The interview with AI creator for AOE2 says that AI knows how many units the player have and when to attack. This is such a terrible way. The AI to be fair should also have restrictions as player. AI should not get info and has ability to simultaneously make and multi task. This is just cearly cheating.
AI should only know about the player if it’s scouting else it should not. The AI should produce units and tech the civ is know for but not for just countering the player.
I agree to this point. I second this.
The AI should behave like an actual human in every way. The game would be more fun that way.
I just played as Gurjaras against Extreme AI on Arabia. I specifically made them Bulgarians to see how they’d perform a Man-at-Arms rush on my mill.
Instead, I discovered they had built a tower on their woodline and massed nothing but skirmishers.
AI LOVES SKIRMISHERS NO MATTER WHAT, LOL.
I’ll be a dissenting voice here. I know it sounds great in theory, but cheats like this really help the AI in a foolproof way that lead to a more consistent experience. Maybe it should be toned back a bit but I don’t want to have games where I just randomly stomp on the AI because they couldn’t get a scout into my base.
As far as I know, the AI still needs to scout the player to get that info in first place. Also, it knows how much military you have (and bases on that whether to launch an attack or not) but not your exact composition.
I also don’t know whether there have been changes recently but Extreme AI for a good while behaved like a player during the 22pop Feudal meta and occasionally liked to drush (which obv became ineffective with faster up times).
Just played as Byzantines against an Extreme Goth AI.
I made a few spearmen and exposed them to the AI, then trained a dozen fully upgraded Feudal Age skirmishers but kept them hidden inside the Archery Range. I waited to see how the AI would respond. It came at me with pure archers.
I don’t think the AI would’ve done that if it had known about my skirmishers. I’m not even sure if it takes the discounted Byzantine skirmishers into account.
I think improper scouting actually hurts the A.I. Very often, I go for an Archer rush, they have Skirmishers, I add a Stable, make one or two Scouts, and suddenly the A.I. wastes resources on producing many Spearmen, which freely run into archer fire while their Skirmishers get shredded by the Scouts.
It has no real idea of where different army types are or what moves the player would naturally make next.
On the other hand, this is extremely hard to implement.