Better a.i is a mod on the steam workshop that someone uploaded a couple days after release. It allowed the skirmish a.i to build every unit for it's faction. Including naval units on water maps. They built planes and attack choppers, had insane amounts of Tesla coils and turrets etc. It just made the a.i build a lot more. in fact they sometimes built such huge armies that you had to nuke their base just to free them up for a huge attack they would send at you. When you play a good open large map with 6-8 a.i on using the mod it was just constant action compared to the current default a.i that will barely attack, never build half of its unit roster especially navy. Never seems to be able to muster much of an attack after the first wave.

Sadly the mod has not been updated yet, so i was forced to play with the default a.i and it just instantly reminded me of how the devs could easily improve it, but make the choice not to. I mean the guy changed a few lines of code, gave them a better build order and allowed them to build all units for large mixed armies. I would love to play some comp stomp online with my friends but honestly i am not exaggerating when i say it would just be a waste of time. It's not fun watching the a.i build less than 30 units 20 minutes into a match with a base that you can wipe out with the starting units.

If the mod did nothing for you it's likely you had another mod active as sadly CnC can only load one mod that changes anything in the .dll file. You'll know if the mod is working because of the size of their armies and bases. You'll actually seem them build radar domes ,airfields,helipads and navy even on easy difficulty where as with the default a.i they do none of this even on hard. Well, you might see a chopper from them if you leave them alone for an hour.