I used to play it with my boss from work, coming home with him to start a game with his wife and against two hard-difficulty computers, surrounded by fried chicken, about to spend eight hours straight on it, thrice in the week, before finally defeating the things.
The AI players in this game weren't cheating a little, cooking the numbers here and there, oh no... They immediately jumped to the furthest epoch reached by a human player, near-instantly accessing upgraded units and buildings and spitting units from these buildings without having to pay for anything.
The great touch from the developers was that computers didn't harvest resources, since they had no use for them, but still produced and placed over each resource near their bases the maximum number of workers able to work the spot, which stood idly around the point almost in provocation.
What a time.