[Hullu]

The problem with AI is definitely design, not calculating time.

If time was the problem they would use multithreaded approach, I'm pretty certain of it.

You have a pretty good idea how AI works, in theory. Putting what is said in this thread into reality is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. Creating even a semi-intelligent AI for a strategy game with any complexity is _EXTREMELY_ hard. Or, why do you think no one has yet succeeded? I can't think of a single game, no matter the budget(Civ4 had a huge one) that would be the least bit smart.

It's VERY hard to code intuition and judgement for computers, and that's what you need for strategy games. Also learning is very hard to do. It's easy to tell the computer what YOU have already learnt, but it's hard to make the computer learn from it's own experiences.

It's just, hard.