I open this thread searching your comments of course.
I usually play this game in sp campaigns to know new scenarios and new histories of the past.
I prefer a game in security and no rush victory.
At extreme level I played many games vs AI with success but with no doubt I saw cheats.
I accept that AI skills improve about:
military tactics;
tech strategy;
acknowledge about units, buildings or maps;
the generals can be stronger ones;
but it’s enough.
I think that:
TC must have same time to create inhabitants;
the knight must explore like mine to reveal the map;
the inhabitants or fish ships must collect as mine (if not improving the technology);
the population limit must be real and respected with no shortcut in technology tree.
Yes, I’m a noob since 20y in MS games, but I loved them anyway; sure honour and medals to their pro players.
Once I’ve been told, that “medium” difficulty does not cheat. It was not a statement coming from a developer, so I doubt that is really true. I used cheats to put pressure on the AI lots of times, and it normally takes me a lot to defeat them, even with 4 or even more photon men. Also, town centers spamming villagers is something I don’t really understand, since every villager costs (normally) 50 food, and I don’t remember having seen enemy AI gathering/producing lots of food. I might be wrong, though.
By the way, there are several improvements mentioned here, if you’re interested in the whole AI matter. Yes, the thread is old, but what’s mentioned there is relevant even to this day, with update 46777, since the AI wasn’t really touched much since release according to official update changelogs.
Playing a small map and full clear, You can see the two town centers and the villager production is different.
With population cap at 100 the AI strategy is not reaching a higher age, but 60 villagers that collect everything for a high quantity; the second stage is producing an army.
No offense. But that was actually already known at the time. But it’s the same with all strategy games I know. The PC can’t do anything. It is incapable and is only competitive through bonuses.
A lot of classic RTS AI were kinda simple, so in the maximum difficulties their way to go was always cheating. AoE DE is basically the same, the AI can literally see your units and buildings from anywhere without any need to explore, for example.
This Definitive Edition is a treasure and I’m so glad we got it, but my godness it has an insane lot of wasted potential just because they put so little work on it aside from the gorgeous visual upgrade.
They have done a really incredible work with AoE II Definitive, improving the AI among other great improvements, but well… AoE was basically abandonware, so they put extremely little effort here in order to focus on AoE II DE after it, because there was were almost all the AoE playerbase was.
It’s so sad, tho, that they are not coming back to bring some update/patch with improvements… this game would grow so much if they put some love into it…
Yes, this is how it would go, based on the success of Age of Empires II. Age of Empires 1 DE just needs a couple more content updates + bug fixes in order to be able to properly compete with any other RTS game, while AOE2DE kinda already reached the sky (some mechanics could still be implemented there.
The first two games in the series are amazing to me. I much prefer isometric style over 3D as it allows for more detailed textures and also is less demanding on the GPU side.