What will often help an A.I. to defeat human
players (in just about any game) is giving
it the ability to process information in such
a way that gives it an advantage, but at the
same time that information processing would
be far too tedious for a human to engage in.
AI's in such situations excel.
This is one of the reasons Imperialism II was
such a bastard to beat. I'm in favor of
allowing a little "AI cheating," as long as
the cheating is mostly related to the AI
having information that a human player might
not have. There's good rationale for this:
human players have intuition and can make
good guesses. Computers can't.
Not yet, anyway.
C//