The AI becomes less intelligent on purpose?

[Chaingun]

I think seeing the IA incapable of raising army maintenance before declaring war is a clear sign that the IA sucks right now. We are not talking about complex strategic decisions, just simple ones, such as pay your troops before declaring a war, so your troops are not at 0 moral...I am not asking for a "Skynet", just an IA that can take simple decisions.

"Incapable of raising army maintenance" is inaccurate wording. There could be a 1-2 month delay for performance reasons. We have fixed this in 1.0.1.

 

[Chaingun]

It's something they said about Stellaris AI as well.
As I understand it, it's not about how "intelligent" the AI is, it's about how efficient it is. It's relatively easy to code an AI that will do everything perfectly to achieve a goal.

It's not. But on an academic level, defining the objective for an AI that only needs to be efficient at winning is indeed easier. However, it can also be used as a scapegoat for justifying why we manually code almost everything; if we had access to an ultra efficient AI we could query it to make our hand designed AI better on average.

AI to focus on just conquering the world. You want your AI to provide challenge, without forcing the player to play in an ultra-competitive way, especially in an asymetric grand strategy game where certain countries start in much better positions than others (different story for RTS like Starcraft for instance).

If the AI is good enough to provide an interesting experience to the player, I think its job is done. If course it would be more interesting to have more personalized AI settings (and more personality to each country AI), but I think we can all understand how difficult it is to design AI for a game like this.

There is is a wholly different development situation for most academic projects. A research team typically doesn't have to deal with the game changing all the time. While very general game playing algorithms don't need specifics about the game to work and could therefore deal with a changing game, those are not anywhere close to production quality yet.