Campaigns are poorly designed and not enjoyable at all

Age of Empires: DE I - Discussion
1

Let me first of all say that I’ve completed all the campaigns I’ve tried to do so far. I’ve done all the Egyptian, Greek, Babylonian, Rising Sun and Hittite campaigns and I’ve just completed mission 2 of the Rise of Rome campaign. All are poorly designed and not enjoyable so far. All are exactly the same. They come in two flavours:

Flavour #1 = It’s an easy mission you just can’t lose, either because you start with enough units to get the job done (and enough priests to convert enemy troops) or because you start with plenty of villagers in a safe part of the map, giving you ample time to build a base before the enemy start coming at you.

Flavour #2 = It’s ridiculously hard and has to be beaten with cheesy tactics. You start in the tool age with only a handful of villagers and resources and the enemy is in the iron age and begins attacking you with armoured elephant tanks, catapults, priests and fully upgraded bombard ships within 3 minutes of the mission beginning.

This is poor design. A little balance would make these campaigns extremely enjoyable. I was really looking forward to playing the Roman campaigns because everybody loves Roman history, right? But I get no feeling of satisfaction at all from playing these campaigns when I have to play cheesy and confuse the AI on mission 2 just to offset the insane balancing issue, where I’m in the tool age with axemen and basic bowmen and scout ships and Pyrrhus is coming at me with elephants and catapult ships.

The Romans didn’t fight Pyrrhus with axes made from stone, they didn’t begin the war with 6 archers and 6 villagers and get curb stomped. They began the war with massive populations, with allies, with fully equipped legions, and when they got hammered in battle they recruited more fully eqipped legions.

All the ■■■■ campaigns have been like this so far. Where’s the balance?

2

Imo in the old game I found the Roman ones didn’t seem as magical as the Greek Babylon Yamato ones. I haven’t tested the new ones yet :slight_smile:

3

So you first complain that the campaigns are too easy, but as soon as you encounter a couple more challenging missions you start complaining about it being too difficult? That seems a bit unreasonable.

Having missions of varying difficulty is not a bad thing. On the contrary, I think it’s great. When I first played the original game, I was not able to beat the more challenging missions, but there were plenty of easier ones too that I enjoyed a lot. Now that I am more experienced with the game, those easier missions do feel a bit too trivial, but I understand that it’s good to have them there for those who are new. And now, the hardest missions are the only ones that provide a challenge to me and it was because of those hard missions that I was able to enjoy the new campaigns as much as I did.

If all missions had a similar difficulty, they would either all be too challenging for new players or all too easy for more experienced players. The current balance where there’s something for everybody is best in my opinion. However, I don’t think the balance is perfect. I think there could be a couple more challenging missions in there, but the campaign balance is definitely not bad the way it is now.

4

Let’s see if I understood … The problem is that some are very easy and others are too difficult?
I do not see this as a problem. Challenging missions are what make them interesting.

On the other hand, I think he has a little bit of reason in the repetitiveness of the missions. I understand it’s a 1997 game, but when they announced it, they talked about “redesigning” the campaigns.
Currently the campaigns do not leave to destroy the enemy’s center of government, kill some unit, recover artifacts or build in the area with flags.

5

@qweytr24 said:
So you first complain that the campaigns are too easy, but as soon as you encounter a couple more challenging missions you start complaining about it being too difficult?

I’m not complaining about them being too difficult. I already wrote in my very first sentence that I’ve done them all so far. All of the campaigns I’ve played so far have ended in victory for me.

I’m complaining that they’re either ridiculously easy or ridiculously unbalanced. Not difficult - impossible unless you find some way to cheese them. Poorly designed. Mission 2 of Rise of Rome isn’t difficult because the AI is great or because the campaign is well designed, it’s difficult because you start in the tool age with 6 archers and Pyrrhus starts in the iron age with elephants and catapult triremes.

6

My issue is that the enemy sends all their villages to cut 1 tree down in the middle of my base at the start of the game even if there are 20 towers in the way and they die before they can move 10 feet thus meaning that they run out of food and no army. I would love for this to be fixed. It takes the fun out of everything.

7

@SvelterPenny568 said:

@qweytr24 said:
So you first complain that the campaigns are too easy, but as soon as you encounter a couple more challenging missions you start complaining about it being too difficult?

