New AI is supposed to not cheat, I am playing against hard AI, I occupy all their trade routes (killing all carts), have spies researched, and know they mine no gold anywhere on map. Their only technically possible source of gold is trading wood, units are max 200, and I know they don’t have more than 50 wood cutters - yet they keep spamming onagers and very expensive units in unlimited amount, in past few minutes I killed units that cost tens of thousands of gold. My allied AI constantly beg for gold, even that one has nothing to build units for, but enemy has no problems.
Is there any way to debug where do they get gold from? I don’t believe this is possible without cheats.
in replay can I see it from perspective of players? we all have some relics, but I have significantly more of them and can’t make 1/10 of what they can. I managed to also kill all of their villagers and I kept killing them, they have no source of anything and yet kept making massive waves of expensive armies. I am pretty certain they must be cheating, there is no other way to play like this. Is cheating visible in replay somehow?
Most important question - can I somehow disable it? I want AI to be hard, but cheating AI is an overkill.
Yes, absolutely. Watching the replay should answer your doubts.
Look, I’m pretty sure that DE AI (the one that is just labeled ‘AI’) doesn’t cheat. Be sure that that’s the one you’re choosing to play against. Other AIs such as the CD AI can indeed cheat. Aside from that you can always choose the difficulty that matches the better your skill level.
OK, I will try to figure this out from the replay (the game is actually ongoing for couple of days lol)
The problem is not AI difficulty - to be honest “moderate” is just too easy. Hard is somewhat OK, but the game is just neverending, I can defeat them, but given that even when I block them from mining any resource, take all their relics, block their trade routes, they still have no problems rebuilding whole village, spamming out fresh army and continue the game in an instant. It just makes me wonder how they do it - only resource they have available are farms, they can’t even mine wood. I block all forrests, kill all their villagers when they approach it, they can barely mine 30 wood before they all die - so how they even keep the farms on?