My feeling about this is that expecting a smart challenging cpu mode is asking too much. Every year lots of big budget games with dedicated AI programmers get slated for the stupidity of their AI and lack of challenge. MG is a relatively small FOSS game and will probably never have an experienced AI coder who could re-write it in any big way.
I am far from being expert with respect to AI. I certainly do not think MG should get a shiny self-learning neuronal network AI thingy that would overcome the player anyway. I see the AI rather as expert system where the designer of the game defines some situation patterns that if matched lead to decisions.
... and a set of switches in the faction XML which allow modders to tweak the AI quite a bit to improve its performance with each faction. Sadly these settings have gone largely untried and untested up till now.
I fear most of us are just lazy slobs like me being reluctant to delve into XML files.
Another way to feasibly better the AI would be through the LUA scripting capabilities. The problem is that whilst this may work in 1p vs 1cpu scenarios it would be too slow for large online multiplayer games.
Maybe the overhead for scripting or for more situation patterns to compare with gets compensated by less need for many many units.
I would however like to see a scenario dedicated to providing a responsive, tactical challenge in a local 1v1 game.
I second that.
Finally I would like to say that as a long-time modder, I appreciate the hard work that the MG team put in. MG is a fun and playable game already, by pointing out some of the above issues I am simply trying to give ideas that I think would improve the player experience 
Agreed
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... horrible strong AI and you state its dumb and too easy to win .
To me, strength and wits are not the same. The difficulty to overcome the AI is not its cleverness but its sheer advantage in resources - if you just keep the multiplier when selecting the MEGA. I wonder how a MEGA 4.9 can be dealt with but I dare say that after having been given the hint to put the resource input at prime I was able to defeat MEGA 2.5, I should repeat it anytime. Is your experience different?
...Imagine the AI would be smart then you would nearly never win.
I don't agree there. If the AI was smarter, you would not have to put the mutliplier so high to still get a decent fight. As far as I have understood, the multiplier exists to compensate the lack of wits in the AI. BTW, I very much have the feeling that AI does not suffer from the fog of war. The AI headed to my base straight away. I have never experienced reconnaissance missions by the AI.
...For example Ultra and Mega fight a bit smarter by attacking standing units in range first. Of course they do this just in some rare cases, because I added a low chance of doing this ( ultra does it less often than mega does it). Imagine I would raise this to 100%. All your archers would be killed within seconds and you have no chance to controll this as fast as a computer can do this!
So in several places it would be really easy to make the AI smarter.
I quite agree that one would need to get some automation to compensate the AIs vast advantage in control speed of the units if one wanted a smarter AI
You already complain about wanting less micro management, I bet you would even cry more if I make the AI smarter and stronger.
I am sorry if my suggestions came across as complaints. It was not my intention.
In the end this would lead to a half automated AI fights were you can make some strategic decisions, so a completly different game! ... Micromanagement is an important part of this game!
Sorry, my believe is that it
IS already half automated AI fights. I cannot imagine that one can control 50, 30 or even only twenty units in a fight - not efficiently at least. Sure, you can group the units but they tend very much to get different amount of damage so one might want to retreat all but the healthy and only lightly wounded. This is not possible without loosing control. Either, you select the ones to retreat one by one and order them out of battle to discover them shortly after in the fight again because you ordered their group on the next target or either you cannot us the group any longer, or you get the whole group out of combat or you just sacrifice some of them while the group stays in action. Another example: My experience is that it is useless to put more than two or three melee units onto one single field target (the majority of the foe's units, I am sure). If I put more they get in each others way or - being as likely as former said - the are blocked by other enemy units thus running around them and getting hit for nothing. As for range attack units it is slightly different. I guess you can target about 5 units on a still single field enemy unit. If you put more, the surplus range attack units need to go around the front line 5, being hindered by other units of yours or the landscape artefacts. Having said that a fairly decent army of 20 units would end up in at least 3 groups. Maybe I am just not quick enough but I just cannot control three groups in a battle. I just cannot distinguish which unit belongs to which group thus rendering groups almost useless for me. And - what I have seen in the coop games suggests that much more experienced players operate battles - not skirmishes - like me. They throw in as many units they can grab, retreat the whole lot if there is too much damage to a certain gut feeling "percentage" of units and hope apart from that most of them survive. I do not call this micromanagement. That is, politely speaking, just very crude tactics. The single unit certainly controlled by the computer instruction set for the unit and only now and then a human command.
If you want this you must play another game.
As I stated in my initial post. I did not put my points in as feature requests - andy5995 move the post thankfully to the right forum - because they would alter the character of the game vastly.
Beside of this I myself am pretty sure if the the AI would be smarter, the game would be a lot less fun!
This is subject to the eye of the beholder, imho.
This would mean you need to lower the AIs general production rate to give a human player at least a tiny chance to win.
I do not consider this to necessarily be a bad thing. After all, if the AI would get smarter siblings one was free to choose which way to go.
So just some units on the field and not those big attacking ( and yes often a bit dumb ) armies that attack you now! But would that be fun ? The motivation is a bit like in the "serious sam" or tower defense games, you as a player feel really good if you can stop a huge army because you fight smarter than the attacking AI! And you feel even better if you can do this with a human team in a coop game!
It can be fun to watch a cillion of units bustling about knocking each others heads off of which I only get some glimpses because there happens so much in so short a time. Personally, I get rather bored after the fifth time or so. I play games to influence things and an epic slaughter is rather a film to me.
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I should be able to get 30 - 50 minutes free from my family 