So here I was playing princess Porcupinee (it's my way of calling her, shush), on a large map, well into mid game tech wise, each AI has long established their kingdoms / empires, towers needed for spell of making were already in the making by several factions, war was wagging between different factions etc.

I was most powerful nation, followed by Kingdom of Tarth (~170-190 faction power each of us). I was about to make a decision on which victory I should try to achieve, when it suddenly happened. 

Dear and beloved Lady Irane, comes and pops on my screen with a warning message: They have dug into the secrets of elemental lost long ago, and just researched Civics! The world of Elemental will be theirs!

I literally chocked with my coffe bursting in laughter, and had to take a break from the game because it was too much, and it was too funny! So yeah, Lady Irane invented the wheel

(Yes I know being a warmongering nation, they do favor militaristic research mainly, but seriously, you haven't even dug into Civilization Tree to get your cities / kingdom up and running? AI seriously needs some tweaking regarding basic research and town building. Couple turns later as I was exploring more of the land I see a village trying to produce a Hunter - the unit I re-designed when I played them, a mounted archer with several enchanted equipment and quite highly production cost - which was taking no less than 390 turns to complete. Seriously? Why would the AI do that? The village will never grow or produce anything, will have high unrest, and spend 1/3 of the game total time of turns trying to build an advanced unit.)

The AI should follow a basic path of research and town development at least at the start, then he can devote more time / resources to their favored traits etc. They need a skeleton for their kingdom / empire that provides growth, research, food, production, in order to move their focus to other goals. Otherwise they just gimp themselves into oblivion and you can simply ignore them, because really I can go for any victory type and clear all map clean by the time Lady Irane even gets close to produce that Hunter from the village