Doesn’t it only know how much units you have, not what you build? Sometimes I can go full boom right in its face because I have more units than it does but doesn’t attack because it doesn’t understand I have no military, other times I just need to hide my main army to bait it into the wrong composition.
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Yes, the AI doesn’t know your army composition without scouting it.
If you show the AI 10 arbalesters while hiding 50 paladins in the back of your base chances are that your paladins will encounter skirmishers (if the AI decided it needed a counter) and no halberdiers (unless they were part of the strategy already, as can be the case for some lategame siege heavy play against non-meso civs).
This is the reason why the AI almost always has one unit scouting. In certain strategies it will even use the information of what kind of buildings it scouted (encountering an enemy stable in early feudal age is likely going to cause it to train spearmen).
This is all verifiable in-game and in recorded games at any time.
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Perhaps it doesn’t know ‘exactly’ what is in the opposing army comp. And it having what it thinks is its best available counter unit (not necessarily a literal counter unit, i.e. Spears vs. Knights), is just pure coincidence! Nevertheless it still has information that it can only know by having some kind of “vision” on your base at all times (not necessarily what human players define as “vision”.) Which is, you know, cheating 11.
this is why the AI has plenty more resources than you
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you have a secret weapon try pressing F3
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If you think the AI is cheating that badly, play with humans. Or eat your humble pie and lower the difficulty.
he just needs to delude himself into believe extra variables are in play because his own skill is so bad he mentaly cant process it. as an armchair phycologist i believe he puts alot of self worth into his skill in games and when that skill is nonexistent his brain is forced to rationalize it as the ai cheating rather then go into a deep depretion and accept that he is just bad and his self worth is misplaced. thats the only explanation i can find for this insaine alligation. that or he is a brilliant troll
This is not Total War or Civilization. The AI does not cheat. You can look at replays if you’re not sure. It does use the market though.
The extreme kill count you describe is simply because you did not manage to get decisive actions. If you don’t kill more resources than they can accumulate, all you get is a stalemate.
What’s really funny about this guy is he essentially wants AI to be easier (talking about the AI’s omniscient macro and micro, no longer talking about resource haxing), but refuses to lower the difficulty. I mean what more is there to say? Lower the damn difficulty until it suits your needs.
Once you can get decent enough to fight a hard AI, maybe it will seem more “fair” to you. Meanwhile we are playing against the hardest AI, and enjoying our time with such a vicious and good opponent.
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Hi!
I’ve been an age of empires player since 1996 and maybe I have some experiences to share with you.
I’s important to point out that there are 3 types of AI in the Age of Empires 2: DE today:
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The Conquerors AI (CD AI) - The original Age of Kings and The Conquerors Expansion AI. The worst of the 3 by far, even on Hardest or Extreme levels.
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HD Edition AI (HD AI) - It is by far the most aggressive, and because of that it even wins 1v1 against the DE’s AI. I did tests on Hardest and Extreme and HD’s AI easily beats DE. It is important to say that I tested it in the Arena, it may be that on other maps the thing is different. Seeing how this AI plays, it really looks like it’s cheating, but watching the replays I haven’t found any proof that it does in fact cheat. Aggressive gameplay can be confused with cheating. One explanation for matches where this AI barely collects map resources is that it usually happens in team games, and she abuses trading.
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Definitive Edition AI (DE AI) - The smartest. It has well-defined strategies for each type of map. It uses several tactics used in multiplayer and is also usually aggressive in open maps above the Moderate difficulty. Even so, it doesn’t beat HD AI in a 1v1 in Arena at Hardest and Extreme levels. This is probably because the HD AI is aggressive and starts attacking in the castle age, while the DE AI always booms.
Bottom line: so far no proof that AIs cheat on Age of Empires 2: DE. But it’s worth bearing in mind that the HD Edition’s AI is much more aggressive and won’t stop attacking if she have the resources to do so, especially in team games. This aggressive behavior can give the impression that she is cheating, I have felt it on my skin a few times, but even she is easily beaten in 1v1, even in Extreme. It’s also important to say that in the old games these (AOK, AOC and HD Edition) the AIs cheated on Hardest, even so it was possible to beat them easily on any difficulty. If you have any more information about this let me know.