I’m not complaining about them being too difficult. I already wrote in my very first sentence that I’ve done them all so far. All of the campaigns I’ve played so far have ended in victory for me.

I’m complaining that they’re either ridiculously easy or ridiculously unbalanced. Not difficult - impossible unless you find some way to cheese them. Poorly designed. Mission 2 of Rise of Rome isn’t difficult because the AI is great or because the campaign is well designed, it’s difficult because you start in the tool age with 6 archers and Pyrrhus starts in the iron age with elephants and catapult triremes.

How should the campaigns be done then? Starting at a disadvantageous position is exactly what makes those missions challenging. It would be way too easy if you had a superior or even an equal starting position. Overcoming the initial disadvantages and securing your position is the most interesting and challenging part of the missions.

8

First I’d like to point out that I quite enjoyed Reign of the Hittites, Raid on Babylon. That one had the timing and challenge right when played on Hardest. Caesar’s Revenge was also pretty entertaining on hardest because of the early naval war. They’re not the only ones but such maps tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

@qweytr24 said:
How should the campaigns be done then? Starting at a disadvantageous position is exactly what makes those missions challenging. It would be way too easy if you had a superior or even an equal starting position. Overcoming the initial disadvantages and securing your position is the most interesting and challenging part of the missions.

There’s a difference between disadvantage and post-iron age army multiple times the popcap that only needs to a-move into your base to win at any time. The only reason you can win a map like that is that the AI is retarded and doesn’t attack. This just leads to further problems because the AI is popcapped and cannot make units before you’ve pretty much killed it.

A lot of this comes from the AI being what it is. If the AI was good, you’d have a challenging match with a skirmish start(TC+3 vils for both.) This would allow a lot more freedom for campaign development. I’ve been playing around in the scenario/campaign editor and I’ve had to scrap more than a few ideas just because of how the AI works.
You want it to defend something? Put that something in the south corner of the map, that’s where most of it’s forces tend to get stuck anyway. Make sure the production buildings are above it.
You want it to attack with a certain timing? Tweak it’s starting buildings/villagers/resources to achieve that.
Want it to have non-suicidal villagers? Don’t give it vision anywhere near the player at the start. Make sure not to place any shallow tiles on the map. Also predators are not allowed.
As a general rule always make the smallest map possible. AI is unable to take advantage of the space and will waste tons of units on guarding the whole map. Never make a gigantic map unless it’s naval.
BTW. AI loves towers and doesn’t know what walls are so make sure the walls you want are on the map from the start.

The best way I’ve found so far is dividing AI into multiple players. One with a defending army(set on don’t move stance,) one with an offensive army(engage right at the start) and then an AI player for every TC you want them to have. Every AI also needs either a granary+storage pit or wood+berries at enough distance from their TC to be able to develop properly(a villager should be placed where you want their first buildings to go!) Remember to leave enough space next to TC to build a base. It’s also worth it to ban every building that they don’t need and you can control their production curve if you ban all military buildings and only give them a certain number at the start.
The biggest problem with this approach is the limited popcap for the player but that can be solved by lowering the AI popcap to compensate. If this is not done the player is forced to spam Towers to overcome the difference should they all attack at the same time.

I’ll probably replay a lot of the campaigns if the hinted AI rework comes out in a future patch.

9

The Rise of Rome campaign mission 2 is the worst one I’ve encountered so far. The one where your objective is to “destroy the army of Pyrrhus”. Either they attack you in the first 3 minutes and wipe you out with their catapult triremes and elephants (while you have only tool age archers and axemen) or they don’t attack for 30 minutes, giving you ample time to collect tons of resources and build up.

But even when you collect tons of resources and build up, the rest of the campaign is still brutal. You send wave after wave of swordsmen, improved bowmen and catapults, and they all get destroyed over and over again because Army of Pyrrhus has infinite resources to recruit elephants, elephant archers, helepolis, cataphracts, and they can micromanage every single one of their units to avoid your arrows.

You try to use catapults to take out their elephants but your catapults end up getting stuck on trees, then they decide to shoot randomly and wipe out your entire army (seriously, I’ve given up using catapults in this game, they kill more of my own guys than the enemy, they’re just not worth it).

