Extreme heavy cheating of AI on higher difficulties

Objectively, it is not cheating. It has no capability whatsoever to do so.

It’s micro potential is hardly revolutionary, it’s not going to win games off the back of it. If anything, it’s macro game is better than its micro game and it’s macro game is nothing special.

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Ai micro sucks in part because it’s done unit by unit. OK maybe if the AI was super smart it would be an advantage but since it’s isn’t, it ends up being a disadvantage, since it means you can just run your melee unit in their archers/siege army and make them scatter their army so that each unit ends up being singled out and easily taken care off. People mostly complain about this because it makes the AI annoying to fight more than anything.

It makes them seem way more competent if you try to use Onagers against them in small numbers since they pretty much swarm as opposed to pushing with coordination. Outside of chokepoints they hardly ever bunch up, and individual units targeted by the mango line scurry away like ants.

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The only cheat that AI uses is simultaneously managing eco and military xD

Plot twist: What if FeedAardvark824’s AoE:DE AI has become sentient? :smiley:

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The idea of resource cheating is pretty easy to check. Play a game, record it, replay it, go to the AI’s point of view and keep an eye on the resources. See how much comes in with each villager, how long it takes them and what upgrades cost them.

Historically, resource cheating on this engine has usually been very blatant. The hardest AI in Galactic Battlegrounds (which is my example because I did check it for cheating ones using the replay function) just gets a big ball of extra resources, and I think an extra bonus whenever reaching the next age too. This is what gives it faster uptimes and more military units.

But as everyone else says, the AoE2 DE AI does not do that. The advantage the makers of this AI had was literal decades of experience from human players. The original developers basically had to guess how the game was best played and write a script for that. For the new AI they could imitate the way top players play. It’s not the best imitation, but it’s good enough mostly. There are fan made AI’s that do a better job, particularly on the user patch version which supports some extra AI commands, making it easier to get the exact behavior you want. (Or so I heard.)

The DE AI is certainly good enough to handily beat me (or it was before I got into multiplayer, haven’t checked since), but there are a lot of people who can beat me without cheating, so that in itself is rather weak evidence.

AoE2 is simply a very complex game, it takes experience to play well, and the AI is build on experience.

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The extreme AI isnt really that good. A 1k player (1v1 rating) should beat it pretty much almost always.

Seems like a fun experiment: at the AI to a fake account in ranked to see its rating. So you can also track its performance over time.

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AI is attacking with ~50 huskarls, and 5-10 onagers, in each 20th second, each time with the same amount of units, even if the allied ai is attacking it from opposite side of the enemy’s town. A mega zerg rush, in each 20-30 seconds. So there is no pause, as if a group retreats, the other groupt is arrived already.

The cheater AI has about 7000 units loss in game (me about 200), but still attacks without a pause. No human can do this, especially controlling the tens of onagers in onager rush, one by one like the AI does.
Obviously the enemy AI has a huge build time bonus, and unlimited resources.

BTW the path finding routines are the worst that i ever seen in a game, frequently choses the blocked path in the opposite direction to the target point, instead of the straight clear path.

You know that Huskarls are designed to counter archers?

Sorry, but for me it looks like you witnessed the power of goth lategame against archer civs.

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Combo necro+didn’t take the time to spectate the AI to check allegations. A solid 7/10 , use full caps next time.

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The AI does not cheat in AOE2 DE

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You should try watching the replay and see what the Ai does. If you can’t beat the extreme ai 1v1 you need more training and to be quicker. The Ai has a few advantages over us mere humans, that’s for sure. It control each unit individually, it knows which units you’re making if the scouts scouts the military buildings you have, and it uses the market like crazy. Macro speaking it knows everything, but doesn’t cheat for resources. i’m always impressed by how well the Extreme Ai plays if you don’t rush it, it does create tons of units that can be hard to hold, but if you play 1v1 you’ll see that it runs out of resources after that really big push.

it also makes a lot of mistakes, like sending dozens of vils to steal your gold that’s protected by a castle, or take your woodline for no reason etc but no cheats.

