"Basic" civs are rather weak and seeing them die to deer and wildlife in the first years is not uncommon: they cheat a bit, but not too much. I've never seen AI make use of the planes, but plane-exploring is best viewed as a roguelike-like experience (as most of CoE is, honestly).
Yeah, I DLed a mod that gives everyone a couple guardians and some crystal shards in their starting base to keep them from dying that way. Still doesn't prevent them from getting their commanders killed.
Think I've gotten Necro down pat. Tartarian Spirits are nasty, just send em out in pairs and steam roll indies. In many ways they really gimp the Carrion at it's scouting roll, since the spirits can just outright conqueror everything they come across scouting. Think I'll try more High Cultist next, but the transition is as rough as having gone from Troll to Necro. Necro might be weak to begin with, but with AE fear and decay/disease spells it's easy to take on cities early to build up hands, I tried the same thing with High Cultist on a map and got wiped out because my guy and his apprentice came without any nifty AE spells and only were one shotting archers while they ate my army.
I DLed a mod to give everyone guardian statues in their home town to keep the AI from dying early, but it's of little use the game decides to spawn 3-5 of them within sight of each other.
It has been a while since I last played, but are you sure you are not spawning too many AI's for the map size? I don't remember having that issue in my games.
I'm using a custom map that is larger than enormous. I'm not sure if the spawn spots are predefined, since sometimes they're very well spaced out while others cluster them into 2-3 locations while leaving a handful of others with wide open room to expand.
When I finally got a good distribution I had a good game that's getting kinda tedious given how spread out I am. Was able to spawn close to the Markgraf and Voice, so took out Voice early while they were weak and Markgraf gave me an old castle to spawn vamps from (DLed another mod that made his start citadel one to help give him a leg up, for necro it winds up encouraging you to pick on the him). Was able to so far get 8 Tartarian Spirits to send out 4 armies to expand, kept some smaller ones to expand elsewhere while my Lich led the main army to beat up the Senator (Needed the Spirits and his army to combine to knock out the High Priestess 240 man army fronted by two rows of giants), but now ran across the Demonologist and his massive with a good dozen demonic casters, most worrying 2-3 fire guys.
Might continue that game, was planning on expanding into Hades before I ran into the latter invading army, which is tedious to face down since I need to muster all my scattered armies together to take it on and my corner of the world is 95% Desert and Mountain (and the Tartarians movement bonus' over mountains seems to be wildly inconsistent at times, dunno why).
You really have to view of things like clumped starts as part of the overall dose of roguelike that's just part of CoE's design. Balancing is not a thing in this game, in every respect, so why should the starting locations suddenly be balanced. Just restart and deal with it.
Also ... bigger maps? What are you, a masochist? On the larger map sizes, if an AI happened to have enough time to build up, it might very well become an insurmountable foe - even on lowly difficulties. Some matchups rely on early taking out your opponent, and it's already pretty darn hard to do that on the current biggest maps.
I really like to play CoE as a bite-size strategy game, on medium maps with five or so enemies of not too high difficulty. This way, most matches tend to play out in ... sometimes only a couple of hours, sometimes a dozen. If I run into a Priest King with a gazillion summons as the Baron or something, I tend to just restart. Most matchups CAN be won somehow (especially since the AI isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer), but it's often just not worth the hassle, imo.
I've never been a fan of short games. My preference has always been long campaigns, ideally ones where I'm stalemated against the AI and have to work hard to tip the balance between them. Liking the Necro, I'd really love to fun into a map where I can play the defensive really well in Elysium while I work to expand into Hades having it neither easy nor overwhelmingly difficult.
I've never seen AI make use of the planes, but plane-exploring is best viewed as a roguelike-like experience (as most of CoE is, honestly).
It's a shame. My hope would be that later editions, or possibly mods, would add different factions to different planes so the conflict is multi-dimensional. I'm reminded of a fantasy scenario for Civ Test of Time that had twenty or so factions fight and expand over four maps, land, air water and underground. I'd think it would be really neat to, say dominate Elysium conquering numerous factions, but then realize that the Pale Ones or Dwarves have dominated in Agartha and have decided to finally try and invade the surface world.
