[HoneyBadger]

If you could just get the AI to recognise a few very decent starting strategies to get them through Pretender creation and the first turn of the game, and then a very few explicit things definitely *to* do and definitely *not* to do

(EX: *do* recruit independent archers when you can, if you don't have national missle troops, but *don't* recruit independent troops when you can recruit better nationals, *do* forge magic items items to protect your expensive commanders, but *don't* forge those little amulets that turn them into werewolves, unless werewolves are better than what they already are), then you'd have an improved AI

This could be handled with a ranking system-like "spend 100% of gold income on national troops", unless you can recruit missle troops, "spend 95% of gold income on national troops if you can recruit slingers, 90% if you can recruit archers, 85% if you can recruit crystal amazon archers, and 80% if you can recruit longbowmen" limited ofcourse by available resources, just as an example.

You could then give them a list of Pretender builds to choose from and some idea of what to do with them.