I've taken anzio, but not taken monte cassino yet, and I've been noticing the bonuses AI are getting in skirmishes is becoming insane. I'm playing on expert so I'm accustomed to the AI cheats, but with tactical pause it's easier to be efficient enough to handle it. But now I'm coming up against one of the randomized build orders the AI uses in skirmishes that seems to have it's timings busted because it's like expert+++. Within the first 4 or 5 minutes of the match the AI will have built a panzer IV, a brummbar, 3 fallschirmjaeger squads, a panzer grenadier squad, a jaeger squad, and 2 pioneer squads with flamers. With air and sea battlegroup this might be managable because it's so insanely OP with free MG and AT at the start and deep discounted CMP+AT gun+guards squad you can call in almost immediately, but most of the other battlegroups don't have much of a chance. Beyond the build rate/resource bonuses the unit damage/accuracy bonuses seems to be way higher than usual. But maybe that's just an effect of my unvetted basic troops having to go up against brummbars and fallschirmjaegers.

Other than that, I know for certain something is broken with smoke bombing run, because if the AI has that battlegroup, it'll start to use it at an impossible and obnoxious rate, culminating in chain spamming it without cooldown, lagging the hell out of my PC.

Look at the minimap here, it was running planes back to back like that with only short interruptions near the end of the match.