[Ygorl]

I believe that levels higher than Normal simply get more design points at the beginning of the game - no improvement to AI (and I don't think they get bonuses to gold or gems or resources in-game, except from the good scales that they can afford and sometimes happen to take). So creating a nation and then setting it to AI control would be essentially fighting Normal opponents who have the advantage of non-random pretender design. Of course there are plenty of other ways to handicap yourself, some mentioned here already.
Xietor, the developers do read these forums, though not as much as some other people. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for official features that could be implemented as mods; improved AI is always appreciated, of course, and may or may not happen, but most of the suggestions here you can do yourself with little effort.

It *would* be interesting to be able to mod the design points that different difficulty levels give you... Even a half-blind lobotomized AI could probably do pretty well with perfect scales and a quadruple bless... Yeowch, that's scary just to think of!