Do you mean Google should write a better AI than the one in Civilization?

Interesting. But also consider this: in casual strategy videogames -- actually, strike "strategy" and just consider videogames -- most players don't want a really hard opponent. A computer opponent that is really very hard to beat is not what we want, because that'd be frustrating and many of us play videogames (yes, even strategy games!) to unwind; we want the illusion of challenge, an opponent that is challenging to beat but within the possibilities of every person who buys the game.

Which, by the way, is also the case with Starcraft II. Most people who bought it aren't tournament players. They expect a challenge, but not a really hard challenge. Game difficulty is all about perception ;)

PS: I shamefully confess I reloaded my X-COM (DOS!) game every time I lost one of the soldiers I was emotionally attached to. I don't like losing! :P

In strategy games like Civilization the "preferred" difficulty level is that hard/easy to beat because it gets extra resources. It would be preferrable to have the same difficulty level through opponents that play better/smarter while having the same game mechanic consequences as players if they make the same actions, but we currently can't, so they get artificial production multipliers and such.

Yes, I understand this. I guess I disagree better/smarter would be better, because in videogames what matters is the illusion of challenge, not a real challenge. So spending resources into developing a real AI for Civilization is probably not the best idea; as long as it tricks casual players into believing it's putting up a fight, that's good enough.

This approach creates a mismatch between singleplayer and multiplayer modes - this means that playing against a computer opponent rewards/requires different strategies than a human; a challenging computer opponent has more income and units but poor usage of them, while a similarly challenging human opponent has less income and units but uses them very differently; so playing against challenging computer opponents doesn't help you improve against other players but possibly is even counterproductive as you learn to adopt strategies that are bad in the other environment.

True. I don't know many videogames in which playing against the computer really helps you against human opponents.

I don't know whether a more capable non-cheating AI would help though. Not unless it specifically imitated how a (good) human opponent would play, which I guess is an additional and difficult to implement constraint.

I mostly agree with you - there is a little bit of a fine line though. I can learn from my opponents strategy playing against someone a little bit better than me. Maybe i lost because i need more or less of X? Tough to learn from when the opponent is creating the illusion of playing well, rather than playing well.

Current civ A.I.s may not be the smartest that the Civ team could do. Sid Meier once said on video that on play tests, when the A.I. would do something brilliant, players would just assume it's cheating.

I would pay a lot of money to be able to play a human level Emperor+ level AI on civ