Now does anybody want to dance ??
[dance]
Ok, enough of that dancing, people are starting to give us some weird stares.
Ok, back to the topic of production improvements....
Is it your observation that the AI NEVER builds them, or just very rarely? I went and took the unhappiness away from all of them, and added 1 culture to all of them. One of the first few Iroquois cities started building a slave market as it's first item!
And Greece's capital has a Mill and Wind Mill! Greece did not have natives, so no slave market, but they did have iron. I'll have to wait and see if they build a forge or not...
However, I can't find any other production improvements in any other AI city
. All of them are first building libraries, colleseums, etc. that provide more than 1 cp/turn.
I think the AI priotizes buildings by how much culture they produce (besides barracks, harbors, etc. that it already is designed to understand its' purpose and has it in it's build order). I say this because I was practically giving away techs to the Iroquis and Aztecs to boost the tech pace so I would be more caught up with the european civs. And I almost always saw their cities building libraries and colleseums as their first culture building (even before obelisks).
If they do priotize building by highest culture first, then if someone wanted to eliminate culture victory, they could manipulate the AI build order by changing the amount of culture for each building. For example: If you wanted the AI to always build forges and slave markets first, you would give those buildings 3-4 culture points. I'm sure there are other factors involved, but the amount of culture could be one key indicator the AI uses to decide what to build. If you keep the unhappiness from slave markets, you should probably keep the slave market at 1 or no culture, so the AI builds happiness buildings before building the slave market and inheriting all that unhappiness.
Just some observations and guesses if someone else wanted to test it out and see what happens with their games.