In almost every game in a two-on-two battle, the allied AI is very weak. While the enemy ally AI helps its ally very well, my ally does not help at all, either when defending or attacking. I’ve lost a lot of battles this way, and I hope the developers fix it because it’s really annoying.
Are you trying to give them commands at the start of the match? At the top near where you can tribute resources you can go into a comms thing and try to tell them to focus on defense or economy etc. I don’t know too much about it as sometimes they will give you a message saying they are refusing to do it, but I think it does help if they accept.
I think you can also issue attack orders, but they may need to have a built up army to follow that one.
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player comms tab has the same purpose as AI taunts in aoe2, a set of commands that the AI answers, neither solution is ideal, but they mostly work
Sometimes they ask for resources, I give them. When I am attacked, I give a sign of offensive defense, but mostly they don’t care. The enemy AI manages its economy and army well, while my ally AI generally performs mediocre. In general, this is how it happened in the games I played with the Ottomans. When I just played with the Germans, the allied AI was slightly better. Enemy AI is also good at helping each other. I think enemy AI is better than player allied AI because they are trying hard to win the game and allied AI is not.
ye enemy AIs in tandem are in sync, while one allied with player can do some weird stuff, but i wouldn’t call it unplayable, seen aoe4 AI? thats what i call unplayable
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I agree that Age of 4 AI is bad. Altough Age of 3 is complicated game, AI isnt that bad.
here and in 2 AI always answers either with action or straight up message, in 4, sound of silence, also you can’t give it commands so F to all team AI enjoyers
back to 3, ofc AI has a ton of variables like player to keep track of, per civ even, i’d say it does darn good job on all civs given how many specifics there are
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I hope developers will continue to focus on AI. Age of 3 showed that it is better than 4 in its current state and equal to 2 in terms of fun. This game deserves to be played in every form.
This might not be relevant any longer since I experienced this when I played the original [Age of Empires 3] many years ago, but I remember where on one occasion I used cheats to get a bunch of resources and decided to give a lot of it to the ally AI that I played with.
When I did this the behaviour of my ally AI changed drastically, where it became a lot more aggressive than usual and started training a bunch of military units. Maybe there is something connected to the coding of the ally AI where it will be less responsive depending on the amount of resources that it has.
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This can show that AI cant do his eco properly which devs should do something about it. I will try cheats and giving my resources as you said.
I hope it helps. Except for possibly having something to do with the lack of resource management of an ally AI, another reason could also be that the AI itself needs more complexity to handle different situations properly and where its performance is partially based on the modifiers that it gets depending on which AI difficulty that the player sets it to.
In other words, the AI starts “Cheating” once the player sets it to any difficulty that is higher than [Hard] where it will gain different types of buffs. I am also pretty sure that the AI gets to see the whole map without having to explore it, therefore an Extreme AI for example doesn’t have to bother with finding the player or another AI when it will always know where they are.
Having an AI that cheats in order to compensate for its higher difficulty does not lead to a challenging game it just makes it unfair.
I happened to find a discussion on Reddit from 2020 where a user wo###### if the AI still cheats in the Definitive Edition and another user who responded to the post provided this message, which is shown below, for the modifiers that the AI gets depending on the difficulty that it has.
Yes, it has +40% handicap. AI handicaps on DE are:
- Easy -70%
- Standard -60% (-50% in Campaigns)
- Moderate -35% (-25% in Campaigns)
- Hard 0%
- Hardest +20%
- Extreme +40%
Edit: The handicap for the [Hardest] and [Extreme] AI seems to have been lowered in a later update for the Definitive Edition.
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actually the handicap on hardest these days is +15% and extreme is +30%, since few patches ago, the other values however still apply
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Is that so? Thanks a lot for coming with this information. 
it was stated in patch notes not long ago, maybe 2 patches ago at most, reasoning being AI having vastly better decks, and script itself having major improvements to provide equal challenge despite lower handicap boost, looking for the exact patch notes
I play often with hard enemy AI and game is fun.Hard enemy Aı is not bad. If ally ai get better, this will be awesome. 
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If you have played a match yet with an ally AI did you notice any changes, when you used cheats and started giving almost all of your resources to the AI?
I hope you did not end up wasting your time through trying this out, and without there being any results. But if it did end up being a waste of time then I’m sorry for telling you something that didn’t help with your problem.
I wish I could try this out myself since I don’t have a PC. Its a real bummer that this game only supports PC since I only have a Mac laptop for the moment, which isn’t really that great for gaming. When I played [Age of Empires 3] in the past I had a CD disc of the game that was compatible for Macintosh computers.
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Thank you so much for your support, man. Your advice is not in vain, it all makes sense. I haven’t wasted any time because of your advice, on the contrary, the allied AI is standing a little more. This is the best thing to do until the devs make adjustments. I’m going to help the allied AI with resources in the games I play, I’ll post the results in this thread and I hope you can play the game with a PC…
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Then I am glad that my insight was of big help! 
And thank you, I am currently trying to buy some parts for assembling a PC. But aside from [Age of Empires 3] there are some others games that I can play on my laptop for the time being, Like “Don’t Starve”. Should have tried out this game much more sooner, because wow is it an enjoyable experience! (even if it is a rather difficult survival game).
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good luck with pc bud, doing so myself too, to retire my laptop which ain’t great
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