Moderate is way too easy for me, and I don’t really have fun. The AI resigns quickly and doesn’t pose much of a threat. Problem is, Hard is way too hard, and I get wrecked on literally any map that isn’t Arena.
So, there should be a difficulty level between Moderate and Hard that allows for a gradual transition. Or you could just tone down the difficulty of Hard, but that would present the same problem for people who are already good enough for Hard.
This. This all night and all day.
AoE2DE allows you to chose between 3 different (or was it just 2?) AIs, the classic AoE2 AI is worse then the new AoE2DE one so you can set it to a higher difficulty.
You can also try using handicap, giving the Medium AI a 10-20% handicap might make it more challenging.
But I agree that the gap between Medium and Hard is something that probably many players will fall into.
I have been playing hard lately and it becomes a situation where I dip to an island and launch raids, smuggle via trade cog for 8 hrs. My Ai teammates are trash but the enemy goes crazy. I will never play against the Spanish/Mayans again haha.
I think there’s even a bigger gap between Hard and Very Hard, or what is called the difficulty before extreme.
At that difficulty AI is not capped at 140 pop so you can’t simply outnumber it.
I think it’s hard to quantify the gaps between AI difficulties.
It’s also hard to make an interesting scaling. I wish AoE would have a build in personality selection.
I think a lot of casual (coop) players want big late game fights but not having the AI attack early or raid their eco.
Easy and Medium AoE4 AI did the worst thing on release. It attacked early and aggressively but never aged up into Imperial.
So if you managed to survive the early attacks it felt boring and not rewarding to attack the AI.
I remember Command and Conquer 3 let you chose between different AI personality like:
Also per AI difficulty.
This would allow you to customise your experience.
You want to fight off a big attack instead of constant small attacks then you set your enemy to that personality and maybe give yourself a defensive AI ally.
Or the gap between medium and hard is too big? Then maybe give yourself an easy ally or fight against a medium plus an easy AI.
Iirc you cant decide the difficulty for each AI Player, only for all of them.
But i would Like to have the Option too choose different difficulties forveach AI Player
From what I remember, the HD moderate AI is a little stronger than the DE moderate AI, but it is still not strong enough for most players who struggle against the DE hard AI.
Currently, the two fixes I know for someone who finds DE moderate too weak and DE hard too strong are:
Yeah, this would be great. Currently it is only possible to mix DE hard AIs with DE hardest AIs using a mod.
Good to know
What is that Mod called?
I was not talking about AoE.
I wish that feature existed in AoE.
It is called “Hardest to Hard”:
I don’t know how it is implemented though. Since it apparently has not been updated since end of 2020, it might not work with the DLC civs, depending on whether is directly access the (newest version of the) DE AI or whether it hard copied the (old version of the) DE AI at the time when the mod was created.
LOL, I always thought Hard difficulty as a “Noob Slayer” since I never win against Hard difficulty but tries so hard to “not win Moderate difficulty under 30 min”.