also, the AI's have much greater difficulty w/ high indy str. As such, and perhaps counter-intuitively, crushing the AI's is much easier the harder you think you set it (indy-str-wise, at least).
Yeah the game we had panther was going quite well and was a lot of fun but the game got bugged because of the damn patch. It made the game so buggy that it actually time warped the game back several turns. Everything was just messed up. It was a shame we had to kill that game =[.