i am surprised that they did not change AI dificulty from original at all. I thought they will do same what they did with AOE 2 and add AI wich is actually not cheating.
Titan is no longer cheating in Retold. The cheating starts at Expert and it does way less than in the original.
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But the players say the opposite.
Up to and including Titan has no resource bonus, Expert has +25%, and Legendary has +50%.
That’s how it is. I even checked the income to make sure.
Now some people make some wild assumptions that AI cheats with map visibility but there’s no proof for that. In fact, if my own experience with the matter has told me anything, the AI sucks at properly scouting my weak points and harassing them. You can just make an undefended gold mine on some far corner of the map and the AI would be non-the-wiser.
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Technically, I think it did cheat before (pre-Retold), but now it’s smarter instead of stronger, so they removed it. I remember a few times where he hunted my villagers down without the need of a scout.
Pretty sure they target eco without having scouted first. Even the scripted AI in campaign does that.
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I thought I was crazy for a second but you’re right, turns out it’s been reduced since the open beta. It used to be 50%/100% but now it’s 25%/50%. Interestingly, that’s still considerably higher than 3DE at 15%/30%.
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My only concern is that AI fail to make aditional settlements, at least from hard to standard
Welll, how should I describe that…
The main campaign simply throws “settlement” out of door, and go for scripted enemy unit spawning points completely…
The campaign AI is often not even AI but attack scripts that spawns a certain army and moves it to a certain position.
In many missions the AI just has a few production buildings and infinite resources while their villagers are more or less just decoration. They will not build any additional production buildings unless the original ones are destroyed.
I have not looked into the triggers yet but they often seem to rebuild buildings in the exact same spot so I wonder it it’s literally just a trigger telling them to do so instead of AI script.
I have not done an AoM(R) AI scripting so far so I can’t really tell how that works and what it is capable of.
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You can’t judge it by the campaign AI, because that’s specifically scripted to do so. What makes you sure that the skirmish AI targets resources without scouting?
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Adding on, there’s a whole grey area where the AI may be operating, and we would either need a clear replay from the AI’s perspective or the script itself to know what it’s doing.
It may consider units that it scouted within the past 30 seconds to be “visible”, and then by the time it finally sends its army over it seems like it just magically knew.
It could also “know” where your starting base is, even though a player could reasonably guess with high accuracy just by knowing the map layout.
There’s even some funny posts on the AoE3 forums where people get accused of cheating/map hacks when all they do is check the resources near the opponent’s base or get lucky and bump into something.
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