I think the Dominions series is the best fantasy TBS that's been released in recent years, but no campaign settings. And, as has been mentioned before, it's not very accessible. For those who have the gumption to unpack the gameplay, it's like crack.

The Civ IV: Fall from Heaven mod is free, for anybody with the original Civ IV or CIV:BTS (BTS version is a bit more full-featured), and is EXCELLENT. IMHO, it suffers from some of the same challenges as the original Civ IV, but that still leaves it a darn excellent game! CiV FfH doesn't have a campaign mode, either.

Warlords IV was a good game that the publisher launched way too early, but the user community and Steve (?) Fawkner, the original Warlords developer, have produced some excellent follow-up patches at www.warlorders.com which have given the game a lot more playability. It does have all the features you've specified, and with the mods, the AI is even pretty competent.

It's not a 4x game in the classic sense, but I've recently started playing Fantasy Wars and it is a very enjoyable game. Think Panzer General, with unit promotions and beautiful graphics. The gameplay isn't so different from that venerable series of a decade ago, but with the PG series, gameplay was never a problem...

I believe that this same speech was discussed on AIGameDev.net. If I remember correctly, I believe that the consensus (or at least a common opinion) was that the two are not as mutually exclusive as the article makes it out to be. Good AI can be fun AI as well.

It seems that the only real way to make an AI that is fun to all levels of skilled players would be to make a different AI for each level. Since that is ridiculous with regard to time and money spent, the next best thing would be to balance the AI for the really good players (note that this can't be done until there ARE some really good players), and then nerf it a bit and then a bit more for each level down below that.

You could then have some 'underdog' setting where the AI gets bonuses for the players that like to have the odds against them.

Hey, does that sound like the AI in any games we know?

I'm by no means an AI developer, but from my experience, developing AI is extremely difficult. It's not easy to create an AI to play as well as an intelligent human. In chess, computers can brute strength all the possible moves and figure out the best choice. Add some pattern recognition and it can beat most human players. But in a game like GalCiv or Civilization, there is no way to brute strength all the possible moves.

Developers have to create 'cheating' AI because it's just not possible yet to make the computer good enough to beat the best human players.

This is largely the reason for the distinction between 'good' and 'fun', IMO. If the AI could be as good as the best human players, it would be fun. How can a player argue that it's not fun when it's playing fair? Instead, it operates within a smaller set of guidelines which limits its abilities.

There are games where the player is supposed to win. A campaign in a strategy game should be internally biased in some fashion. But when the AI is just another opponent in a deathmatch, it should play the same as a human.

In many cases, even with the AI doesn't have to cheat to win, it often doesn't play the same as a human. The reaction time is too fast or the mousing is too accurate or something similarly technical. That's another challenge for the developer to make the AI into a convincing human.

i liked the AI in Spaceward Ho!...
after time it learned to play like the players..

Of course this was very interessting with lot of different players involved