Hardest AI seem dimwitted

Age of Empires IV IV - Report a Bug
1

Hi all,

The newest patch for some reason seems to make the hardest AI really dumb. Lots of idle villagers even at the very start. Starting vills do nothing and only new vills are actually doing work. This seems to fix itself after 2 or 3 minutes.

I was playing this with mods (advanced game settings and double villagers). I will test some more and post further if needed.

1 Like
2

It appears to be advanced game mode mod that’s breaking the AI.

All good. Hopefully it’ll be fixed shortly

3

This is issue with skirmish AI and her behavior toward units spawned by scripts.

At the moment AI is unable to properly control spawned units. Might be just a problem with lack of documentation or it can be something that makes AI unable to recognize what is she supposed to do with spawned units.

Its trivial to replicate as villagers are best example of unit that AI is unable to control properly if they are spawned via script.

Create new mod and spawn starting TC and villagers completely via script. Once game starts AI will slowly start using villagers, but after a while she will either completely ignore spawned villagers and leave them idle or she will send them to random position of map to chop wood or build something.

4

Not just a problem with mods.

Played against a French AI on a default island map and it kept build trade carts on its island (no neutral market on it). It then proceeded to food starve itself (had plenty of wood) It never even reached imperial because it just refused to collect food from anything other than fish (which ran out or where denied).

5

Its possible there are multiple issues and everyone reports something different as there are multiple variables. Including the fact that each civ AI behaves different.

  • Single player Skirmish AI is not same as Multiplayer Skirmish AI, creating issues specific for single player. (or at least multiplayer AI behaves much better with scripts/mods)
  • AI is not able to act correctly if starting conditions are spawned by script, instead of default start. Mainly spawned units in single player are rarely picked or operated properly by AI, most noticeable with villagers.
  • AI during PUP and after PUP is worse then it was before, most likely AI machine learning tuning went wrong
  • AI might act incorrectly in multiple situations, for example AI prefers to built Granaries over TC in situation where it has no TC. This might be also related to incorrect tags for buildable buildings when TC was never present.
  • AI was spotted attempting to use allied player farms, instead of building own farms.
  • I also heard of issue where AI idled all farmers, which might be related to bug where villagers get stuck with full carry capacity unable to finish drop off.
6

Hey @UnshodShark8607! Was this seen when playing hardest AI as well?

7

Yes, I never bothered with the lower difficulties as the hardest AI isn’t very hard to begin with.

8

Thank you for the additional info @UnshodShark8607! AI work is ongoing, but we’ll look into this.