Ok, sadly I'm finding the AI at normal is acting more like I would expect an AI to behave on easy. Judging from what I've seen the AI plays at his best whilst not cheating (other then them all starting with a spouse/wife and all starting to lay eggs err make children without having the tech).
My strategy is to build few cities but build good ones, focus on strong tech production whilst beelining to housing upgrades in order to expand the cities then reshift focus to warfare and beeline towards command post in order to be able to build squads, then reshift to civilisation in order to get farming guilds tech and villas. Note that I as good as neglect magic because it simply doesnt payoff to waste valuable building time on it (i do tech the easy 2-3 turns paths in all the tech trees). I normally build 2 cities, 3 max if a really good location is available and make sure they have huge areas of influence due to both pop and therefore effective prestige being way higher then my neighboors. Basicly I turtle with the exception of declaring on Altar as soon as I come accross their pioneers, and give love to the aggressive factions like Kraxis, Magnar and Capitar by sending caravans their way.
The Ai its tech focus seems to be on warfare and diplomacy with city spamming being their priority on the board, with their focus in warfare just being beelining for weapon upgrades, but lord hammers wont do you any good if you dont build squads of them or if you dont have the cities to even support them. They seem to have a quarter to a half of the tech production I have and are showing higher tech units way before I do but squads of lower tech untis still kill of higher tech units with easy.
Looking at their cities the computer runs into difficulties getting their food production up to par, this is most likely due to them focussing on arcane production over tech production causing them to fall behind (no way they are getting a tech treaty from me), trading tech for tech would be better then the tech resource sharing as is now but it should be done in such a way that you cant see what they researched yet) but thats side stepping, also they are really dump with regards to peace treaties, I mean you are getting hammered and want me to pay 130% of the gildar I have to layoff your back???). The main issue the game and AI suffers from besides not building commandposts until around turn 300 is that bottomline the game is a teching war, if you fall behind you are done for squads or no squads. The underlying issue is that lower tech units dont hurt upper tech units at all (also recovery time (50+ turns in some cases) is waaaaaay to long on hurt units). Extending cities to at least lvl 4 needs to be a priority, only then start making the shift towards magic and expansion.
IMHO a good AI should play as well as a seasoned player on normal without having to cheat in order to do it; that you'll have the AI cheat on higher levels for more challenge is fair enough I'd say but I simply dont like playing cheaters be it human or artificial, I just want strong competition.
Other nuisances are unable to break alliances if the AI is abusing it (bloody altar and its pioneer spamming), imho an alliance should consist of all other treaties (tech, trade, etc), breaking it should lead to neg diplo hit with all factions (you are unreliable) and a 100 season nap or something. Also whats up with asking for a marriage and then not willing to arrange it...
Really wish there was sort of savegame upload feature in the game itself for reporting purposes.
Edit: Also the AI should not be building near to another influence zone (say 5 square (was going to type hex) radius should be free.
TLDR: AI on normal acts as how it should on easy
