What I'd like see AI do in SP play

[Taqwus]

Sombre said:
It's not entirely a matter of memory though. I mean the game works out what happens in all battles, involving human players or not, watched or not,... so the AI players could basically calculate in advance whether it will win or not - then having done a single theoretical attack rather than an actual one, it could decide whether to commit or not.

It's not 'will win', but 'expect to win with certain troop, resource and opportunity cost against an expected opposition'. You'd have to run multiple simulations based on various scenarios (reinforcement, gem allocations, the resolution of army-push-army rules, et al).

Granted this would make turns take a bit longer to process, but if you limited it to SP then I can't see that many players would complain - you'd get a dramatically less idiotic (not actually smarter) AI.

It can only do that calculation if it has perfect information regarding order of battle, resources, commands, and all player's orders for that turn. It doesn't get that. There's no legal in-game way for it to spy on your orders for that turn before it gives its own -- not that this has stopped other game developers like Creative Assembly, of course.

Incidentally, such a thing could also be gamed; if, for instance, I knew that a fairly strong force of mine would almost always deter the AI from attacking because it ran sims based on that army staying there, and if I also knew that a neighboring province of mine would be invaded by the same potential AI army because I'd left that province deliberately tempting, there's an obvious sucker punch to use.