Well, I'm through with the game

[lch]

jscott said:
As I said above, I've already tried that. It sets the AI to the normal difficulty level. It won't let you pick anything harder than that. Normal AI is even easier than the higher levels, so its a net result of about zero improvement to give them intelligently designed domains, but force them to be a low difficulty level.

The AI isn't smarter at better than normal difficulty levels. It just gets a bonus to it's income, resources, maybe even supplies and research. So the easy way to emulate the same in a SP game: Take some Turmoil/Sloth/Death/Drain scales and don't spend the design points you win by it. This will make the normal AI that you get after turning a prepared nation to AI into a "better than normal" AI.