AI does not respond well to destroyed Town Centers / farms

Not a traditional bug report, but I’ve noticed that the AI, even on Extreme setting, has a difficult time responding to large attacks on its economy. I almost feel like I’m cheating because when I do bot games, as long as I can distract them by absorbing attacks on a defensive line, I can pour in 60-100 Paladins to wipe out their food economy fairly quickly. They predictably ring the bell, villagers go inside, paladin swarm quickly razes 2-3 town centers and most of the fleeing villagers before their army/castles pick all of them off, and after that, that particular bot just never seems to recover. They do build new TCs, but for some reason they never build them in the same place, and they never seem to build the same number of farms they had before. It’s like they decide to permanently shrink their economy or something.

I think there have been a few games where I swarmed them with this tactic early on and moved on to other players, and they seemingly recovered fairly well but only after ~25 minutes had passed (I like long boom games). But most of the games, this is a trustworthy way to essentially implode a bot player’s ability to fight. It shouldn’t be difficult to just spawn new TCs/farms/villagers to replace what they lost - I’ve done it far more quickly in human player matches. But this is a major weakness for the AI.

2 Likes

I also noticed that, feels like they just give up.

They also don’t react if you attach trade carts far away from the town center, I usually carry the game for as long as I want and when I get tired I send a few archers near the markets they build in the corner of the map killing only the traders, it won’t do anything about it until it runs out of gold.

Yeah, that’s another thing. They just sit there producing more and more trade carts instead of taking out what is only just a handful of units tearing apart their entire trade line. Another issue is that, bots don’t counter units very well. It seems like sometimes they do, but maybe it’s just a coincidence? For example, if I’m hitting them hard with cavalry, it would make sense to flood the field with halberdiers. They don’t seem to do that.

There’s been a lot of good updates to aoe2 but the AI could still really use some work.

They don’t seem to counterattack at all, they will only use their special units and change to something else if they don’t have enough resources.