Especially in the days when these games came out -- the machines they were built to run on were absurdly under-powered by today's standards. When MOO1 came out

Especially in the days when these games came out -- the machines they were built to run on were absurdly under-powered by today's standards. When MOO1 came out in 1993, a high-end desktop PC would have had a single-core 80386 CPU running at a blazing 25MHz, and a whopping 4 megabytes of RAM. DOS was a single-tasking operating system, so at least your program didn't have to share those limited resources[1], but still your entire program had to fit within those constraints. That didn't leave a lot of room for AI. [1] Well, technically it was a single-tasking operating system, but there were hacks like TSR programs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_pr...) that people used to run multiple programs at once. So that was an additional wrinkle you had to deal with.