I'm soooo tired of this!

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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So, I play exclusively 1v1 against the AI on the highest difficulty and on the largest map size, because I don’t have teammates to play with. Beating it is a grind — takes me hours — since the AI is super aggressive and attacks right away. Honestly, the only reason I eventually win is because I outsmart it.

But here’s the thing: sometimes I should win, no question: I’ve got all the relics, I’ve wiped out 90% of its buildings, it’s down to a handful of villagers, barely scraping together some wood, a trickle of gold, a bit of stone and food. And then, out of nowhere, it magically restructures itself, spawns villagers from thin air, and starts pumping out soldiers like crazy. Suddenly it’s resisting in this completely unrealistic way against a way stronger opponent. And not only that — it’s fighting me from some random corner of the map with equal or even greater strength than I’ve got!

Like… what is this? It feels like the devs hardcoded some “never die” mode into the AI. Instead of collapsing like it should, it just cheats its way back into the game.

Honestly, this only pushes me to get better and come up with stronger strategies, which I don’t mind—even if it feels totally unrealistic. I actually like that the AI fights back and rebuilds itself, but what annoys me is when it does so in this ridiculously unbalanced, artificial way. Suddenly I’m stuck in these unfair stalemates that make no sense. Today I actually resigned—a thing I never do—because normally I’d rather grind it out and win fair and square. But not against some “deus ex machina” nonsense that has nothing to do with the “impartiality” you expect.

People say the AI doesn’t cheat, but I’m convinced it does. Otherwise, it would lose almost every time. It’s only through brute force and ingrained resistance that it manages to keep fighting. In other words, it’s got a handicap. It multiplies resources in ways no human player ever could, which is why it hangs on. Instead of pulling those cheap tricks, I’d rather see the AI actually get smarter—learning to play better each time. That would push me to improve too. Right now, I’m basically fighting a caveman that relies on brute force and a few hardcoded gimmicks from the devs, nothing more. And in this era where AI is all the rage, why not invest in making it truly alive and cunning, capable of deep analysis and learning? Now that would be sensational!

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Do you ever watch playbacks of these games? As someone who has played a ton of AI games on Extreme difficulty, sometimes the AI will just give up if you sufficiently destroy their town, or keep destroying their new towns, but sometimes they do not give up, and a single villager wandering around out in no man’s land will build a town center, which churns out new villagers, which build more TCs and other buildings, and before long, they are basically back up and running, depending on how many resources they had before they had to rebuild.

The AI doesn’t cheat, it’s just very quick and efficient with things that take a human player time to go through. But even so, after you’ve destroyed their town, it doesn’t seem like you’re actually hunting stragglers down very well. It still takes time to rebuild, and if they have time to spawn a new town and military, I mean, what were you doing that entire time? I play large AI games all the time and I never have these problems. And there are definitely a litany of problems with the AI… Just not this.

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Oh come on, it’s not like I just started playing yesterday… I’ve been at this for decades. Of course I know exactly what you’re talking about. I don’t complain about the AI reorganizing or a lone villager starting over; on the contrary, I actually like that. What I do complain about are the impossibilities — like five villagers chopping wood somehow rebuilding an army of 500 elite units and giving me a fight, when they’re clearly not producing enough resources to justify it, and after I’ve already wiped out everything they had across the entire map. And trust me, I always stack up the 30,000 gold needed to get full map vision as early as possible. I know where they are, I know what they’re doing, and I know what they cannot do. That’s my gripe.

And just to be clear, I’m talking about rare exceptions here, not something that happens every single match. It’s obvious there’s some kind of exception in the code that makes this possible once in a while.

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I am pretty sure it does not cheat by itself. Only thing extreme ai “cheats” is it can controll all units individually faster than we can. So nope. If you play for very long game ai might have enormous resources in its stock and with 1 vill place 10 barracks in a corner and can pump out units for hours.

Do you use cheats? if you do, i think that AI gets them also. But i am not sure i never do. and also wathc you replays and you will see it does not cheat. unless you play some random scenario.

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I guess I don’t understand why, if you knew where they were, you didn’t just go and finish them off? There’s going to be a period of downtime for the AI between when you raze their town and when they are able to rebuild enough to start producing an army. And as another user said, if this was a long-running game where a lot of resources were stockpiled, then it doesn’t need to fully rebuild an economy before it can start attacking again.

Share the game in question and let’s see the playback.

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I’ve already posted about this issue, see my previous complaint. What you must do is change the ai setting.

DO NOT fight “HD edition ai” or “CD edition ai”.

Just pick the top-most one that says “ai”. They do not call it definitive edition ai but that’s what it is. Problem solved. Also don’t play 1v1 on a big map.