The video shows it all. At the end he demonstrates the original game.
Are you playing in an older version? The issue you show in the video was present at release, but was fixed a while ago. When I try to replicate your results in the current version, the AI works fine.
Video was uploaded in the last 24 hours and the guy in the video knows what he’s doing. I doubt he’d be accidentally playing with an old version.
See the top post and my reply in: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe/comments/87krge/why_does_the_ai_still_do_this/
The video compares DE with the UPatch version (not the official original version) which, since DE’s AI gathering update, doesn’t consistently behave better than DE in that regard.
He still raises some good points which are on our radar and we’re still working on improving the AI.
I have done some further testing and here is my take on the other issues shown in the video.
Building towers in weird places. This is the same as in the original. Basically the AI is set to build towers within a certain range of the center of their town, but also outside another smaller range. This creates a belt around the town where the AI builds its towers. In the mission shown, the yellow TC is very close to the shore, which means that most of this belt in on water. The remaining parts of the belt are mostly in the back of yellow’s base, which is why it builds towers there. This used to be easily exploitable, as the enemy never builds towers near its TC. You could run your units through the tower belt and park them next to the enemy TC, killing villagers in complete safety from the towers. A simple solution to this would be to remove the minimum distance at which AI builds towers. A more complicated one would be to build the towers between the AI’s and player’s bases or in the areas where the AI is gathering resources.
Gathering resources far from a drop off point. The bug of extremely long gathering distances was fixed already, but there are still cases where the AI gathers resources further away than it should. This can be seen in the latter UPatch section of the video, specifically with the stone miners. (The current DE behavior is very similar to that in UPatch.) Basically, although the AI gathers from the resource that is closest to a drop off point, they do not build new drop off points for resources that are not close to any, like in this mission where red has no storage pits near a stone mine. The simple solution would be to have the AI build a new drop off point whenever they gather resources further than a certain distance away from the nearest drop off point. Some additional check might also be good to make sure the AI doesn’t build pits for single straggler trees.
Lack of aggressiveness. The current DE AI seems less aggressive than that of the UPatch. I played this scenario for a long time AFK and though red built an impressive army, they never attacked. Yellow also seemed to attack with fewer ships than they did in UPatch. The only real attacks were yellow troops sent over by a transport, which were about as frequent and effective as in the original. I think the AI aggressiveness should be slightly increased in the highest difficulties in this specific scenario. However, this issue is not present in all missions and in a large number of them the AI is already aggressive enough. Therefore, any increase in the aggressiveness should be done with caution, as some other missions might then become too hard.
Those were all the issues brought up in the video. But while testing I came across another bug. The AI sometimes assigns villagers to farms that are already being gathered from. This causes the villagers to simply idle on top of the farms, sometimes moving on top of another farm to idle there.
@Promiskuitiv Keep up the good work! The last AI update showed that you are able to improve the AI 
Guess you just need some more time to iron out more of the AI issues!
@SvelterPenny568 said:
Video was uploaded in the last 24 hours and the guy in the video knows what he’s doing. I doubt he’d be accidentally playing with an old version.
Just to clarify, this was recorded before content patch 5, so it seems some of the issues have been fixed with the latest patch from late last week.
But good to know that these issues are being worked on! I’d love to see the AI and pathfinding all fixed up and then there wouldn’t be much to complain about at all. Well those and classic mode would be cool for everything, but I know that’s being worked on already.
Yeah I remember that third mission being very hard on the higher difficulties. Great work on the comparison, and the videos in general.
Good to know things are being worked on, indeed, but given that that is -now- rather than in that six month delay, or before it, makes me wonder if anyone will still be playing when those things are even vaguely addressed.
Which is why MS/FE should have delayed this remaster even further. So much for the quality checking that MS does. Upon release the AI was even worse than the original, ■■■■ poor really. It’s a bit better now but in all honesty I can’t see them fixing the AI.
Also they should have hired many more people to bring us a finished game instead of patching things up constantly. I’m hardly excited anymore.
