It occurs to me that maybe we're approaching the subject of AI stupidity from the wrong angle. Major fixes to the AI are beyond our control (and probably CA's too, truth be told), so let's consider the root cause of why it's so important: we all want an opponent who offers a real challenge. (This is the very reason why so many people have sworn off SP altogether...and yet I digress.) Now challenging game play results from the interaction of two elements, the AI and the human it opposes....and if we can't do anything about the first, why not the second? If you think about it, RTW and other games of this genre are historical simulations, and in history there is NO SUCH THING as a god-like entity who leads his nation for hundreds of years, relentlessly pursuing the same strategy and tactics. One way to overcome this would be a formal role-playing mechanism.

Lets say we created 6 basic types of leader, and every twenty turns you roll the dice and whichever number comes up, that becomes the style you have to play. As an example, let's say that "Peace Lover" immediately tries to end all ongoing wars involving your faction; disbands armies down to a specific units-to-cities ratio; dismantles military city improvements (or can only build commercial ones), etc. If your leader was a "Lunatic", then truly serious things could ensue, such as killing off your best generals, deliberately driving a certain percentage of cities into revolt, canceling alliances, assassinating allies, etc. And there's nothing magic about the number six, you could even use two dice, and thus increase the number of leader types - as well as the chance of appearance.

Alternatively, we could eliminate chance and do something a bit more complex - tie specific actions to the traits picked up by the faction leader. Thus someone who "hates farming" might disband the more advanced farming improvements (or be prohibited from building new ones), while a "bloodthirsty" type would have to lead all offensive military operations personally, with the result that you could advance militarily only on one front at a time. The possibilities here are almost endless, but it would take some work to come up with a comprehensive list of V&Vs , assign required actions to every one of them, and then playtest to see how things work out. The loadgame/AI bug was so discouraging that I don't even play RTW anymore, but this might be a way to more than offset it.

Thoughts?