And it’s not difficult because you already have tons of resources built up, it’s just a brutal slog of sending wave after wave at the enemy until eventually you overwhelm them after 3 hours of playing the campaign.

I dunno, I’m just not enjoying the campaigns at all. This game shouldn’t have been a straight up remaster of the original. The bugs really needed to be fixed. The campaigns could’ve been improved 1000% if pathfinding was just fixed and my units didn’t get stuck inside each other.

It’s great in custom games, but in campaigns only 10% of my army can fight at the same time because the other 90% are stuck inside each other and/or getting massacred by my own catapults.

10

@JoonasTo said:
There’s a difference between disadvantage and post-iron age army multiple times the popcap that only needs to a-move into your base to win at any time. The only reason you can win a map like that is that the AI is retarded and doesn’t attack. This just leads to further problems because the AI is popcapped and cannot make units before you’ve pretty much killed it.

A lot of this comes from the AI being what it is. If the AI was good, you’d have a challenging match with a skirmish start(TC+3 vils for both.) This would allow a lot more freedom for campaign development. I’ve been playing around in the scenario/campaign editor and I’ve had to scrap more than a few ideas just because of how the AI works.
You want it to defend something? Put that something in the south corner of the map, that’s where most of it’s forces tend to get stuck anyway. Make sure the production buildings are above it.
You want it to attack with a certain timing? Tweak it’s starting buildings/villagers/resources to achieve that.
Want it to have non-suicidal villagers? Don’t give it vision anywhere near the player at the start. Make sure not to place any shallow tiles on the map. Also predators are not allowed.
As a general rule always make the smallest map possible. AI is unable to take advantage of the space and will waste tons of units on guarding the whole map. Never make a gigantic map unless it’s naval.
BTW. AI loves towers and doesn’t know what walls are so make sure the walls you want are on the map from the start.

The best way I’ve found so far is dividing AI into multiple players. One with a defending army(set on don’t move stance,) one with an offensive army(engage right at the start) and then an AI player for every TC you want them to have. Every AI also needs either a granary+storage pit or wood+berries at enough distance from their TC to be able to develop properly(a villager should be placed where you want their first buildings to go!) Remember to leave enough space next to TC to build a base. It’s also worth it to ban every building that they don’t need and you can control their production curve if you ban all military buildings and only give them a certain number at the start.
The biggest problem with this approach is the limited popcap for the player but that can be solved by lowering the AI popcap to compensate. If this is not done the player is forced to spam Towers to overcome the difference should they all attack at the same time.

I’ll probably replay a lot of the campaigns if the hinted AI rework comes out in a future patch.

The AI is indeed rather weak. This is the main reason why the campaigns have to give the AI a large technology advantage or a huge army to make it challenging. But this is not the fault of the campaign design. The campaigns are well designed within the mechanics and limitations of the game, but saying that the AI is bad is fair, since there are many areas where it could be improved.

For making your own campaigns, .ai and .per files are important for making the AI behave like you want it to, but I don’t think those files are moddable in DE currently. With those files you can set how many and what units the AI makes, as well as when it attacks and with how many units. It’s true that there are workarounds to make the AI behave more like you want it to, but I would rather wait for the ability to make .ai and .per files before making any advanced scenarios.

@SvelterPenny568 said:
The Rise of Rome campaign mission 2 is the worst one I’ve encountered so far. The one where your objective is to “destroy the army of Pyrrhus”. Either they attack you in the first 3 minutes and wipe you out with their catapult triremes and elephants (while you have only tool age archers and axemen) or they don’t attack for 30 minutes, giving you ample time to collect tons of resources and build up.

But even when you collect tons of resources and build up, the rest of the campaign is still brutal. You send wave after wave of swordsmen, improved bowmen and catapults, and they all get destroyed over and over again because Army of Pyrrhus has infinite resources to recruit elephants, elephant archers, helepolis, cataphracts, and they can micromanage every single one of their units to avoid your arrows.

You try to use catapults to take out their elephants but your catapults end up getting stuck on trees, then they decide to shoot randomly and wipe out your entire army (seriously, I’ve given up using catapults in this game, they kill more of my own guys than the enemy, they’re just not worth it).

