I don't see much or a difference with AI at the moment. I now see generals standing on top of defending castle. Pretty nice to know if defending generals are active or not and what their levels are.
Many times they put out new update but don't activate the new features until a bit later, especially until its out for both ios and android. Are you sure you are seeing new functionality?
I'm on Android so I haven't see the new update yet. iOS got the update first. I already see so many reporting issues with people attacking each other with different version of the game.
30 minutes was the perfect playing time for me - don't really want to play for 1 hour at a time, so hopefully it's screwed up enough I can quit playing altogether.
It's pretty terrible, I'm finding myself attacking less and less simply because I do not want to wait for training times even with the TB up. It was the only reason I went with the French, even though yeah they still do have "fastest building time" but seriously, I'd rather go play Koreans or some other nation.