Quote Originally Posted by Tristan de Castelreng
Yes, but Kingdoms AFAIK includes some of the work done by Lusted (notably rebalancing units) and I would have thought that his taking part would have given some results in other fields of the game...
The units were rebalanced by Palamedes, not by Lusted. The balance was partly tested in Lusted's mod to get more feedback on it pre-release.

As for the passive AI: What did you expect? I expected it to be exactly the same as in M2TW