I would love to lay out the entire plan for scaling-up the AI. Im so very tempted.
But since Septimius put out some on the Game 1 AI I will also just for this initial one.
I figured that for a noobs game with vets, on a scale of 1 to 10, I should shoot for about a 4 in game one. Better than the randomized AI of the vanilla game that I figured noobs had already had experience against. But only about as improved as an average player could make it. The AIs in this game are built off of pretender builds recommended in those nations game guides that have been posted. So basically this was the AI playing Human Player styled builds. Better than crap, but not optimized for AI use.
As Septimius alluded to, the central castles were "expanding". The corners were lab/temple mages and priests. Not very expansive early on but not something you want to leave in operation for too long. You wont have that split in game two helping you simplify tactics.
Note: If you found this AI an improvement in the game, this level of AI was fairly common for the SemiRand program which can do the same thing for all your games.