I know this is your(Paradox) game, you can do whatever you wnt with It but I do like the AI been agressive towards players with opinion penalties but without any other bonuses. Now I'm been force to play with your preferences .
The problem is, to make decent AI, I need to play with it all the time in the particular circumstances the player will encounter it. The more different degrees of freedom there are in the settings, the more complicated it gets to understand the implications of changing something in the AI solely under one setting. Having 3 ordinary difficulty settings and 3 AI difficulty settings means 9 possibilities, do not underestimate the impact of this on quality of the game experience. I'd rather make e.g. 5 different well balanced difficulty levels that take into account how good the AI presently is to minimize bonuses given and that were all actually tested by QA at some point.
They are separate things, though. One is AI behavior and the other is AI handicaps. A lot of people, myself included, want to be able to change one without changing the other. This was one of the things that sold me on EU4 when I originally started playing from CiV. I hate that in CiV the only way to add challenge is to make it so the AI plays pretty much an entirely different game. Now that's no longer an option (w/o disabling achievements via mods).
And with the current level of the AI, how many players do you think would opt to play with a less smart version? There are some cases where we can actually dumb the AI down or make it nicer towards the player on lower difficulties, but the opportunities for such are not really that frequent.
So to summarize above two paragraphs, we want to make (and maintain) an AI that cheats as little as possible to accomplish a given level of difficulty, and where a level of difficulty advertised as "harder than normal" really is that.
