Skirmish AI with legendary loot making it impossible to win

If you are playing solo, you can turn on champion mode (bottom leftish in skirmish page) so gear and advisors won't matter, and you get to play on the PvP balance patch! The only thing different from real pvp then is the ai still gets defensive advisor units to mitigate rushing.

 

It isn't an advisor as per se, what I mean is they get to use a unit from one of the advisors to defend their starting base early, and if you kill them they respawn as though the ai had used a consumable. The number of units and their respawn time is scaled with difficulty, so the 2-3 the easier difficulties get makes little difference, but in higher difficulties even later on in the game the 6-8 free units constantly respawning as you push into the ai can be tricky to deal with, especially as some that some of the different ai commanders/strategies use (this is what determines the unit type) are pretty lategame cavalry units

 

they respawn? I've never seen those units respawn... not ever...

 

They either don't respawn or take several minutes to in stronger or below, but in fierce and unstoppable they certainly do.