know your extreme AI can't handle a castle drop on Arena.