And it’s not difficult because you already have tons of resources built up, it’s just a brutal slog of sending wave after wave at the enemy until eventually you overwhelm them after 3 hours of playing the campaign.

I dunno, I’m just not enjoying the campaigns at all. This game shouldn’t have been a straight up remaster of the original. The bugs really needed to be fixed. The campaigns could’ve been improved 1000% if pathfinding was just fixed and my units didn’t get stuck inside each other.

It’s great in custom games, but in campaigns only 10% of my army can fight at the same time because the other 90% are stuck inside each other and/or getting massacred by my own catapults.

I agree that the time when the AI attacks can sometimes be too random and some missions can even become impossible if you are too unlucky. This is something that the developers should look into, but again, this is a problem with the AI, not campaign design.

But if you attack the enemy with improved bowmen and kill your army with your own catapults, then it’s your own fault that you lose. Improved bowmen are not very good even in bronze are basically useless in iron. And catapults should not be used in combination with melee units like swordsmen. A single push with legions and ballistas should be enough to destroy the enemy. If you can’t find the best army composition to counter what the enemy has, I think it’s only logical that it would make the mission very hard.

11

It’s already possible to use own PER and AI files! :smile: I use already some for my Seleucid Campaign (there is still space for improvements for my AIs, but at least I was able to stop most AI players from some annoying behavior like suicide scout villagers).

If I would have more experience, especially with PER files, I could make better AIs, because there are more options, than I ever thought!

12

Use stand ground to halt catapult fire if they are not needed. Double click and q I think is the default hot key.

Use Helepolis instead of archers, to guard your units against cavalry or elephants. Try using boats as well. Maybe transport boats. Attack with towers, build barracks nearby, hit and run. Use an aggressive wall, force them to walk near the shore where your boats are waiting. Just some ideas, I don’t know if they’re all possible on certain campaigns.

Try some phalanx vs the elephants. 1 balista = 5 improved bowmen.

You can also try pirate trade with the enemy dock. Build your dock as far away as possible. There must be no closer docks or else the boat will go to that and gold will be less.

13

@Penelinfi said:
Use stand ground to halt catapult fire if they are not needed. Double click and q I think is the default hot key.

Use Helepolis instead of archers, to guard your units against cavalry or elephants. Try using boats as well. Maybe transport boats. Attack with towers, build barracks nearby, hit and run. Use an aggressive wall, force them to walk near the shore where your boats are waiting. Just some ideas, I don’t know if they’re all possible on certain campaigns.

Try some phalanx vs the elephants. 1 balista = 5 improved bowmen.

You can also try pirate trade with the enemy dock. Build your dock as far away as possible. There must be no closer docks or else the boat will go to that and gold will be less.

Like I said, I know how to win. I’ve completed every campaign I’ve done so far. Today I completed mission 3 and 4 of the Rise of Rome campaign.

14

I got through the pre-ROR campaigns, but I’ll probably leave it there. The campaigns were a nice(ish) bit of nostalgia, but they don’t make for a good game. Maybe the AI is messed up in DE and that might have changed the character of the scenarios, but mostly I think we’re all just coming at the game from a very different place in 2018 than back in 1997. For a lot of people it would have been the first RTS they played, and that alone would have made the campaigns feel pretty amazing. These days, not so much.

I suspect it’s not really a matter of campaign design, but just the nature of the game - there’s only so many ways you can dress up doing the exact same thing. Maybe people creating custom campaigns will prove me wrong, but I don’t think it’ll be easy to create scenarios that are genuinely engaging and genuinely challenging and that don’t also need to be cheesed.

Personally I bought the game for MP, a bit of extra nostalgia was a bonus, but I didn’t expect to be amazed by a 20 year old RTS campaign. I’ll be much more interested to see what Relic can do with Age IV.

15

Im just half way on the babilon one, and The only kind of issue I have encounter is that the mission were you start with 1 monk, that one was really hard, because some times the AI would agro my little civilisation or monk.

but outside of that nothing crazy broken.

