AI players don't focus on destroying TPs as stated in patch notes

Age of Empires III: DE III - Report a Bug
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:arrow_forward: GAME INFORMATION

:point_down: These details are CRITICAL; DO NOT skip them or your issue may not be reviewed.

  • GAME BUILD #: 61213
  • GAME PLATFORM: Steam
  • OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10

:arrow_forward: ISSUE EXPERIENCED

:point_down: DESCRIBE THE ISSUE IN DETAIL (below). LIMIT TO ONE BUG PER THREAD.
The AI players don’t focus much on destroying TPs when trade victory is enabled. The latest patch notes indicate the following:

  • AI players now focus on destroying TPs when the Trade Route Monopoly condition is activated.
    But when playing, the AI won’t attack TPs in the 5 minutes it takes to win, or if they do, they will do it with less than 10 units, sometimes less (the ranged attack of the tp is more than enough to deal with them). Meanwhile, the rest of their army keep focusing in destroying the enemy base.

Even in map like andes in a 4v4, when I manage to take the two native villages besides an enemy base and left them unguarded, they’ll still concentrate their attack in enemy bases and not to prevent a monopoly win.

The “Better Ai Mod”, in the mod section, also allows the ai to attack TPs in trade victory, but there the AI do send their whole army or a significant part to destroy them, which would be happening in the live version.

:arrow_forward: FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

:point_down: How often does the issue occur? CHOSE ONE; DELETE THE REST!

  • 100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS)

:arrow_forward: REPRODUCTION STEPS

:point_down: List CLEAR and DETAILED STEPS we can take to reproduce the issue ourselves… Be descriptive!

Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:

  1. Play a match
  2. Activate trade victory
  3. turtle in your base and win

:arrow_forward: EXPECTED RESULT

:point_down: What was SUPPOSED to happen if the bug you encountered were not present?
AI should destroy nearby and unguarded tps to prevent from losing.

:arrow_forward: IMAGE

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:arrow_forward: GAME FILES (SAVE / RECORDING)

:point_down: Attach a SAVE GAME (.aoe3Ysav) or GAME RECORDING (.aoe3Yrec) of the match where you encountered the issue. Link it below if using an external file service.

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I’ve actually experienced the opposite where the AI is doing exactly what the patch has indicated. Just the other day I invoked the trade monopoly 3 times before wining after fending off waves of attacks. Luckily my allies came to help otherwise there would have been more attempts. It’s a lot better now than what it used to be when you could just cheese a win. On the other hand it was the only feasible way to win a match since the enemy AI are really good at aiding one another. Still, I take the AI improvement, I’m glad they fixed it.

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Which map was this in?

I’ve been noticing that the behavior of the AI is heavily map dependent. On some maps, it plays well, and on others, it’s not very smart.

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I think it is very inconsistent. In most games I’ve had, the Ai may prevent one or at the most two trade victories, but then they just won’t care. In the game I talked about, they managed to destroy an outpost and cancel the timer once, but then, the allied ai acttivate it again and I had to destroy manually my own tps like 6 or 7 times before winning, at the 5 seconds mark, because the enemy ai was just going allow it to happen.

It was on Andes Upper large. I managed to took the 2 quechua native sites that were besides one ai enemy and it never even tried to destroy them, and they were unguarded. That Ai was the one that had received the less beatings and was sending waves and waves of soldiers still to our base. Other enemies were the same.

What I also remember is that sometimes the ai did destroy the tps in the trade route (in the middle), but they most did it when the timer wasn’t on. As soon as the victory was activated, they wouldn’t go and I had to destroy them manually.

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I think late game AI is very hit or miss as you say. I’ve had long games after a certain time where the enemy AI balls up their forces and just camps and the allied AI then just camps in their own bases and nothing happens. And I do agree the AI plays on some maps better than others. My match yesterday was on Baja California. If you play that map give us your experience.

One thing I have noticed with this patch is the allied AI refuses to attack a enemy base with you as requested even though they have a army ready to go.Before, even if they did oblige it wasn’t always a given they would, now they just outright refuse. Allied AI could use some work.

I will say the improvements to the AI since release has been great.