Yeah, the new patch definitely improved the AI and the overall balance of units. AI players now can make more than one attack per turn, and they use nukes (but mostly from nuclear subs and mobile launchers). Plus, you can fire nukes to sea territories and to other continents now, they are no longer only usable to territories on the same continent. But the AI still is easy to beat, 'cause it expands faster but still doesn't react properly to attacks and doesn't concentrate its attacks on the strongest player. So, I still wouldn't recommend this game to single players. Just test out the new demo and read the changelog of the new patch, which you can find here:
http://download.shrapnelgames.com/do...on-History.pdf
I hope the patch 1.09 isn't the last one 'cause the game still isn't really challenging, but not as abysmal as in the versions up to 1.06.
Please read the release logI can't say anything about TCP/IP games, haven't tried that.