If you do some research on AI you will find that most AI as we know it today is not intelligent at all. It is merely reacting to given situations by choosing from a list of viable responses given by the programmer. For example lets say you are writing AI for a moon rover, and how to handle a rock in its path…

If the rock is small go over it
If the rock is big and the way is clear, go around it

Very simple example there but you get the point. The code chooses the best action from a list of actions. This can become predictable however for game AI so some programmers code a human element into it. For example a kid may walk home from school one way on Monday, and a slightly different way on Tuesday. There may not be any advantage or disadvantage for taking a different rout on Tuesday… the kid just felt like it. To add a bit of unpredictability to AI, the programmer may “teach” the AI to pick the best 3 actions from a list of actions, and then randomly choose one to perform.

To code the AI for a game like this is a monumental task indeed. Literally millions of different situations could happen on the battle field, and we expect the AI to react at least reasonably intelligently to all of them. Unfortunately the AI in MTW, RTW and now MTWII has NEVER given me even the slightest challenge. While I give the guys at CA props for taking on such a task, I’m afraid the campaign in MTW3 will become just a quickly boring as MTWII is starting to be.