I played a game of Iron War with a lot of AI players and observed some pretty bad behavior.

Britain kept building transports & units out of Western Canada, but these just sat in the bay without doing anything, just accumulating over 16 rounds:

Russia was getting beat up a lot, but they kept building air transport planes instead of something like infantry:

EDIT: Britain was also building a lot of Air Transport planes in the England and not using them for anything. It's probably not the right thing for them to be building, but at least once built, they could have used their 13 air transports to land units in Africa - or straight up to land units in France.

EDIT 2: Reading the game notes, it looks like the Air transports might be coming from "Allied Airfields" that produce them each turn. OK, in that case it's not an AI decision to build them, but that the AI is not using them effectively (e.g. as Britain) is a bug.

Germany was buying a good amount of AA guns and at some point brought 13 of them to the front and attacked with them:

In general, Russia was messing around all over the map, such as going to Africa, Middle East, etc. and badly losing its Western Front.

2021-5-8-Iron-War.tsvg

Contested territories (which can occur as a result of limiting land combat to a fixed number of rounds, ex=3) seems to be causing trouble to the AI fighter management:
The following issues have been observed:

sending planes without the supporting infantry (blocked in the contested territory). not rebasing fighter after combat because they cannot land in the planned destination (contested), even though other destinations were in range.

I've also posted an issue about a quite frequent Air Battle error popup message (with AI attacker)

@dadude9211 The AI does not make any special effort to take or defend VC's. The AI does not normally try.to protect anything other than capitals or factories.

You could simply uncheck projection of power and check honorable surrender instead in the opening screen.

I mostly play World War II v3 1941 or the equivalent real world boardgame.

Against the Hard AI, when playing the allies, I consistently obtain a round 1 victory, where Japan:

Leaves Kiangsu empty!? Clears the fleet outside the Philippine Islands, but does not land the units. I assume the AI wants to benefit from the bombardment, but it could just use the units on mainland China and then transport them next turn if that is the case. Does not go after Hawaii (understandable). Does not go after Kwangtung (understandable, but not given the VC count)

Italy and Germany cannot reasonably capture a victory city in round 1, so their movements are largely irrelevant.

Since China goes after all the other Axis powers in the round, they simply march into Kiangsu, and adding it to the 12 starting victory cities, and the Allies win the game.

This is... anti-climatic.

Is there something abnormal about my move order that leads to this funky move by the AI, or is this the standard experience for most players against the current AI?

Given it is a round 1 win, I can't balance this out with a bid, I have to change the victory conditions. If the AI isn't trying to get to X victory cities, what is it trying to do? Just target capital cities?