16

Re custom campaigns, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the old formats had been kept compatible. Played through much of The David Saga, which was a favourite back then for unique things it did. But I don’t think the included .ai files worked as they were supposed to, and it seemed like some of the old map tricks were also no longer the same, but the content is pretty fun and different from the default campaigns, which certainly do suffer from AI issues. It will be interesting to see what the future brings - hopefully more than a cash grab. But even for that, at least the game was priced well.

17

@SvelterPenny568 said:
The Rise of Rome campaign mission 2 is the worst one I’ve encountered so far. The one where your objective is to “destroy the army of Pyrrhus”. Either they attack you in the first 3 minutes and wipe you out with their catapult triremes and elephants (while you have only tool age archers and axemen) or they don’t attack for 30 minutes, giving you ample time to collect tons of resources and build up.

But even when you collect tons of resources and build up, the rest of the campaign is still brutal. You send wave after wave of swordsmen, improved bowmen and catapults, and they all get destroyed over and over again because Army of Pyrrhus has infinite resources to recruit elephants, elephant archers, helepolis, cataphracts, and they can micromanage every single one of their units to avoid your arrows.

You try to use catapults to take out their elephants but your catapults end up getting stuck on trees, then they decide to shoot randomly and wipe out your entire army (seriously, I’ve given up using catapults in this game, they kill more of my own guys than the enemy, they’re just not worth it).

And it’s not difficult because you already have tons of resources built up, it’s just a brutal slog of sending wave after wave at the enemy until eventually you overwhelm them after 3 hours of playing the campaign.

I dunno, I’m just not enjoying the campaigns at all. This game shouldn’t have been a straight up remaster of the original. The bugs really needed to be fixed. The campaigns could’ve been improved 1000% if pathfinding was just fixed and my units didn’t get stuck inside each other.

It’s great in custom games, but in campaigns only 10% of my army can fight at the same time because the other 90% are stuck inside each other and/or getting massacred by my own catapults.

Agreed. Also on top of that, their ships and tower fire in front of the unit. I’m very sure the player’s don’t. Even on easy it is so hard because the Devs made it even easier for you to get killed by the AI

18

@“Decius Flavius” said:
It’s already possible to use own PER and AI files! :smile: I use already some for my Seleucid Campaign (there is still space for improvements for my AIs, but at least I was able to stop most AI players from some annoying behavior like suicide scout villagers).

If I would have more experience, especially with PER files, I could make better AIs, because there are more options, than I ever thought!

@“Decius Flavius” : I have encountered the same issues with my campaigns. Is there any difference in changing the PER-files, like the tutorial on aoe.heavengames.com? I am very intrigued by your comment on this topic, and I want to fix this problem too, so if you have any solutions, please let me (and rest of us) know.

Thanks.!

19

@SvelterPenny568
On this topic though, I can understand that some campaigns feel much ‘easier’ than others, and that the difficulty is now linear, let alone in any order. But also try to look at it in a different way; some missions are fast, others are slow, but some also have a nice puzzle-effect, while others depend or your pacing. In that sense I’ve found the missions quite enjoyable, but I can understand some might call it ‘unbalanced’.

But now having made around 20 campaigns of my own, and I must say that it it one of the hardest parts in the editing. The AI-personality and strategy combinations not always have clear outcomes, and it will not always do, or act in a proper way like you’ve might intended for the scenario.

20

@LegoVogel said:

@“Decius Flavius” : I have encountered the same issues with my campaigns. Is there any difference in
changing the PER-files, like the tutorial on aoe.heavengames.com? I am very intrigued by your comment on
this topic, and I want to fix this problem too, so if you have any solutions, please let me (and rest of us)
know.

Thanks.!

Good news: You can edit your own AI and PER files. They work the same as they did in the original AoE and RoR. Like Decius, I have already started using my own customized AI and PER files for my Tai Gun campaign.

So the AI/PER articles in the Siege Workshop at AoE Heaven are still up-to-date. Stoyan Ratchev’s AI Editor and PER Editor still work with Windows 10 too. Alternatively, you can just simply use the Windows text editor. Link: Age of Empires Heaven » AI and Per Files

You can put your own AI files in this folder: Age of Empires DE\Game Content\AI Data\AI
Your custom PER go here: Age of Empires DE\Game Content\AI Data\PER

These folders are empty by default. However, when you put your own files in there, you can then select them from the player menu.

Hope this helps!

Ingo