I’m no stranger to the the AoE series, though perhaps not the best of players. I’ve noticed some odd behaviour from the AI that’s been bugging me a bit and appears present in everything from AoE1 through to AoE 3 and AoE DE.
The issue is this: The AI opponents (almost always) target the human player.
Okay, this isn’t surprising news but I was curious to see to what extent this occurs so I set up a number of games with different parameters and observed the following:
All-vs-all, teams locked (each AI selected to be a different team), No specific victory conditions: In 7/9 matches, the AI targeted the Human player even though they had the lowest / middle ranking score.
All-vs-all, teams locked (each AI team set to (-) ), No specific victory conditions: In 5/8 matches, the AI targeted the Human player even though they had the lowest / middle ranking score.
All-vs-all, teams locked (each AI selected to be a different team), Deathmatch: In 4/5 matches, the AI targeted the Human player even though they had the lowest / middle ranking score.
I tend to play with Fog of War switched off and have also observed enemy troops marching straight towards buildings and units that are in areas of the map the computer has not explored yet and has no LoS in. When I move my units, the enemy then follows them even though they have no LoS. This has led to some amusing merry-go-rounds that cannot be by chance at all where a string of slower enemy war elephants has followed a villager around in circles - never attaining line-of-sight and yet somehow able to ‘sniff them out’.
Has anyone else ever noticed this phenomenon? I must admit it makes the game a little less fun for me (personally) being jumped upon by multiple ornery enemies even though I am neither the biggest threat nor actively attacking them. Enemy forces have been observed marching straight through other enemy towns just to get to me.