I have a pretty lengthy list of things I want to play around with this month and next (for starters).
If you guys want to see what I've been doing in my spare time, check out this video:
Now, in case anyone wants to know why AIs are generally done this way the reason is that it's commercially unviable to build AIs that do lengthy-multiturn planning because you can make an AI that challenges players without having to do this (either through cheats or because players just generally aren't that good).
But multi-turn planning allows for a much more intelligent AI. It just takes a LOOT of work and for the developer to be comfortable managing a lot of concurrent threads/cores which is something I particularly enjoy doing. But if you want to get an idea of what I'm going to be doing on my extended time off, this is the bulk of it.