I usually play the "daily challenge" against the Hard AI, and I win about 70% of the games. The AI has gotten better with time, and it excels at a certain strategy, which is kind of "good cards" + money, start hammering Provinces early and then Duchies. Surprisingly often this is a good strategy. There really has to be a very strong attack and/or strong alt-vp to beat it. The AI recently beat me by avoiding Cultists and just going for 1 Maroon and 1 Margrave, no village. This is its own topic, but it's actually changing how I view the 2-player game. It seems money is the best option much more than good players think. Sure, there are better players than me, I hear that good players beat it 80% of the time. But I'm convinced that good players play engine too often, it's just this meta where both good players and decent players play engine when it seems at all viable, so there is never a good player playing non-engine to show them wrong. I assume this has been discussed in other places, Discord or something.
Anyway, on to the actual topic!
Today I gave myself a huge handicap. I started with 5 coppers. I wanted to right-click on Annex, but misclicked and bought it before having played any Treasure! After the first shuffle, I had my opening cards plus a Duchy and was $6 in debt! In the meantime the AI was buying Sacrifice, Archives and Treasure. But by luck, this was an extremely engine-friendly kingdom, with Sacrifice, Temple, Crown, Charm, Wild Hunt, City Quarter, Overlord, Legionary and Labyrinth. Lots of alt-VP and a strong attack. I was not attacking until way into the game though, and by that time it had 5 Provinces already. It started to stall a little then, even before I started attacking (almost) every turn. When it bought the penultimate Province, I was still behind on points, but could easily score enough on my last turn to also buy the last Province for the win (and of course another Annex in the end!).
So the AI still doesn't know how to play engines... almost at all.
