[the_af]

Yes, I understand this. I guess I disagree better/smarter would be better, because in videogames what matters is the illusion of challenge, not a real challenge. So spending resources into developing a real AI for Civilization is probably not the best idea; as long as it tricks casual players into believing it's putting up a fight, that's good enough.

[PeterisP]

This approach creates a mismatch between singleplayer and multiplayer modes - this means that playing against a computer opponent rewards/requires different strategies than a human; a challenging computer opponent has more income and units but poor usage of them, while a similarly challenging human opponent has less income and units but uses them very differently; so playing against challenging computer opponents doesn't help you improve against other players but possibly is even counterproductive as you learn to adopt strategies that are bad in the other environment.

[the_af]

True. I don't know many videogames in which playing against the computer really helps you against human opponents.

I don't know whether a more capable non-cheating AI would help though. Not unless it specifically imitated how a (good) human opponent would play, which I guess is an additional and difficult to implement constraint.

[jfoutz]

I mostly agree with you - there is a little bit of a fine line though. I can learn from my opponents strategy playing against someone a little bit better than me. Maybe i lost because i need more or less of X? Tough to learn from when the opponent is creating the illusion of playing well, rather than playing well.