This section is dedicated to accumulating wisdom on ways to make Warlords as challenging as possible when playing against the computer. (The best challenge is to play against a good human, but such games take time.)
If you choose to leave QuickStart off (see below), then this helps a little. AI players tend to get their heroes and allies killed early on while trying to capture defended neutral cities. Making the neutrals only average makes it easier for you to take cities, but it also makes it easier for the AI to do so, which allows them to expand much more rapidly and without losing heroes early on. I think the net result is to give the AI a better shot at winning, especially if AI players are enhanced. But I could be wrong.
This is another feature which humans are more adept at using than AI players, so turning it off hurts you more than it hurts them.
This information generally helps you out, so turn it off.
The AI is not very good at exploring, so humans gain an advantage in hidden-map games, especially if you keep the AI's scouts from seeing your home cities.
This information generally helps you out, so turn it off.
Intense combat tends to equalize the strength of units, and reduces the advantage gained by well-assembled stacks with high bonuses. In combination with I am the Greatest, where you must stop wave after wave of attacks by the AI players, the Intense Combat option increases the challenge by making it difficult to kill enough AI units without losing all your own stacks.
This information generally helps you out, so turn it off.
A good human player expands far more rapidly into unoccupied territory than the AI does, and therefore humans can achive a quick advantage by taking more cities early on. The Quick Start option makes this much more difficult by distributing all of the cities evenly among players, and forcing humans to attack defended AI cities rather than neutral cities in order to expand.
It's a lot more difficult to plan strategy when some AI players will get two moves in between your moves! Of course, you also get two moves in a row sometimes, but since the AI doesn't generally plan its defenses based on when your armies will arrive, Random Turns confuses them less than it confuses you.
This is one of the best ways to make the game harder. Enhancement increases by +2 the permanent base strength of all units produced while it is enabled, but not units produced before it is enabled or units produced after it is turned off. Note that this is independent of medals, temple blessings, or other permanent strength enhancements, and like them it is independent of hero, stack, and terrain bonuses. Since a +2 strength advantage generally gives a unit a 60-70% chance of victory instead of a 50% chance, this makes the AI units much harder to kill, and tends to balance out the fact that humans are better at putting together stacks with large bonuses.