Do enemy AI still essentially quit after x amount of time?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Hello,

I’m an OG AoE II fan who had the game installed on an old Win98 PC back in the day until that computer died. In subsequent years, I have off and on played using a less legitimate portable copy of the game. I’ve since realized the error of my ways and have bought the DE and am currently downloading it.

Before I get too deep into playing the game again, I want to know if the enemy AI has been fixed at all in subsequent years.

Here’s the situation: I always built custom maps and loaded them with tons of resources and tons of enemy soldiers, etc. Planning for very long drawn out battles of ridiculous proportion. The bigger and more ridiculous the map/number of units the better.

But something that I found was that after “a while”, most enemy AI would just sorta stop doing stuff. They’d stop farming/gathering or stop building altogether. I went so far as to download custom enemy AI scripts and I would try setting them to maximum difficulty only to find roughly the same problem with all of them. I don’t recall the typical timeframe for this but generally felt like within 1-2 hours of playing the enemy AI would just stop being effective. I also found that they were often just not that difficult to beat as long as I was able to repel the initial attacks at the very outset of the game. Like, if I simply worked fast and got a sufficient defense built in time to build up my resources it seemed like I could beat every enemy every time.

So, I ask anyone else out there who has played DE with custom built maps and ridiculously large armies/resources. Do you find the enemy AI challenging enough and do they continue functioning after, say multiple hours of gameplay?

thanks in advance!

PS. It’s awesome to see what is perhaps my al-time favorite game still so actively enjoyed. A little surprising actually lol. So yeah, thanks for everyone who’s helping keep this thing alive.

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AI in definitive edition is orders of magnitude better than it was in previous versions.

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  1. de ai is stronger then old ai, doesnt cheat (no free resources) and can use more human like meta strategies. (Build orders and unit comp)

  2. apart from being stronger generally, de ai has an extra dificulty level (more options) and the increase in strength between different ai difficulties has been made more consistent (so it doesnt get slightly stronger when you go moderate to standard then way stronger when you go standard to hard)

  3. you can use the the 104 taunt (dont resign!) To stop the ai from resigning yntil you defeat it. I havent personally tried this so I can’t speak to how well it works.

  4. Apart from 104, there is a selection of new taunts you can use to order the ai to do stuff. Most are useful when you have an ai ally.

Enjoy de and the new features and content mate :slight_smile:

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I’m pretty sure the jump from Moderate to Hard is actually quite large for some reason. And then it feels more natural, up until maybe extreme, where it’s a lot better than the others.

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