In all my other games, it is “normal”. Hard to win, but possible.
If you stop collecting resources, you lose the ability to build or produce higher quality military.
If you have most of the relics, let’s say, 40 out of 50, you’ve got a goo, regular source of gold and from that you can keep going. At some point, with very few villagers doing anything, the opponent will run out and be unable to replenish anything.
In most games of a few hours, when the AI starts running out of resources I see a huge increase in villagers and a mad rush to collect wood. Hundreds of villagers madly cutting dowm trees to sell for gold and stone.
This game, with pop of 500, I’d say 470 was military. Scouring the map, I rarely saw any villagers. Maybe the odd, lone, tree cutter, a city centre with 6 fields and because all resources except wood had gone hours ago, no gold or stone and it was I who mainly harvested that gold and stone.
So we are left with relics and I had over 75% of them.
How can AI have so much in the way of resources when it didn’t have the villager numbers to obtain them.
I had far, far more villagers collecting and yet I was constantly trading my relic build up of gold for stone and often food when it was running low.
All other games I’ve played, I get it. I see what AI is doing and I can beat it 99% of the time. At the very least, I just have to keep going until resources are low and we get right down to almost nothing each and we are hurling spears at each other.
This was never going to happen in this game. Ai was as strong after 6 hours as it was after 45 mins.
Something was off.
This one on one battle was different.
First thing to know about the AI is it overbooms constantly. It gets up to an extremely high villager count and then deletes to make space for miliary as it begins to surplus. It’s relatively common to see the extreme AI push 170 villagers in a 200 pop game.
That being said, as it stops losing population (by winning the fights) against it’s opponent it’ll continuously kill off surplus villagers to make room for more military, since it no longer needs the economy to keep up with losses. It’s normal to see a very low number of AI villagers at the end of a game in which it wins. I can’t tell you what you did wrong or what it did specifically to win, but I can tell you that it didn’t cheat. You are wrong.
As someone who has spent probably dozens of hours specifically watching Extreme AIs fight each other, I can tell you right now they do not cheat. I would’ve noticed. They just play extremely optimally.
Whatever the AIs approach, I still wish there were more personalities. They always just Age up as quick and efficiently as possible to at least Castle age, and then at a certain point send wave after wave after wave… (catches breath)… after wave after wave after wave… long streams of military. Gets a little tiresome to try and age up as fast as them EVERY time, setting up defenses and bracing for impact EVERY time (or setting uo a forward castle ASAP every time if you haven’t been hammered yet)… then keep fending off robotic masterminds that can manage many things in parallel and series with probably 20,000 APM, resulting in a non-stop stream of military units coming at you
The AI is either too easy if you bump it down, or too quick and robotic if you step it up. I know you can do Handicap games, but that doesn’t change their aggro robotic personality and I’d really prefer not to use Handicap
Where’d the turtling defensive AIs of yesteryear go?
I thought it was stated at launch that DE’s AI didn’t cheat. How were they cheating until Feb '24? I vaguely remember they maybe borderline cheated with one or two things, but cant recall
@OP - Maybe the AI researched Spies at the castle to watch and know about your every move?
it doesn’t cheat by getting free resources, free units, free buildings, or better versions of stuff.
however it does cheat with knowledge. eg it always knows exactly how many villagers and military units you have, even without scouting
what are you playing where there are 50 relics on the map?
Also worth mentioning the game isn’t won by resource collecting but rather by efficient use of resources on the right personnel employed with the right tactics.
Whatever the outcome of the game, I want to know what a player did from a military standpoint so I can tell why they either won or lost.
Again, if you don’t deliver a mortal blow and let the AI hang in there, you will lose.
It was a joke. They’ve never cheated.
And even with that knowledge it’s still pretty bad. I wouldn’t call that cheating, mainly because it doesn’t really abuse such knowledge to gain any meaningful advantage, and calling it cheating simply confuses or supports players who aren’t very good and would rather complain about the unfair AI than improving.
Uh. Yeah. You need to beat the opponent in order to win. You can’t wait for it to beat you.
As for “letting the AI hang in there” I can’t say I’ve seen the downsides of doing so - they run out of gold just like any player, and when they do, AI is much worse in terms of control with trash armies than it is with gold armies. Bad prioritization of production, horde micro instead of focus fire with skirms, self-defeating on fortifications, etc.
Ahhh, hahaha, sorry I missed that one
In a way, that is cheating, though, imo. But I wonder how it gets utilized by the AI since they are always in aggressive mode and always aging up using the pre-programmed absolute quickest way possible without deviation or fail. And no matter if you have two military units or 50+, they’re still going to release the kraken on you asap (unrelenting waves of attacks), and they will morph their unit build strategy on-the-fly pretty well/quickly depending on what units you throw at it.
So, if they don’t exploit (or ‘cheat’) with the knowledge of how many villys or military units you have, what is the point in telling them that info in the first place? Couldn’t devs just deactivate that capability entirely?
I do like that the devs updated the AI at some point to start putting lumber camps and such around the map (more villy exploration), though… to make it seem somewhat human. It might be a little crazy now, but it’s better than the alternative of what I remember it was. Would be great if they started building walls and towers around their homeland, or sometimes at land bridges or something, too… as a turtler might (i.e., spend resources on defenses and protecting themselves, rather than only about attacking)
I think it’s a big part of their strength evaluation (I.E. when to attack, when to retreat) and without it, given the lack of information the AI will generally have to work with, it’s likely that they’ll commit to extremely poor fights regularly as they won’t be able to make practical assumptions of enemy strength like a human player would.
And they already do that, so again, if this constitutes “cheating” then they need to cheat better.
This is behavior the AI actually already does use on occasion, defensive civs will sometimes wall off on sides as a precautionary measure. I’ve seen it done by the Portuguese more than once. In team games, the AI like to pollute the trade lines with BBTs and Castles when possible, as every civilization.