So these past few months I've been working on game development, on a side project with a friend, and I've finally gotten to the point where I'm working on the AI. That's really where my interest truly lies, in trying to make an opponent that feels "right". So really the question is what is an opponent that feels right? Well that's hard to describe. You know when something is wrong, you can clearly state it, but you can't quite state exactly what the correct type of opponent in a game should be like. I'll give a few examples...

Civilization 4: The opponents here feel utterly and completely stupid. What the civilization series has always managed and aimed for was consistency. They wanted an AI with an extremely consistent level of difficulty. The challenge would always be similar. On prince difficulty, you expected the AI to have a certain measure of ability to develop his nation. I imagine that they accomplished this through heavy scripting and almost solely scripting. I think it's more of a reliance on programming versus mathematics skill that is the issue.

The results are opponents that have a consistent difficulty. This is a good thing for a game. You don't want a player to select "medium" difficulty and get nothing of the sort when the game starts. That would make for a pretty useless difficulty slider.

On the other hand, glaring flaws and obviously idiotic actions are consistently repeated by the computer. For instance, in Civ 4, you most hated enemy will constantly ask you to cancel deals with your ally, assist him in war and other obviously stupid requests then have the audacity to become angry when you refuse. Any half-wit would have realized long ago those would have been pretty pointless requests but the scripts never considered whether you were an ally or an enemy when demanding those things, so they do it no matter what and if you refuse it is an automatic -1 or -2 on your relations. The combat scripting has the computer send units in haphazard stacks without ever considering changing tactics if you shift your national army around. For instance, I had a game where the Japanese sent a stack of 5 swordsmen against a city with just one archer in it. That made sense, until I shifted my troops from my Zulu front to the Japanese front and now I outnumbered him 10 to 1. Rather than change tactics, he continued as if nothing changed and made a suicidal charge into my city. The issue with scripting is that if you never coded it in, the computer never cares.

Galactic Civilizations 2: Here we can see some semblance of adaptation. I think I should congratulate Stardock on such a well rounded AI but it's sorta hard to tell how much is the computer adapting, or it's just a really really really good script. There is of course no way to tell the difference in a sufficiently complex game (and this game is sufficiently complex).

Now, the main difference between Gal Civ 2 and Civ 4 is really personality. In civ 4 everyone was basically a monopersonality with a plus or minus to their relations with anybody. So for instance, in Civ 4, the Japanese would be equivalent to dealing with an unmodified AI that had a -5 relations with you. In Gal Civ 2, the AIs actually feel different. One tends not to go to war and if they do they go about it differently. They don't just decide, "Gee I'm an asshole and I'll just pretend our relations are -5 worse than they really are". There's a semblance of planning, personality and so on. One guy tends to make alliances, another tends to make war between others, another tends to play arms trader.

In fact, the gripes with the game aren't even the AI, that feels highly robust with a lot of personality, it's when the "stuttery" combat system. Whole fleets can get wiped out in a single turn, which took dozens of turns to build and dozens to move to a location. It makes war kinda... long and quick at the same time. Long to build up, resolved in a single go. It's also rather demoralizing when you lose 75% of your fleet in the space of 2 turns!

My Ideas: Well looking at the positive and negative aspects what I'd be aiming for in the AI in my game would be...
-semblance of personality... the more variables in the AI, the more it is like a human personality, how they make war, how they make trade, how they make alliances, how they decide enemies
-consistency... if you set it at easy difficulty, it should be easy every time!