I noticed many times, when in these matches with AI ALL three AI are exclusively attacking ME. I didn’t set any teams here! Also checked the boxes in advanced settings ‘lock teams’. Or do I need to explicitly set every AI to its ‘own’ team in 1vs1vs1vs1 matches? E.g. Player team 1, AI team 2, AI team 3, AI team 4?
Thanks.
For AoE2:HD, whenever I want a game like this, I always just put each player in its own team. I bet that would work with AoE1:DE, too. (I think I started doing that long ago because of the same issue you describe.)
I don’t know why or if it’s needed in AoE1:DE, but it sounds like it is, based off your experience. You’d think not specifying any teams should mean, “Each player is against every other player,” but explicitly specifying it should hopefully fix things.
There may be a chance that if you always have the highest (or lowest) score among all players when the game matures, maybe they all just globally target you as a product of their algorithm? In AoE2:HD when I play 2 Human vs. 2 AI, I notice they usually target me first because I have the highest score on my team. Or, on occasion, they try to take out the the lowest score teammate first.
In AoE2:HD, sometimes I’ll do a match using me (Team1) vs. 2AI (Team2) vs. 1AI (Team3), where two AI are teammates with “Original AI” skills, and the other AI is on his own team but stronger AI skills (i.e., specify “AI” instead of “Original AI”).
You can make some neat combinations by specifying teams like this in AoE2:HD, and assume it can be done in AoE1:DE.
Thanks for your reply.
I bought AoE2DE now so I’m kinda hooked to that game now, lol.
Anyway I did do some Googling and found some clues that you might be right. The AI seems to like to target highest/lowest scores. Kinda weird though, in my opinion it should be doing ‘random’ targeting.
OK so I’ll try putting them into their own team then, as you suggested.
Thanks.
Good luck! Hope it works out.
Yeah, a more randomized targeting would be nice. Or in the cases where you’ve teamed up with someone against a 2- or 3-AI team, I wish that AI team wouldn’t join forces to only attack the strongest player at once (and totally neglect the lower score teammate) as much as I feel they do. I get it… I know that’s probably a sound strategy, but there’s not much real-world randomness to it. Feels too much like an all-knowing robot algorithm. (If you have the higher score, your teammate can just keep building trade carts and their economy while you have to spend vast amounts of resources on military and military upgrades just trying to survive a 2v1 onslaught.)
Along these lines, it might be cool to have a game mode where player scores are hidden from all players, including AI, until a certain point in the game (5, 10, 20 minutes in, or full game… player-specified before match begins), and/or when you have a scout or watch tower get within a certain proximity to a given player. Then the score is revealed for the duration it’s around. That would help bring some randomness to the attacks, and some nice suspense. I might create an AoE2:DE topic to suggest this someday