Complete and utter nonsense.
The AI in the game is PROGRAMMED to actively seek out to win.
Yes, and so is the AI in Stacraft II. Yet there's a reason people prefer to play multiplayer games - the AI is clumsy, predictable, and at all but the highest difficulty levels easy to beat even for a novice. This is because it's an AI.
Civilization is not about building a civilization anymore, it's about finding the best way to win the game.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Are you suggesting that humans playing the game in past incarnations never tried to win while building their civilization? There's nothing mutually exclusive about building a civ (which is the way you win a game) and trying to win the game - on the contrary it's exactly the same thing.
The AI will backstab, ignore and completely hate you. Finding a good friend is almost impossible, and they will do anything to deny you victory.
This was hardly true in vanilla once you'd worked out how the diplomacy system worked (which basically amounted to appropriate use of DoFs and denunciations); it's certainly not true now. Of course there will be occasional civs who hate or backstab you, just as there were in previous games.
Exploiting the hell out of them is actually playing to their level (they get a bunch of bonuses anyway).
Well, if you're as dumb as an AI to begin with I'm sure this is fully justified; otherwise it needs the bonuses to try and compete with a human player who can factor in many more considerations and adapt their strategy far more than any AI is capable of.
At higher difficulties, the AI winning is actually a serious threat,
Yes, this is one of the things that makes Civ V so entertaining late in the game, where older incarnations of the series turned into a dull plod to the finish line in the late game once your lead was clear.
so you must do your best to overcome this by siphoning off their stores of gold and using that to further your own plans (otherwise they'll hit the GAs anyway and just stockpile money that you aren't getting).
You must do your best to overcome this - full stop. No, you don't
have to do this by exploiting AI weaknesses, any more than you have to overcome a Starcraft AI with a Zergling rush. You can actually do it by having a better strategy.
The AI is programmed to seek victory (you can check the game files for confirmation of this). They are not programmed to "build a civ" like I have been asking for a very long time here. They strictly want to win the game. (Why would an AI want to win a game? They don't care. In a single-player Civ game, the AI should just be immersion for the player).
This dichotomy simply doesn't exist - you can't win the game without building a civ (the AI doesn't try One City Challenge), and as I've noted many times, it's hard to feel immersion in a strategy game that doesn't give you any sense the opposition is trying to beat you. Civ IV is the only incarnation of the series that to my mind rarely or never gave a sense that the AI was at least trying to win, even though it didn't understand that there was a way to win other than steamrolling over everyone and either winning domination or securing enough UN votes by doing so to win.
And simply from an subjective immersion perspective, the Civ V civs feel more "real" whatever their objectives. Even people slamming the Civ V AI do so by describing the AI civs in such anthropomorphic terms as "insane" or "psychopathic". There was an entertaining thread some time back giving a detailed rundown of personality quirks the Civ V AIs exhibit. It's hard to imagine that for Civ IV's bland "Isabella's the one who gives you an extra modifier for shared religion" AI "personalities".
