I don't mind having cheating AIs exist...sometimes, its fun to have a challenge....maybe you want to mimic 3 small TEC factions trying to hold off a Vasari Behemoth, so you use a Vicious vasari AI to mimic it...

What is unfortunate is that the AI hasn't gotten a whole lot smarter in some regards...so, you can't play a "smart" AI that has the same (or at least comparable) income to you...

Especially if you are prepping for online play, going against unfair AIs can be both good and bad, because in some ways they are harder than humans and some ways they are easier...going against cheating AIs can get you into bad habits that work extremely well against even the hardest AI, but utterly fail against even a moderately skilled human....

There are other bonuses the AI get as well....they randomly get techs for free even if they don't have the prereqs...additionally, IIRC they can build units even if they no longer have enough labs too (not sure if that applies to abilities, like those on superweapons)...there are also dubious reportings of the AI seeming to get "units out of nowhere" or AI forces "appearing without warning" in the middle of your empire...

I don't think the AI magically has units appear, but the massive resource cheat combined with the free techs does allow the AI to amass massive fleets very quickly...play a cruel or vicious and you'll see titan factories in the first few minutes...even unfair AIs can be building multiple superweapons rather quickly....

Don't forget that their capitals get levels out of no where...Atleast that is what I think they are getting, their capitals are lvl 7 and higher and I have never seen them in combat somtimes, while at other moments they got lvl 3's

Yeah I know you can buy up to lvl 4, which I do as well when I got enough credits and low lvl capitals. But it's just weird their capitals are lvl 7 or so while mine are still lvl 4/5

The AI can buy levels beyond level 4...they don't come off the production line at lvl 7...to confirm this, play the dev.exe and switch player to a vicious or cruel AI...when they build their first cap, go the level purchasing and you'll note you can click on it many times beyond level 3 or 4....

Then be it so. Since an AI is supposed to react to situations that may arise in the context of its deployment, one might actually hope that it does so in an efficient manner.

The AI does by no means need to be intelligent when compared to a human being. But if it is only able to deal with the situations it is confronted with by changing the situation itself, well one might consider it lacking in terms of its capabilities.

I do acknowledge the difficulty of programming a good AI for strategy games and I do consider the Sins AI quite good.