Thanks for the replies guys
I apologize that the title of my post was a little vague: I do realize that AI isn't just an option in programs like game maker and construct, and I have had my own success in programming AI in game maker by doing just what you said, i.e. setting up a series of responses to events. My basic interest are what is out there for construct in terms of automating path-finding, motion planning, collision avoidance, etc. Those are things that are a little beyond my reaches, and it's nice to have built in options for those things, so I just have to define what the AI should do after it finds the path, is in motion and so forth. (on a side note, it was really collision avoidance that got to me in game maker, as I couldn't come up with a decent way to make two colliding instances of the same object simply go around each other, or figure out who should move first, if that makes any sense at all).
In any case, thanks for the info about the RTS behavior: I will definitely be checking it out, and I'm glad to hear it has A* as well. I'll play around more before I post any more questions -- thanks again for the input