AOE2 Handicap challenge

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Today I saw the Video of T90 beating extreme AI at 120 % Handicap:

Also this guy Erich Müller beat it on 135 % Handicap:

(The Video is in German, you can try to translate with subtitles but he uses quite often “legere” language that is quite common in Germany but can’t be translated by the automatic translator.)

In both Vids the players got actually kinda lucky with the strat choices of the AI. In the first of T90 the AI at some point stopped to make a lot of military for no reason and Erich Müller faced a scout opener of the AI which was kinda “way too easy” to beat.

And I think we get a problem there cause if the AI acts like potato you still can possibly manage to beat it with absurdly high Handicap. Maybe we need to set some rules which behaviour of the AI would be reasonably acceptable to have “fair” competition.

When I made my win with 115 % I faced a full feudal agression play with lots of different units. I never got a clear raid in, the ai always protected the ressources with the fresh made military it spammed. Maybe I triggered this behaviour with my playstyle (walling up and pushing back). But I feel i had to work much more than T90 and Müller. Not that I think I am better, I am clearly not. But I think if this is supposed to be a challenge we should have comparable grades of difficulty, otherwise it becomes a hunt for how to trigger the ai in terrible strategic decisions or just have luck with the opening selection of the ai.

2

T90 just tried 140 % but lost:

This time T90 faced the standard AI opener and had also the problem after psuhing it back that the opponent just turtled with military until he had such superior numbers it was unpossible to stop.

I wonder how much handicap Viper could face.

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3

The handicap feature is such a great addition. You can finally play a 1v1 against extreme AI and it is a challenge :smiley:

4

If extreme AI is 1200 elo, I could say that handicap is generally an exponential boost, therefore a 40% handicap would be 1.4*1.4, or, multiplied by 1200, about 2400 elo. Idk if it’s precisely that elo for an extreme AI, but my friends have used the square of the handicap to balance players and it has been working out fine.

5

Playing with 110% is like having :
aztek military production bonus
byzantine dark age building HP bonus
indian fishing bonus
japanese feudal age fishing bonus
2/5 of the britons shepherd bonus
1/4 of the mongol hunting bonus
1/2 of the corean and turk mining bonus
2/3 of the frank foraging bonus and slav farming bonus
2/3 of the celt wood bonus

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