It’s largely subjective, based on how much experience you have, how hard you generally try when you play and what RTS games you have experience with previously.
There are mechanics differences that have to be taken into account to some degree (eg, AI can’t dodge ranged attacks so its ability to micro with massive APM doesn’t help it there) as well; though those don’t apply to the complaints in the OP which are more about general behaviors.
I think that if you want to relax and play at a mid level (eg you don’t want to worry about pushing APM, but you don’t want to be able to AFK and still win) the Intermediate and Hard AIs are fine.
If you don’t have much experience, you’re still learning how the difference civs work, etc. then the AIs can still be a bit difficult for you because they at least understand the basics.
If you are used to keeping all your buildings producing 100% of the time and really play to reach your peak performance each game, the AIs are probably pretty inadequate for practice/giving you a challenge.
I think the AI is doing okay when collecting resources and producing units, but the unit behavior is very weird, it has a huge amount of units, but rarely attacks on a large scale and retreat very easily. Furthermore, its units are doing nothing most of the time, either wandering on the field or camping near the sacred site. Even when I attack their last landmark, the AI does not defend it. Leaving a large number of units after surrender.
Overall I would agree with OP that the hardest AI is too easy in the current version.
This simply isn’t true. I was very quickly able to get gold in the early economy art of war, pretty much the only thing that will stop you is if you idle your TC, assuming you do even remotely sensible things with your villagers. I didn’t beat the hardest AI at my first attempt, and when I did beat it, it required a lot more than just avoiding idling my TC.
I think there must be some randomness depending on the civs and map. I have used a build that certainly wasn’t terrible, and while my execution isn’t amazing, I wouldn’t say it’s “very bad”, but I have lost against the hardest AI. In one game, I inadvertently had a tiny hole between the end of a palisade wall and some trees, and that was it, basically gg when it got through that hole. I was continuously producing vills and knights and archers as French, and the post-game graph showed it was matching my total number of units up to when it got in via the hole.
3.3% of players have currently beaten the AoE 4 hardest AI. In AoE 2 DE, 4.2% have beaten the extreme AI. In AoE 2 DE, I find it very map dependent. With a 2 castle UU strat on Arena it’s very easy to beat the extreme AI in AoE 2 DE, much harder on Arabia. The AoE 4 hardest AI on Arabia, I’d say is easier than the AoE 2 DE extreme AI on Arabia, but harder than AoE 2 DE extreme AI on Arena. Part of it is game balance, in that when I beat it, I made nothing but archers (then rams with the archers just to finally take down the landmarks), and in 2 DE this wouldn’t work as the AI would counter them with skirms, but it can’t do that in 4.
The AI is bad at dealing with a spear/archer/ram push at about 8 minutes.
I suspect working out exactly when to accept some villagers are going to die, but nuking those rams means the push ends, is difficult to code. I don’t know about AOE 2, but generally all AIs struggle with competent rushes (unless the game is so anti-rush you should never do one.)
As people have also said, the AI seems to get confused on when it should be pushing or not. Sometimes it will do nothing but camp an army on its starting TC. Sometimes it will seem to attack move into a keep with no artillery and just accept the whole army will die for no gain. It has a tendency to split its army up - which can arguably be sort of effective early on, but at 20-30 minutes, moving deep into Imperial, it just means you can crush multiple forces and then easily win.
With that said, if you let the AI breathe for 15ish minutes, you can have some interesting games and yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if people lose if they are floating bags of resources and not really following any particular strategy beyond “do a bit of everything”.
Garrison your scout and build a lumber mill on your gold, age up in 7 minutes, build 1 rax and 1 archery range, and then just make sure every building is producing most of the time. Except for when you idle all your food villagers for 2 minutes while sitting at 0 food, of course.
You’ll have double their army at 10 minutes, crush that attack, triple their army when they attack at ~18 minutes, slap down a couple rams and A move their base and you win.
There is some randomness, but I’ve done a ton of build order testing and every single time the Hardest AI hits with some crappy 8 unit attack at 10 minutes.
I’m not raiding them or anything either… because if you do that then they just break down and suicide charge their villagers, which obviously ruins whatever they were doing.
I should clarify, my awful build executed badly is not a spear/archer/ram push at 8 minutes. That’s obviously not realistically achievable while roleplaying as a 9 year old.
It’s an AFK in my base until 20 minutes then build 2 rams push.
Obtuseness aside, I called it an AFK build because you can spend about 90% of the game tabbed out or cooking or whatever. Just come back every minute and Q a couple times on each building.
Idk, this isn’t my experience. When I went archer heavy, they built horsemen. When I built a lot of knights, they brought a lot of pikemen with horses, and then tried to attack my archers with horses while trying to engage my knights with pikes. Some were more effective than others.
I was definitely playing different than my standard (trying out some quick aging option with a skeleton army), but it does a fairly decent job with all of that imo. It even built mangonels and sniped my springalds when I was busy dealing with a raid. The issue is that it doesn’t know how to push.
That said, you could always play with friends if you want a proper challenge.
I havent bothered completing a game vs hardest ai because its just a waste of time. Sometimes when I make or practice build orders I play vs it, but just until BO is complete and I resign.
I did do all campaign on hardest but that don’t count. I think I’ll be skipping doing the masteries because the requirements for some of them are boring and dumb, and there’s not much of an reward. And I expect a lot of other people that’s not completely lost when it comes to RTS will feel the same about playing vs this AI
I don’t understand what’s the big deal with AI here.
AI is expected to play dumber then a human can. So if you want a challenge - why not queue some multiplayer game? Or just put 2-3 AI to have more fun.
Say I want to play relaxed and chilling skirmish focused on base building on EASY, and I just can’t without having the AI spamming nonsense rush attacks…
Some time Hardest AI attack with many Siege Weapons and few soldiers to defense it. it too easy to crush that attack (just aim Siege Weapons first) and push back at their base with few efford (because their base have too many Siege Weapons and few soldiers to defense it TOO) and EASY WIN Hardest AI.