Team games are still hit or miss but it is slightly better now.
There are a few more issues that I think also affect the gameplay of the AI. Most of these are known issues which Iām just summarizing here. Thank you so much for reaching out to the small group of people who enjoy playing with and against the AI and want a challenge from it.
Here goes:
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The explorers always prioritize difficult treasures in exploration age, and they get killed very quickly by the guardians.
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In many cases explorers will leave a treasure guardian when it is almost dead and not land the final blow to kill it. The explorer should probably gauge whether the guardians are Killable or not before engaging the treasure. If itās killable, they should probably kill it since they have lost so much hp already, might as well get the treasure.
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AI explorers wonāt build TCs if their starting TC is destroyed. There was a game where the starting TC was destroyed and the AI gathered wood and spent it on mills. Useless waste of wood since there was hunt nearby. The explorer was around and didnāt build a TC. The villagers later (after 10 min) started building a TC.
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Regarding reconstruction of destroyed military buildings - the AI will constantly try to rebuild military buildings near the destruction site of the old ones - even if the enemy troops are there. It should build it away from where itās being attacked. The AoE2 AI does this very well.
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The allied AI will not aid teammates when they are being attacked. And does not heed calls for help either. The AI should help teammates in team games as a priority since if one team member goes down, the game become unwinnable pretty quickly. Enemy AI is better than this actually, and will most times help teammates.
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AI will prioritize sieging defensive structures over killing units around them sometimes. There is no point trying to take down a fort at close range if there are units around it that are capable of killing your units. I can often find myself picking off AI enemy units one by one as they are busy trying to burn down my TC.
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This is the most important one in my opinion: The AI will very often switch tasks/targets. They start something and donāt finishā¦ vills chop wood for 2 seconds before sending whole economy to coin. Then it will mine for a minute and then completely go confused and do other things as in the posts above. Or it will siege a TC till the TC has 200 hp left and then retreat at The brink of victory. Why?
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Artillery will spazz out : AI artillery will often spazz out and keep switching between limber mode and bombard mode when it senses an unwinnable battle. The falconet senses that the battle is unwinnable and starts to retreat. If in the process of packing it up, thereās a stray gunshot on it, it will get aggroed and want to go bombard mode. And then it will sense again that it canāt win and try to change stance again ad infinitum till it dies. All this without firing a single shot. It should either run away despite getting hit a little, or stand and fight.
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AI musketeers are too eager to go melee mode when they see cavalry. I can lure them using cavalry and then theyāll chase the cavalry around in circles while I use skirms to kill them off. This issue is already being tracked by you guys.
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AI will go far out of base to gather hunt and mine. And if fixated on one mine, theyāll sacrifice all of their villagers to get coin from it. Man that mine so far away you need to build an estate. In general it seems they have a hard time understanding what is Safe and what is not. Theyāll not get food from close safe hunt but instead run across the map to hunt and die. Same for mines. Walking across the map is seriously too much idle time and just staying put and gathering would do much good.
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until these AI issues fixed I reccomend FFA gamesā¦ they are causal, much funner with people, full of varied skillsā¦ you can learn new things, meet new people. etcā¦
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Isnāt FFA free for all, which means everyone wants to kill each other. That sounds like stressful?
not for me, because its just fun win or loseā¦ nothing really on the line but gaining experience. And you will get better much faster playing people vs. computers. A lot less so than ranked games where you get dependent of a fair team mate and is highly competitive. FFA is more casual and attracts more casual players.
FFA is not like SUP most people do not attack right away and want to be more boomy. You can still be aggressive though and catch people off guard, but for those really wanting to win they know they need to get to imperial undetected.
So really there is a lot of social aspect to it, one can be nice and try to be diplomatic with neighbors, or you get some that will try to steal your treasuresā¦
Sometimes things go wrong for you and you get teamedā¦ but learning to really navigate FFA is a whole another level of strategy that makes it the best and most dynamic way to play the game.
I played my first couple hundreds games and never won, often challenging the best players so I could take myself to max limit. Then once I found a civ, and learned some boom orders from youtubeā¦ started winning a lotā¦ (legacy)
Spain was the first civ I really broke through to win FFAS with. I finally had a counter to Japan now with unction and used that to take a lot of good battles and defend my bases.
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I played some games today and it seems that one of the factors (just one of them) behind the huge idle time is the fact that the AI garrisons all of its villagers inside the TC when its base is under attack. True for both allied and enemy AI.
If some villagers are away from the TC when the main base is attacked, they will walk to the TC and many will die on the way there. Itās better to just walk AWAY from the TC in this situation. And maybe try to build some military buildings away from the main base.
Here is a recording of a match where the allied AI somehow got saved from the wrath of the enemy AI. But if you see the idling trends, its the same for both allied and enemy:
Record Game 2021-08-12 12-50-11.age3Yrec (16.5 MB)
Also regarding crates: it seems the default setting is to not allow settlers to collect from them unless its in the meta. It feels like a settler gathering from non-meta crates is like an idle villager to the programming. For example, the settlers gather the 200 coin from the governor religiously, or the 400 wood from the quartermaster, but other crates like 1000 wood, 1000 coin etc, will be abandoned at the TC. If a settler happens to be nearby doing nothing, theyāll start to gather from these, but the programming will retask them immediately after. This behavior can also be seen in the recording above.
I played my first casual game since the new DLC and I noticed that AI is the weakest ever seen in AoE3 too. Hope devs will fix it soon
Just updated my mod here, and the focus of this update was to try to stamp out a lot of idle time due to the gameās poor autogathering functions. Itās not perfect, but a hopeful improvement. Any feedback is always appreciated!
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With the September PUP, I seem to notice an improvement.
The AI villagers now effectively gathers from crates and is less finicky about sending villagers back and forth between resources. Thanks a lot, devs.
The AI continues to build mills when thereās hunt nearby in some games. And the Russian AI seems to be having issues with its build order. Iāll make a separate post about it so the devs can fix it.
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@DiplexBoss6 thanks for your reply. We are working in order to improve as much as possible the AI and we are happy to see the effort is paying off, regarding the mills issues you mentioned are known and being tracked. Thanks a lot for your time
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Thank you very much for your work!
I also wanted to mention the issue of AI artillery - artillery of the AI is still switching between bombard and limber mode too much. Usually it dies because it is almost always packing and unpacking and not doing any damage!
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You guys are doing great work! It os greatly appreciated.
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Thank you for addressing these AI issues. I canāt tell you how much we appreciate the fact you listen to us.
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