This is an issue I’ve been experiencing over the past several patches. It happens consistently on Black Forest and intermittently on other maps like Nagari. For example, on Nagari, I’ve played 2v2 against 2 AI, and had one play normally, and the other would stop progressing in Castle Age. It appears the AI is not gathering wood, which is limiting their ability to advance and expand. For the AI to not gather wood in Black Forest, is crazy.
This happened on or sometime shortly after patch 7.1.113 was released, which included “Fixed a rare issue where the AI would build too many Lumber camps on some maps.” This fix did absolutely nothing except break the game. The AI went from having 80+ villagers on wood and capping at 100K in the first hour of gameplay, to collecting almost none at all. On the maps where the AI isn’t bugged, they STILL make too many lumber camps.
As an experiment, I left the game running once on Black Forest and after about 2.5 hours of the AI sitting idle, they un-glitched themselves and started playing normally. Not sure what happened in the background.
There’s only a handful of maps I can play against the AI and have 100% success rate. Hill and Dale, Mountain Pass, and Boulder Bay work 100% of the time. I usually play on Giant map size. Changing difficulty has no effect, even on Ridiculous setting.
Using Imperial Spies as the Chinese just shows villagers standing idle in masse.
