I'll be happy if they notice that I'm one patron away from a victory and at least try to stop me from flipping all 4 of them on my next turn, at least on the expert difficulty.

Katheriah wrote: »

Maybe you're just VERY smart.

Haha! I think we can be confident THAT isn't the case

It's more that NPCs are VERY silly when it comes to things like Patron wins, and buying from the Tavern. Even expert level NPCS will, in the early game, almost always spend 2 gold to convert a 1-coin card to a 2-coin, even if they have enough for a game-changingly good card from the tavern, and will rarely hit Ansei Frandar Hunding in the early game even if they have the power to spare. They seem to randomly pick the most expensive cards they can afford, and always spend all their coin even if it disadvantages them.

Playing against an Expert NPC, when I had used the Purring Liar's Patron ability to put one Bewilderment card in his deck. A few turns later, I made him discard one card at the beginning of his turn. The first card he dealt after that was... the Bewilderment card! Assuming it was discarding the lowest-benefit card, why would it have discarded anything else, and left that in its hand?

And as @Woeler says, their behavior with Orgnum is... I just avoid using Orgnum against them unless they pick it.

Katheriah wrote: »

Is this against a novice NPC?

This was my first 100+, so probably. Though... https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Bejal ... I didn't realize until just now that the ToT NPCs are random-level. So... I don't know!

Though to be honest, I've not seen a whole lot of difference between the levels.

Novices just seem to occasionally pick worse cards to buy from the Tavern, and Experts seem to occasionally make an effort to use a Patron if I'm one away from a win, and seem to have a very few cards that they will change their default behaviors in order to obtain.