Hey dude @microkrap5974, sorry but DE AI don’t cheat. You can literally google the AI scripting (written by Promi) and go line-by-line through the coding to confirm there’s no resource gifting, etc. Absolutely 100% no doubt of it.
Best I can think of is you’re getting confused by the AI’s macro. Computer’s pretty good at doing heaps of little specific things at once (as computers tend to be good at) so it’s not hard for it to put a plan in place (read ‘build order’) to continuously and efficiently produce (especially if you as a player make no effort to interrupt it). That’s not cheating though; you can do it too if you try hard enough.
Anyway, peace! Hope you find that love of the game!
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The AI doesn’t “recuit” their units in “20 seconds”, buddy. It actually recruits WHILE they’re attacking you. It’s programmed to do so because it doesn’t take its enemy for granted and won’t stop until you’re defeated. Just like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator won’t leave its task for tomorrow.
I remember thinking the same thing the first time I played against an Extreme AI on DE. I’ve never played HD so my last experience was against the original AI from AOC. I wasn’t aware of the degree of urgency and sheer military strength needed to defeat such opponent and ended up on an endless cycle of launching unsucessful attacks and defending against the constant stream of enemy troops. The match wore on until I finally gave up.
Keep in mind that you’re facing a computer which is fully capable of executing multiple tasks at the same time. This is by the way the fundamental ability you need to match their pace. To launch an attack while mantaining the economy running so you can reinforce your men on the field with more troops (or just have enough troops in case your fast attack fails) is absolutely necessary.
Like many have already said on this thread, you can watch a replay of a match and see there’s nothing up on the AI’s sleeve but good micromanagement and urgency.
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Nah, the AI don’t cheat. You can set yourself as AI and watch them play to test them out. They’re just superior with their micro and marco skill, they play along their stratery. They also very dumb againts early wall and tower strat.
There’s a forum called: Aiscripter which people share their AI. Most are very good, even better than AI-DE, there’re also AI which are very chill and play with casual speed for you practice againts, Developer of AI-DE also post there.
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Where the AI has an advantage, on top of following a scripted behaviour (a double-edged sword as it exactly knows what to do, at the expense of being less flexible), is the monstruous quantity of data a computer can process. Most players can only focus on a few things at once and quickly mismanage everything if they have to switch between several areas of focus, say fighting on 2 or 3 fronts while still managing your economy. The AI has none of those problems.
At the extreme, an AI could become a micromanagement nightmare if sending instructions quickly enough to perfectly micro its entire army. Look at how you use and abuse the active pause in campaigns (well, I don’t know if you do that but I certainly do 
) and imagine controlling all units like that. Making them dodge all if not all projectiles, return fire at each unit with the exact amount of damage required and not a single arrow wasted… name the situation, it reaches the mathematically optimal solution. Though it would surely require machine learning to reach that level.
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I have played AoE since its release mamy moons ago.
I dip in and out and usually play just myself and AI in a skirmish for an hour of two of down time.
I play hardest level and can pretty much beat it every time but my mpst recent game, after an update,mleft me resigning from the game because it was never ending and left me with no doubt there was somethimg fishy going on.
Ai was playing Vietnamese and I think i was Spanish.
My usual tactic is to grab almost all relics and collect as much stone and gold as possible.
I usually get attacked fast and have to rebuild by moving aroumd the map a few times but ultimately my resources and gold gives me the edge and AI folds with nothing left to play with.
This game was different. Ai had maybe 6 relics and I had possibly 40.
I did not see AI collecting gold, stone or wood and there was not much farming although I did see the AI building castles all over the map.
The AI had a massive army. Almost its entire 500 population was military. There was perhaps, 30 villagers doing very little.
No matter my obvious resources advantage, nothing reduced the army size.
Battle after battle saw no change in forces.
