I always felt like I was cheating when I cheesed the AI to defeat it. But then I realized that this in many games they hit you with a large number of dumb mobs because one isn’t a challenge.

You could do the same thing to a human opponent in some of those games, or they to you, so in practice you had to micromanage some things like fights in order to kite or retreat effectively.

When I got out of college I had a brief fantasy of trying to consult doing game AI but the whole field cratered and I had no idea if I actually had an aptitude for it, and I got busy doing other kinds of “serious” work.