Well, so far playing on Hard level was more frustrating than challenging...
I realised what you meant by AI cheats - opponent wizards have more 'starting' points than me, they seem to generate more mana than what is possible considering the size of their cities and the buildings within them - they have heaps of summoned creatures on their side.
But the general AI remains the same - they would pass by my city with absolutely no troops in it only to attack a bunch of my troops that they have no chance defeating in the first place, and obviously because those troops are in their way. It turned out that the land mass was formed so there is a bottleneck/causeway connecting two bigger parts and I made a point of guarding it. The wizard ignores my cities on his side of the bottleneck and keeps throwing away their troops by trying to attack those guarding it. Funny enough, he doesn't consider just flying around my troops with several units of sprites that he has, probably because he grouped them with land units and can't think of separating them.
Yet, that is not the frustrating part about game. What annoyed me was that I literally had to raise a small army to capture a node guarded by a single unit of giant spiders and even then I suffered considerable losses. I couldn't even consider conquering nodes with more units present and that's where the unfair advantage of my opponent generating more mana than possible comes into play.
Like I said, it's just wishful thinking for AI that would challenge you by mimicing a real opponent rather than making it difficult by having those unfair advantages. But I'm not giving up, though. I'll try some different wizard combos to counter difficulty, or maybe I get lucky by having no opponents too close at the beginning
