I know the devs have other priorities, but could we get a buff to the hardest A.I. I’m not that good, but I just beat the hardest AI playing the best civ (French) without knowing any build orders. I could never do this in AOE 2. I can’t beat it with build orders in AOE 2. I consistently beat it in AOE 4. As someone who plays single-player, the game kinda falls off once I beat the hardest A.I. There is nothing left to do.
I replayed the game and here are some obvious mistake the A.I. made:
1: Did not make a mill by a nearby dear patch. Harvested the whole herd at the beginning of the game walking all the way to the T.C. for each trip. Eventually, it made a mill by the berries.
2: Did not make a lumber camp by the main wood line till the 9 minute mark. The villagers walked all the way to the wood line and back till then.
3: At the 7 minute mark, 2 villagers where sent a good distance to build a lumber camp and instantly abandoned it.
4: At no point did it get any of the mine or lumber camp upgrades. The only mill upgrade was wheel barrel. (It was a 25 minute game).
5: Built up a mass of 7 royal knights plus a few other units but never pushed out or raided.
6: Pulled back after starting a good fight (This happens a lot in other games as well).
7: Massive focus on stone walls. It’s cool that the A.I. can stone wall, but this is the hardest setting and it’s hard committing to a meme strategy. At least use wood walls.
8: ADVANCED WITH THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE?!?!?!?!?!
9: Did not use the Chamber of Commerce to make trade carts or do any trading like selling stone for food when villager queue went dry.
9: Built a market. Even though it had Chamber of Commerce.
10: Did not use market. Just built it and resources stayed the same afterward.
11: Sent like 8 villagers to build the wall instead of 1 (massive idle time according to some random guy on Youtube: Viewer says spearmen don't counter kinghts, I check the replay - YouTube ).
12: Town center villager production idled a lot including an entire minute from 7 ish-8 ish and 3 minutes from 10:40 to 13:30.
13: Did not research iron under mesh until 15 minutes despite me spamming longbows (researched the other three techs first).
For anyone wondering, it was on Hill and Dale. I understand these mistakes from the easy A.I. and I get that an A.I. is hard to program for 8 unique civs, but Chamber of Commerce into sending a third of the vills to gather stone for some walls should be easy to fix.
6 Likes
Could the devs just grab one of the pro’s build order guides and base the hardest A.I. off of it? At least for the first 20 villagers or so. Then basic strategy tips past that like which landmarks to get. I know Beastyqt has build orders.
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Just subscribe to the mod brutal AI.
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If you queue for co-op 4v4 against hardest AI, often all your teammates will leave and you’ll have to win 1v4, which is a lot harder than 1v1.
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Maybe they could do like the definitive edtitions and add an extreme AI.
Or just give an update on how the neural network AI is going.
3 Likes
Yeah, I forgot about that.
I’d agree with buffing the AI. I’m not sure if there’s more of an issue now, but I’ve been noticing the Hardest AI not doing as well as a few patches ago - specifically with their resource collection/allocation like you mentioned.
I’ve seen them collect gold or wood from trees by distance-mining/cutting, while already having a mining camp set up at gold, for example. I’m not sure if my very minimal scout harass does anything to make the AI Villagers to be more distant.
Overall, the economy needs a rework for the AI and it’s a bit underwhelming when you take out just a handful of their villagers and it sets them back what feels like years because of their super poor resource management.
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I would agree. The A.I. is better than me at military composition. It’s the economy that it fails in.
3 Likes
I tried the brutal AI and a couple other mods and did not notice much of a difference.
Edit: I forgot to select it under Tuning Pack. It makes a HUGE difference. Thanks for suggesting it. Basically, it just triples the A.I. drop off amount. This offsets the bad A.I. strategies.
2 Likes
You tried the brutal ai with no other mods in a standard map with hardest diff? If you tried with intermediate or hard it’s ok… But with hardest I don’t think you can’t notice the difference
I have problems with A.I… even playing on hard or “hardest”, there are still problems
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Usually the A.I. cannot repair walls or close holes in walls.
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Also, it has issues with the issue of mastering sacred grounds. Too much trouble with that. I often win easily, and the A.I. not interested in capturing sacred grounds, which she has lost. Mainly in the middle or late game. Even though I left empty, defenseless places to “help” the A.I. , she won’t conquer her.
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Another fact: Unfortunately, I happened to be, face to face, with a huge enemy army,… and guess what… they ignored my presence, they walked around, going to one side and going to another, in front of me and dying, they didn’t fight … it’s as if they didn’t know what to do… watch, the A.I had a bigger army than mine. But I won without losing any units, at that moment, T.T
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Yeah, it makes a huge difference. I just needed to activate it under Tuning Pack:
2 Likes
Whenever you own Brutal AI, you can take the next step with an extremely aggressive AI
Mod name: Zycat AI
Gl hf
