[LDiCesare]

Stardock's handling of maps is very bad. They've been told to open map scripting to modders, who proved with Civ IV that they can do it.
No, they preferred to do it themselves. Now they have a big map generator, that is slow, that has to pick bits of here and there because they can't think of a non-fractal random map or can't create good fractal random maps and make them fast...

As for the ai, it will be decent enough given time, but right now, the Gold version is just worthy of a beta.
And I concur that Stardock games had good ai's because of simple rules.
Now, it's much harder with Elemental, which has way more varied rules, and in which many tricks will come, including unforeseen ones I believe, like self-hasting fire giants.