bribing generals

One of the funny things I've found in EB is that bribed generals tend to be better than native ones. When playing as AS, I found the best general I've ever discovered. He was an Arabian guy called Zari whom I bribed together with a sizeable army for 20000 mnai. In the course of two campaigns, he became a 9 star general, which was quite shocking to me.(I've never met one with more than 8, whether in vanila or EB) When he died, he was 82. Can anyone explain why this happens. Is this a freak coincidence or something to fo with the script

Look for the AIGeneral trait in the traits file. It should account for nearly 100% of this phenomenon.

Yeah, it's meant to prevent you from Auto-Winning every battle, as the AI will gift itself command stars for the hell of it.