And -that- is a big problem. If you’re not excited now, you’re not going to be made excited later. Which is of course most important for the multiplayer side, especially these days, but i guess that’s where things have changed so much. Games just are not released like this these days, as complete products with nothing more to come. A game like this needed either the promise of more content to come, or at least to start out with a huge interest in the multiplayer, and with new modes to come. And just look what happened to Age of Empires Online, which had all that as potential!
I have a question, it is part of the plan having that Villagers are ignored while I Attack move with my army?
Because I feel some times my army ignore villagers and houses, so it becomes a pain to finish battles.
It is a bug isnt it?
@DemonioBlanc0 said:
I have a question, it is part of the plan having that Villagers are ignored while I Attack move with my army?
Because I feel some times my army ignore villagers and houses, so it becomes a pain to finish battles.
It is a bug isnt it?
In the Diplomacy menu, there are three settings: Ally, Neutral, and Enemy.
I may be wrong, but what I observed is: If the setting is at “Neutral,” the military units only attack other military units. If the setting is at “Enemy,” then they attack both military and civilian units, and buildings as well.
@Juliankhamun said:
@DemonioBlanc0 said:
I have a question, it is part of the plan having that Villagers are ignored while I Attack move with my army?
Because I feel some times my army ignore villagers and houses, so it becomes a pain to finish battles.
It is a bug isnt it?In the Diplomacy menu, there are three settings: Ally, Neutral, and Enemy.
I may be wrong, but what I observed is: If the setting is at “Neutral,” the military units only attack other military units. If the setting is at “Enemy,” then they attack both military and civilian units, and buildings as well.
gotta check if that is the case, Im playing the campaign, and I doubt the enemy in the campaign is set to “neutral”
It is funny when the pc attack me with 20 villagers when building a sentry, and I have to click 1 by 1 to safe my building.
@DemonioBlanc0 said:
I have a question, it is part of the plan having that Villagers are ignored while I Attack move with my army?
Because I feel some times my army ignore villagers and houses, so it becomes a pain to finish battles.
It is a bug isnt it?
If you attack move your troops, they will engage first thing they see. So if you are going into the enemy base and they found a barracks they will start attacking the barracks. Lets say the enemy comes with his army and start attacking your army attacking the barracks, they wont target them as they found the barracks first (some will attack back when attacked but the rest will keep on hitting the house).
So lets say you send with Attack ground 2 cavalry to the enemy base, they will stop when they find anything. But, if you press attack ground again (lets say in the TC with some farming villagers) they will target villagers first.
@DemonioBlanc0 said:
gotta check if that is the case, Im playing the campaign, and I doubt the enemy in the campaign is set to “neutral”
It is funny when the pc attack me with 20 villagers when building a sentry, and I have to click 1 by 1 to safe my building.
It may be the case, indeed. I played a campaign yesterday, and it was set to Neutral. I had to manually (or is it “mouselly”?) change to Enemy.
New comparison. Some improvement, but still far from being (at least) equal to the original. In the content update notes I am not seeing any focus on the AI, maybe it is about time…
@MarceloMoura10 said:
New comparison. Some improvement, but still far from being (at least) equal to the original. In the content update notes I am not seeing any focus on the AI, maybe it is about time…
Would you care to specify how exactly is the AI “far from being equal to the original”? I watched the whole video and to me, the AI seems pretty much similar to that of the original and even superior in certain situations.
@qweytr24 said:
@MarceloMoura10 said:
New comparison. Some improvement, but still far from being (at least) equal to the original. In the content update notes I am not seeing any focus on the AI, maybe it is about time…
Would you care to specify how exactly is the AI “far from being equal to the original”? I watched the whole video and to me, the AI seems pretty much similar to that of the original and even superior in certain situations.
I would care. Sorry.
Well then, it would seem that maybe you have memories that don’t quite add up now that you have more experience…
I still think one of the main issues is that you can build a tower close to the AI base and get all his villagers to attack it and then kill them.