Much thanks.
I was using Skirmish AI already. About the teleporting in towers - I would think a modest tweak, perhaps to teleport in only to towers below 90% health, could help the issue with jumping to towers nicked by trebs or such. Secondarily, a bit of more sophisticated salting of percentage chance to teleport in on actually damaged infrastructure might also help prevent too much predictability. I'm unaware of if one might have access to that kind of tower health info / rand() methods, merely assume so.
I program professionally by dayjob, but haven't really looked into demigod / lua yet. It would be fun, just not wanting to overcommit, since I know I'm biding time until Civ5 nabs me.
----
I've found that a nightmare-nightmare 5v5 is actually a lot like a 1v1 nightmare. Possibly a bit easier. I need to pull my weight, but just my weight, and the 5v5 mayhem can at times be harder for the AI to follow than a human, in terms of ganking opportunities even if you make some mistakes, whereas a straight 1v1 it's very bad to lose an edge early.
Most fun so far has been a mixed hard-nightmare blend on each side, or 3v4 4v5s. Still playing around. I wish the AI didn't waltz into towers so inadvertantly, but like most complaints, I shoud really go code an improvement myself and scratch that itch...
Thanks a lot for the help / links / advice.
----
Humans sound fun. I waited about for a game the one time and gave up and tournament, then got a game the second day and got just blitzed by someone with way more games of experience before I could work out how to counter what they were doing properly on the spot. One to grow on...
-evoke