We are talking 6 hours of constant goi g around the map rebuilding but no matter where I built a city centre, a huge stream of AI raised it to the geroumd again and again.
I could not make a dent in the AI.
Sometimes I’d think the AI was down and out and all of a sudden, it’s army was at full strength in seconds.
It clearly had no gold, no stone and possibly no wood and little food but it was behaving as if it had 400 villagers collecting nothing but resources.
I had to resign as it was impossible to beat. The AI always knew the second I built a city centre or barracks.
So, in this scenario I have to conclude that there was some kind of cheat being implemented. There were almost no villagers,mhad everything destroyed with the exception of one town centre and perhaps 6 fields…that’s it, and yet full army that never reduced in size.
There has to be a cheat. There is no other explanation.
I know "real"gamers will say it is because I can’t play but it’s because I play so often and have wisened to how the AI works that I feel that this AI oppenent of Vietnamese in Hardest, had a setting that meant it couldn’t be beaten.
Didn’t you look at the rec? Even if you don’t have recorded game enabled the most recent will always save as 'rec" (which you should save away if it’s notable, before it’s overwritten)
It happened something similar to me when I played against a Hard AI in DE the first time. That day I learned you can’t slow cook or even take your time at tougher levels.
You rush first and don’t stop until you have the AI on the ropes. Let it off the hook and you’re done. A machine’s ability to process data and make quick, simultaneous decisions is unmatched by the moment the game asks players to do more than a couple tasks. Imagine managing precisely 6 TCs. You can be the fastest person doing it and know exactly which resources and how much of them you need but you simply can’t do it at the same time
Best tactic is to spend resources on upgrades and troops as soon as you collect them and go for it harassing their Villagers while you can reach them. The moment their workforce is safe behind castles, Mangonels and troops, you lose.
More recently, in a Capture the Relic random map, I had the upper hand with heavy cavalry and trebs on a map with very few gold. AI had already spent their gold because I recall they were Turks and I wasn’t seeing Janissaries after the first wave. So I decided to train more Cavaliers and even gunpowder to reinforce my front instead of just hunting Vills.
This gave the AI enough time to simply flood Hussars (freely upgraded, +1 pierce armor) to the point they leveled 2 Castles (!!!) I dropped near their base. With the remaining gold I had I tried to answer with Camels but to no avail. Shit had already hit the fan and I resigned.
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I guess it’s time for the update for this thread
As of February 26, 2024, the Definitive Edition AI does not cheat in any regard whatsoever.
I’ll update the thread again in a few months when we get another cheating accusation… probably.
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“init.per” and “interaction.per”
(goal cheating yes)
(cc-add-resource food 4)
(cc-add-resource wood 3)
(cc-add-resource gold 2)
(cc-add-resource stone 1)
you would taunt 200 to the AI to ‘cheat’
Technically, the script is there but, according to comments, is completely disabled/removed. I do fully trust that promi does not cheat but, I would request that this is removed from the AI though. (If not already in the works.)
edit: and yes, I am aware that some cc- commands are used. (Mainly due to the normal commands not working the way it was intended.) But if you are wondering, any command that uses cc-* or up-cc-* are ‘cheating’ technically. but as I said above, they have to be used. Although the “add-resource” ones are the one’s you are looking out for.
edit: The only exception would be if someone modded the AI to enable this section of the script again and you got subbed to it without your knowledge. (Which would be a pretty mean thing to do… but possible.)
I pretty much only play long boom games with extreme AI and it never obviously cheated in any of my hundred+ games in the past few years.
I actually got kind of annoyed at how the AI was particularly vulnerable to surprise attacks on their town centers. Distracting them somewhere else and razing their town centers to the ground with ~80 Paladins wouldn’t cripple them, but it would clearly slow their military down and usually cause them to build the town centers somewhere else, unprotected, and thus be even more vulnerable to attacks on their economy. I’ve even had the AI bug out a couple times and stop creating new villagers, and their ability to fight fell off a cliff and the game was basically over. It wouldn’t have been if they were cheating.