Just because the game has shipped doesn't mean that development should stop.    Each time I play the game, I play it in a window, in a debugger.  As I get better, I think of new possible strategies and then try to incorporate them into the AI.

Tonight I'm in the middle of Drengin/Human Wars XVII.  I've won the previous 16 games and I am...reasonably confident I will win this one as well.  I have this map called "duel" (comes with the game) and I set the Drengin to intelligent and starting at war.  Then I see how many turns it takes for me to beat him. I look for faults in what he did and rectify. 

Of course, one has to be careful not to update the AI so that he's better at this particular scenario. Instead, I look at what sorts of things should he have been looking at and what sorts of things should he get access to?

For example, at the time of "gold", the cool ranking system that human players get to see to see where they rank was only available to the humans. But I've since gotten a set of APIs so that computer players can look at it too.  As a result, the computer players can make fine-tune adjustments to their strategy based on their rankings in a half dozen different categories.

Mind you, at this point improvements are a matter of degree.  I don't think people will be saying "The AI sux" (well actually yes, people establishing their "street creds" will say it sucks regardless).  Most people felt the AI in Beta 5 was challenging and that AI was a total joke compared to what's on the CD.  But just because the CD has been mastered doesn't mean we shouldn't keep updating. That's the whole point of making a PC game -- you can keep improving it.

(you can tell I'm nervous about even talking about this because any time I talk about adding new things to the game or tweaking something I worry someone's going to think that the CD version wasn't "finished" or something when it's just a matter of wanting to keep improving the game).

I'll respond here with the results shortly to Drengin/Human Wars XVII.