If you really want to have a discussion on AI and what's wrong with Panzer Corps, you have to understand how it works.
If you don't understand how the AI works in Panzer Corps, it will punish you absolutely mercilessly. The problem, believe it or not, is that the AI is too smart. And when I say smart, I mean it's book smart, not street smart. It boils down to this statement:
The AI will not voluntarily initiate obviously bad engagements.
What does that mean?
It means it will punish new players who don't know how to screen their valuable and wounded units by throwing strong attack after strong attack directly into the player's exposed weak points. A half strength infantry unit caught in the open, an artillery unit in transport, a tank sitting on a river with reduced combat values. The AI is really good at zeroing in on these units, because attacking these units always shows the AI very good casualty ratios, so the AI very happily attacks these weak points without mercy.
Once you figure this out though, man does the AI become impotent, and you
really need to crank up the difficulty to give the AI its fangs back. (me personally that means taking the game to Manstein level) If you screen your valuable units properly and also 'bait' the AI with juicy, juicy targets you intentionally offer it to make it attack (putting cheap infantry and cheap SP ATG units in vulnerable positions to act as a screen for your main CORE), you veteran and elite players will absolutely obliterate the AI and then come to the forums asking for better AI in Panzer Corps 2.
It's that predictability that is the bane of both new players and veterans.
The AI will, without fault, predictably stomp on new players who aren't tactical geniuses and make mistakes that every first time player is going to make. At the same time, the AI will, without fault, predictably fail to respond properly to a player who is massively taking advantage of it. If you set a 1000 StuG IIIG bait traps, the AI will fall into 1000 traps.
You want an AI that doesn't play like a massive jerk and constantly punish new players by focusing their attacks purely on the player's weakest and most vulnerable units? Make the default AI stop attacking smartly, make it not always pick on weak units, make it gravitate towards strong player units with bad combat odds.
You want an AI that can sometimes challenge veterans, make it stop always doing the obvious best moves. Sometimes you have to make bad moves to create openings for really good ones. Throwing infantry into a target to reduce it's ammo and entrenchment first, thereby softening it up before pummeling the same unit with extremely powerful tank assaults.
And how do you combine the above two absolutely contradictory ideas? Bake them into different difficulty settings. Lower difficulty, less lethal AI behavior patterns. Higher difficulty, more lethal and less predictable AI patterns.
Now that is extremely oversimplifying the problem, perhaps dangerously so, because I realize I just said we need to make the AI dumber to make it smarter, and its really dangerous to make it dumber because some players will instantly pick up on this dumbess and be facepalming hard if they see the AI do some truly preposterous moves (using arty in half tracks to attack and soften up a Sherman tank).
So we want want better AI all we want, but it's a really complicated issue. I personally think better application of difficulty levels is the best approach, but as always, easier said than done.
