decided to update the AI mod Aggressive Ai Mod - Mods - Age of Empires and found several bugs and mistakes.
ai can use more abstract tags rather than specific buildings in many areas such as in the repair manager. using Abstract Fort rather Fort Frontier makes more sense.
the ai sees AbstractFindScout as valid for military/native/influence manager, wasting precious wood and influence early on native scouts. these units should be zeroed out, they are already handled in their own dedicated scout section.
lots of problems with ai micro. infinite range melee is still a thing, though rarer than before. sometimes the ai will do amazing split shot micro, mostly though it runs skims into their death to melee cav. ai cav will run into and past my muskets and changdao to siege my tc. strelets will attempt to melee my dragoons, if i kite they may rarely fire a volley before again trying to melee them.
sometimes ai units will just #### out and walk back and forth for no reason. ai has no idea how to use mortars, rams, petards and other siege weapons, will make them attack units instead of nearby buildings. haven’t seen them effectively use healers either. ai doesn’t value undefended villagers/resource buildings highly enough, or isn’t competent enough to raid them.
delete idle fishing ship logic is missing despite the ai being able to handle deleting its own useless units i.e. Trek Wagons. this results in the ai sometimes wasting large amounts of pop in water.
ai exploration is still wonky, will throw random units or explorer at enemy tc than forget about it, leaving it to tickle enemy villagers or buildings before dying. most common way for ai to lose explorer early game.
the ransom command doesn’t reliably work, setting it up as a tech research plan for “DeRansom” results in more reliably ransoming heroes.
wagon manager could use an update, adding in missing wagons and buildings and more reliably building wagons such as church wagons/builder wagons for Africans or general wagons for Americans.
ai armies will walk back and forth between main base and forward base when regrouping, wasting time and making them easy to pick off.
japan and sweden ai are too restrained in building houses across the map, japan ai especially. ai also doesn’t gather treasures consistently when it has nothing better to do and is gathering troops for an attack. treasure gathering needs more help in general. ai will sometimes crackshot a bandit rider and attempt to kite the other 3 before dying uselessly, as well as other major mistakes.
ai doesn’t know how to handle a lot of Unknown map special cases such as free balloons or miners, these could be easily added in.
ai can still artillery spam when it has access to resources, making it easy to counter and losing the advantage it had before. either a dedicated artillery manager or a built in cap to existing unit managers could help.
ai doesn’t harvest its herdables.
lots of age up options missing. no mercenary contractor age up for Europeans or New York for Americans for some late game merc comps. no Arabs for Ethiopians for cheaper Gatling camels and mameluke spam. Mexican ai cannot use revolutions despite being a simple add, Yucatan/Maya may take at most 2 hours to fully enable for example.
the native dance monitor only partially works and is too complex. it does not reliably add healers and priestess to the community plaza, and doesn’t seem to know the limit to adding them is 10. using a flat number(10) in the addtoplan seems to more reliably get them into the plaza rather than numpreistess, especially for Inca. dance could be set up as Rescue Warchief>Spawn Healer if less than 10>Wardance if attacking or defending with less than 50 desired pop missing>Fertility otherwise if more than 25 desired pop missing>Takola/Wood dance if need be>XP Trickle.
maltese gun wagon has the land military tag, the only wagon i believe to have it. this messes up the AI handling of this wagon since it yeets into the frontline. there is also no building logic for these wagons at all, adding the logic only works some of the time due to that errant tag. malta ai does not build fixed guns in general, either defensively or creeping forward on an enemy base as the logic is missing.
malta ai is also missing the explorer card for faster building fortifications and early fort card for sentinel fort building, both easy to add logic critical to malta gameplay past age 2. gunpowder depot logic is also missing, again either defensively for gunpowder unit buff or to blow up desired tradepost sites and villagers that are mining or farming away from starting tc. with so much of the core gameplay missing from the malta ai it is in urgent need of attention. people who payed for this dlc are only getting the partial malta experience fighting its ai.
russia ai is also missing sevestapol and toy soldier card for musket fort creeping, again not something hard to add but strangely absent.
lots of missing important cards such as several royal decrees, infinite Indian rockets, infinite sufi/oldenburg/mayan allies, and Akan recruits for dutch.
My Mistakes:
looking at my forwardbasemanager code from earlier versions of my mod makes me amazed it ever worked. its full of contradictory, self sabotaging lines.
i had zeroed out LogicalTypeScout rather than AbstractFindScout in some of my lines, obviously very bad mistake.
i had attempted to force the ai to prioritize finite shipments over infinite shipments, the lines were added after the choose card logic so it didn’t do anything. this is something i think should be added to base game.
lots of mixed up plan id identifiers for the same lines.
there was a bug where the ai would continue to gather wood for buildings it couldn’t build due to being at their limit.
i couldn’t figure out how to get the politician priority system working for Americans or Mexicans so i just gave up and brute forced my preferences. not ideal since they will pick the same age ups every time rather than favor 2 or 3 options.
General Game Bugs and Issues.
this game is still clearly unstable. crashes still happen, in some maps more than others. performance tanks hard after every game if you don’t restart entire game, it goes from smooth after launching to a stuttering mess by game 4. restarting skirmish matches to test ai changes makes this performance leak especially painful. this was actually also in the legacy version of aoe3, but the impact was much less noticeable and required more games to feel it so i don’t fully blame current devs for this. just wish it was fixed. I’ve been in some betas and alphas past few months that are more stable and have less crashing/performance issues.
the servers aren’t reliable and can lag especially in weekends. game is still missing key ESO features such as finding online friends, how is this still missing. there is no auto translate feature, i have no idea what Turkish, Chinese? and French team mates are saying, and they often don’t understand me either. perfect usage opportunity for Microsoft translation tech.
Game Improvements:
the ai is much better than it was before, i don’t see a pressing need for this mod at all to enjoy fighting against the ai like at release.
the new unknown variants are amazing, the best fun map in the game by far rather than a resource scarce joke it was before. the sheep scout is wonderful along with other Easter eggs such as Leonardo tank. and the new European natives are a good continuation of African natives, being desirable to pick up for tech and units and free big button. the stockpile rebalance big button native is particularly fun to use, turning my 6k wood or food to 2k everything when i don’t feel like macroing.
What Can Still Be Improved:
dedicated canbuildtc and cangathertreasure tags for heroes would help, sometimes with explorer cards ai will task dogs, sheep and other non building heroes to tc and treasures since it cant differentiate between them.
why are warpriests and AbstractFindScout land military, this just seems to screw with players and ai.
some revolutions are clearly worse than others, same with mercs. when would i ever take jat lancers or royal cuirs over mamelukes or elmeti, or corsairs and arsonists over highlanders and cannoneers, or napoleon guns over gatling camels.
repelling volley/green jackets doesn’t affect natives or mercs, should be a rifling shadow with some added bonus for chu ku no and arquebus vs light infantry
old natives could use some more simple updates to bring them up closer to africans/europeans, such as auto respawning for nootka warchief ala berbers, higher build limits and more cheap useful techs you can pick up in age 1-2.
cant research techs at allied native posts, hurts teamwork and ai the most.
host ai games online using mods without needing to replace ai core folder.
Final:
ai wise game is in good shape, best its ever been. you can have a great time with the vanilla ai now. lots of nice new gameplay additions too. the technical state is still tragic and the online interface is very lacking to what we had in 2005.
as always feel free to use whatever you find useful in here. i don’t ask or want any credit. and beware malta and mexico ai, they will murder you.
you can play with others online using the mod if you replace your ai core folder with the mods version, you are the only one who needs it installed in that case. if you dont replace the core folder then everyone needs to download the mod.