Me and a buddy have been playing on hard lately (2vs.2) and until the latest patch was released we would beat it once out of every other game. Now it seems like it is impossible to beat. The AI comes at you right after hitting Castle with a combo of knights, m@m, skirms and archers. Tried raiding it as of early Feudal, keeping up the pressure until Castle, managing to kill as many as 5-6 vills in raids, nothing worked, it always came out stronger. Have you guys been noticing this too?
Well, it’s meant to be hard. Just play on a closed map like black forest or michi and you should win more easy. One of you playing as portuguese with feitorias can be very useful for vs the AI. Since you can make never ending bombard towers and walls.
Right. Thanks for the advice. But I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t just me, and that other people had noticed it as well.
Check that you are still set on the DE AI, the CD and HD AIs behave differently and from what I remember go for a lot more castle age aggression and early rushes than the DE AI does (They aren’t harder but just ramp up earlier so if you’re used to waiting for imperial age to deal with attacks it will throw you off)
They may have also changed the behavior of the AI I haven’t played against it since the patch released
Thank you. Yes I am still on the DE AI.
The AI defo got harder. The extreme AI drushes pretty frequently now.
Another problem with the hard AI is the fact that it spams castles when starting with ultra-high resources and that just isn’t fair. In my most recent game against it, it spammed 14 castles and that’s just ridiculous. The battle was more of a slow grind than anything.
Hmm, I play 2v2 games with my brother against the hard AI and haven’t noticed it being harder. In fact, we beat it 2v3 today, which I don’t think we’ve managed before. On the other hand, since the latest patch we have often been playing as the new civs, which I suppose might help.
I find that the AI’s performance can be very different depending on the map, and on hard it’s quite random as to how aggressive it is. So maybe you’ve been playing on maps it does well on, and got a run of bad luck with it playing aggressively?
The AI imposes a lot of different strategies. Some are better than others, and yes, what strategies it uses is map dependent. There’s a lot more that goes into it than map and civ, and some of it is random.
If you’re having trouble with the AI on any level, you need to improve your earlygame most likely. Whether you’re playing a closed map or an open map, having the economy to either get your military running or to develop a functional economy quickly is the most important key to success.
Yeah go figure… Yesterday we played on Ghost Lake, Mongolia, Arabia several times and beat the hard AI nearly every single time. When aggressive it was pretty much back to its previous behavior, with early rushes with 20+ archers & skirms that are easy to prepare for (very rarely m@m and no knights). Maybe all the devs did in the patch was increase the randomness of the AI behavior.