Hello there folks,
well after wasting my life with WoW and Civ4 I've decided to donate at least a fraction of time to doing something creative and "useful" for a change :)
Reading this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=184128

just further inspired me.

Now I understand that AI is hard to grasp, and that I will need some serious programing knowledge but who am I to dissapoint myself :P

Anyway I have a bit better than basic knowledge of C++ and some Java so programing is not new thing to me. Now I need to understand basics of AI and how to program it and hopefuly help in any way with this wonderful Civ4 project. So any books/links/software/forums you guys could recommend would be greatly appreciated. Basically I'm not really sure where to start so every little bit helps. Thank you for your time!

I too want to learn about AI. I've never gotten very far due to my hatred of math. Anyway, functional languages seem to be popular with learning AI. Such as Scheme or Lisp. I couldn't tell you what links to go to, since I would just search for something like "ai tutorial" or "learning ai" or "game ai".

The book:
Artificial Intelligence, a modern approach by Russell and Norvig

is a pretty standard AI text book that's used everywhere.
actually it's probably THE textbook.

I'm not sure it helps game programming, or Civ4 though.