This is definately a get good situation. Play the art of war to get an idea of how to play the early game. Make sure you get gold in the reach feudal age and build x villagers mission and you’ll beat easy ai everytiem
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4 spearmen rushing your base = aggressive?
Make 3 archers or garrison TC and you kill them, I believe on Easy, AI doesn’t go higher than 25 pop and on Intermediate it caps at like 40… definitely a “get good” situation, make 1 military building before 6 ingame minutes and make 4-7 units of any kind and you can fend off any aggression.
Like… even if by some star alignment, those spearmen/men at arms the AI made kill 10 of your villagers, you can outboom the easy AI because it stops vill production very early, the question for me is, how can you lose vs easy AI, other than not garrisoning TC, I don’t see how it’s possible.
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I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a ‘get good’ situation, it just takes time to adjust to the game. As a long-time AoM player I had the same struggle with AoE3 and AoE4. The easy AI will definitely catch you off guard pretty easily (pun intended) at first.
My biggest tip is to find the civ that clicks for you. And make sure to build a few outposts around to allow the distanced/exposed villagers shelter.
I would like an even harder AI on hardest. It’s somehow too easy to deal with after you figure it out its pattern.
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Hard agree. Easy AI should be easier for new players to try out the game with. Hardest should be harder since you can literally just ram rush them and they’ll fall dead of cardiac arrest.
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I noticed this also, to add some helpful bit; the AI tends to send 2-3 small forces pretty early to poke you, if you do kill them they they turtle up and wait for you to come get them, the usual idea for playing against an easy ai is to learn and mess around so you do not expect early attack (or tbh any attacks) so it can be rather annoying or unwanted to be raided so soon. I think if they are an agressive style AI they just keep sending small forces.
I understand the intent behind ut and it has helped me to get a bit faster and hjave a small defense force early going forward, but first time around its pretty annoying.
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Yeah researching before going into this game is a good idea even on easy AI.
After I did some digging I had better results.
But this is definitely a game where you need to play ALL of the Art of war, not just a few and jump in.
Im seeing that now.
Great tips, I appreciate the feedback.
Poking around the forums helped me get a better grip on tactics early on.
The early economy approach for me is a bit less effective than a late economy approach.
I got too wrapped up early on with production early on and neglected my troops
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Maybe it was the matchup, China vs Russia? Im going to try different factions and see which one works for me best
That’s what it seems so far. The game is absolutely gripping though and well made. Just feels a bit unbalanced at time, but that’s to be expected early on, I guess
China in particular has a weak early game and needs a couple of buffs, that is popular opinion. They are also more complicated to play, so you might want to come back to them after you are a bit more comfortable.
Alternatively, you can stick with them. Once you learn how to fend off the AI, you have all the time in the world.
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I thought this might be the case. I was able to figure them out somewhat with trial in error, but they seemed a bit underwhelming to say the least.
They have a certain ability that buffs their wall health in the castle age that helped big time.
Im thinking the tactic with them might be walling off and expanding through fortifications, idk theory-crafting lol
I personally find the easy to be ok for me but I can definitely see where it would be too hard for a lot of players. I’m no expert by any means and I’m not a competitive player. I can sometimes win against a Hard AI, but not always.
I hadn’t played an RTS in years though before this, so the first day or so I was getting butchered even by the Easy AI till I remembered how I used to play as a kid.
You have to make sure you aren’t letting units face their ultimate weakness. For example, don’t let horsemen fight spearman. Use horsemen against archers, and absolutely never let spearmen go head on with archers. Archers butcher spearmen.
You have to build spearmen and horses early. Upgrade your outposts with slits and put archers in them. Build wood walls and stone walls behind them later.
I build a house right away. Send all villagers to nearest food source. Only build farms once that’s gone. Train 5+ villagers to wood right away and 2 to gold.
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Once you can fend off the AI, doing a civs Mastery challenges can teach you more.
Each mastery level takes place in a match (though for some you don’t actually have to finish or win the match to get the achievement). What you do have to do though, is get your base up and running, and this will improve your starts while it teaches you more about the civ.
I am currently doing Chinas Mastery. I finished the English. I will just go through them all to learn what I can about the civs.
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Those are all great tips! Im gonna have to experiment more with them.
I didnt do a great job early on building outposts.
I got my archers way too late as well.
Horseman i didnt grab at all.
Yeah I just need to try new tactics
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I noticed that the “Hard or Hardest” AI’s focus is on training more villagers than military units. That is why they don’t feel as aggressive as “Easy or intermediate” Ai’s.
Easy and Intermediate Ai’s would train more units than villagers over time and would feel more aggressive but they upgrade technology much much slower or even age up.
On the other hand, Hard and Hardest AI would train too many villagers almost 80% (are villagers), and train very few units to fight, and feels so easy for most of the players. But they would upgrade technologies much much faster and have a better economy than Easy or Intermediate AI.
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There is definitely a problem with difficulty scaling, just put up 1 hardest AI against 2 easy AI and see it struggle. In every other RTS game the hardest AI would easily annihilate the other two.
Also AI only matches are pretty boring to watch in AOE4…
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Thats something I need to look into, for sure.
Thanks for the advice!
This is really helpful actually actually and makes alot of sense.
So its more or less, the harder AIs are playing the long game, right?
Interesting! Im curious to try out some AI matches myself and see what results i get.
Maybe I could learn something from it