I do everything right. I never get housed. I constantly build villagers. I age up quickly. I’m constantly upgrading and building units. I manage my units in control groups, I use attack-move, I use all the advantages of my civilization.
Easy, of course, is very easy and it’s impossible to lose. But when I switch to intermediate I’m faced with the GIANT ARMY.
Why are there seven difficulty levels but four of them are like ‘Insane’, ‘Crazy’, ‘Impossible’, etc but we can’t get one level for the intermediate player that doesn’t cheat like crazy? It’s the only way they can be building all those units so fast.
I win for awhile but the AI can JUST BUILD SO MANY UNITS SO FAST THEY OVER-RUN ME.
You are likely far too slow, hardest difficulty is fairly easy to beat and anyone that wants to play ranked should first be able to easily beat hardest AI as most human players are far better even at low ranks like silver.
Watch some replays on youtube and compare yourself to those, try and speed up your actions by using hotkeys.
Maybe someone else can confirm this with me, but I have seen Intermediate, Hard, and Hardest perform at similar levels.
Once you get into the swing of things with the game, mostly having near constant production and following a build order somewhat, they are pushovers. Most of my AI games over the last 3 months have ended up with the AI going completely still in their base. No clue what that’s about.
This is a major issue in my opinion. The AI is either indomitable at all levels above easy for newer players or hardly even a challenge for veterans.
Meanwhile, 2 1/2 years in the past:
During early development the lead devs did interviews stating future plans for an AI that could beat any player, making allusions to Alphastar and the like. Hinting at an AI powered by a deep learning model
Fast forward a year and they gave us the other higher difficulty AI (after temporarily altering hardest to operate as absurd does now). AI which function in much the same way as previously existing AI but with a resource handicap.
Devs, we don’t need magic solutions. What people generally want is something that works. The AI, among many other things in this game, does not. At all.
The AI not having an incremental difficulty is the tippy tip of a tremendous iceberg. It’s something that’s turned away a ton of people I’ve introduced to the game.
I know tryhard ranked players are going to talk down to people about this… but so many people I know that play video games never want to do PvP. Not having solid PvE gameplay in an RTS is a death sentence.
With this Build Order you easily beat the Intermediate AI, after the 33 villagers I put them to collect stone so that you can see that what is needed is to properly manage the villagers
