[Laughlyn]

It's the Arbiter that's the ultimate git unit. On the simple side it cloaks all your units, on the advance side 1 lone arbiter lurking in the middle of nowhere can enduce mass paranoia amougst even the sternest of players.

And if you're playing broodwar, then you can have cloaked siege tanks

As for the A.I. Blizzard games have notoriously vicious AI in skirmish mode (warcraft 3's a bit of an exception). It's always geared up for the short game, in a similar way to most online AOE matches. Most of the time you factor in an action delay when coding A.I. to reduce the computers reaction time and make things more balanced.

[floppydisk]

I have trouble when I play Warcraft II. Whenever I start a skirmish game with more than two players (me against the comp.), they all target me, ignoring each other. It's pretty strange...

[SimeSublime]

Red alert 2 was similar. Skirmish meant all against you. In the expansion(or patch, I forget) they added in free for all, which was better.

And what do you mean about the AI in Warcraft 3, Laughlyn? That was brutal. I was getting swarmed with enemies before I had any troops, and there was no difficulty level to make things easier. Well, not until Frozen Throne.

[Laughlyn]

I justfind WC3 the easiest of the lot in skirmish. You can at least hold ground without requiring ninja micromanagement skills. WC2's the worst for it, however if it's an island map or an air attack AI then you get some survival time and can go for outlast tactics.

FTR Red alerts enemies attacked each other pre-patch, they just tended to ally if you got too powerful, which nearly always happened. There's a line in the rules.ini that covers the subject.

[SimeSublime]

Yeah, it was Red alert 2 which shipped with only an 'all onto you mode'. You had to turn off superweapons, because there was no question on who was going to be nuked.

[Laughlyn]

Quasi-cool point about Redalert 2; it had a co-op campaign.

Admittedly the A.I. still sucked, but it's fun to play on the same side once in a while.