A lobby with a lock, and a seat that stays warm
An evening of playing together stands or falls on the five minutes before it. Those five minutes got the attention this week.
Your lobby can be locked. Open to everyone, closed off with a password, or friends only. Anyone who dropped out earlier always gets back in, even if the host has set a password in the meantime — otherwise you would be locking yourself out of your own match.
You can watch a match that is already running. Not only from the start as an observer: you can join halfway and get to see the whole map.
If somebody drops out, the computer takes their seat. A four-player match used to stall on someone who never came back; now the computer plays on with their town and their army, and the player gets the seat back the moment they return. The others notice nothing in the meantime.
Computer players get a playing style. Per slot you pick aggressive (comes early and often), balanced, or defensive (towers, a wall, and saving up for one big push). It is explicitly not a second difficulty dial: it gets nothing extra, it just spends differently — the aggressive one can lose to the defensive one. On top of that style, every computer player picks up a character of its own each match, so two computers on the same style do not open the same way.
And teams can be balanced with one button. The game uses the ratings from the server for that, not what somebody says about their own level.
How all of it works is under playing together.