But anyway i doubt i can change your mind, you’ve been saying that it cheats for over 7 months now, so whatever! :grin:

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You realize that Goths have a tech that creates barracks infantry 100% faster right? They can get huskarl creation speed down to sub 13 seconds. I think it might even be sub 10 secs with everything researched. With enough barracks and villagers they can easily create about 50 huskarls every 20-30 seconds. The AI never cheats. Why are you so disbelieving on this? Yes, the previous versions would get free resources, but the definitive AI just knows how to streamline it’s start and boom up. If you let an AI playing Goths reach a point where it can spam huskarls at this rate you have done something wrong in the early game. The AI hasn’t cheated, it’s probably just boomed up to about 100-150 villagers, collected a heap of resources, built a ton of buildings, and is now in a position to spam units against you. It’s not the AI cheating, it’s you not being able to handle it and getting salty.

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That’s only half truth, the AI doesn’t cheat resoures but on extreme difficulty, it does cheat research time. It can instantly turn all archers into XBow in 1 second after reaching castle age, or turn all knight into cavalier (if they have enough resource to upgrade) after reaching imperial age in 1 second. That’s just blatant cheating, and I have seen this time and time again, it’s not even funny. :sob:

It has the same research time as humans, it can be verified when viewing the recorded game.
On lower difficulty levels than hardest researches and train time are slower than those of humans (among other handicaps).

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I’ve played some all-AI games where it was like 4 v 3, and I walled in an AI enemy early and cut them off from their allies, and maintained that wall for some time (not easily), which managed to visibly starve that AI of resources. They went trash pretty quickly due to no trade gold and were noticeably unable to rebuild as many buildings, particularly those costing a lot of stone.

I don’t know enough about the underlying mechanics to say for sure but it doesn’t seem like AOE2 DE’s AI cheats. If they did, a few eco-busting tactics I use shouldn’t work so well on them, yet they do.

They can micro way too good though, mangonels are very hard to use against AI archer/skirms, this is imho bad for new players that might think they’re useless and skip training them. No wonder a lot of noobs prefer cavalry civs, much easier to deal with archers with knights, than with siege.

AI also annoyingly clogs all the map with buildings.

Here’s how you can verify the AI doesnt cheat:

Play a map that is migration style but has some starting resources. The AI doesnt transport vills to expand economy so it doesnt know how to play those maps.

Just yesterday I was playing Jungle Islands, where you start on a small island in the corner of the map. There is no gold or stone on the starting island so you have to expand and ‘island-hop’.

The AI opponent didn’t do that, and as a result never had access to gold. Nornally it spams fire galleys but this time around it was just chopping wood and farming, and when it ran out it just idled.

If it can cheat, why didn’t it make a ton of fire galleys? Because it doesn’t cheat. I understand the frustration when you lose vs the AI, but this is a clear case of Occam’s Razor: it’s not some elaborate hidden cheating mechanic; you simply need more practice to beat the AI. There’s no shame in that.

What’s more embarrassing imo is going on here insisting that you are right andthe AI is cheating despite literally every fact disproving this. Open an AI script sometime, it really tells you how the AI operates. It is very efficient, yes, but it doesn’t cheat.

wow you are so bad and delutional its hilarious. even if you are trolling you do it in a way that makes it very convicing you believe your own dribble. the ai does not cheat at any level. you are just incapable at observation and have such low level game skills that even the rediculously stupid gameplay made by the ai looks like an omnicient and godlike smiting in comparison to yourself. you are so bad that the only way your mind can comprehend it is that you believe the others must be cheating. thank you so much for the laugh you have given me and all these other commenters

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The only way the AI cheats at high difficulty levels is by knowing your army composition without having to scout it. This is noticeable on maps like Black Forest where you can wall out the AI’s scout at the start of the game, then boom and not fight until the Imperial Age. The AI will always have the best counter to your army available to the AI’s civ, without ever actually seeing it until you start fighting.