The AI is getting better these days, thank you devs! Now with lots of improvements being made, I think I can report this relatively non-essential issue :
Non-African and non-Indian AI doesn’t see livestock as a source of food. Fattened cattle will simply keep moving from one TC to another without being eaten.
Wanted to bump this thread.
AI doesn’t use livestock for food.
It collects the animals and then nothing. I’m talking about civs that have no special livestock mechanic.
Maybe because AIs like to collect bovines?
AIs are most likely against slaughtering animals 
There was an AI mod on GitHub by jameskicklighter that was much better at using resources and would prefer animals over berries and farms most of the time. Unfortunately, I think recent updates made it obsolete because there’s an error when I’m using it. The devs should definitely take a look: GitHub - jameskicklighter/aoe3de-ai: Ongoing AI Mod for Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition.
We’ve been using the same fix for years in Legacy AOE3 mods. It’s not that hard to implement…
I’m going crazy, I thought there was something already written that handles livestock? It was something super simple like “if you’re not booming eat them right now, otherwise wait but never build a livestock pen, let them just sit there”
Maybe I was looking at a mod, though.
So I went digging and found quite a few rules already written to handle livestock, but they often don’t kick in until 15 minutes and even then it just sends 2-4 villagers to gather them.
What’s missing is building a livestock pen, training more livestock, and automatically gathering once they fully fatten.
Then there’s another issue, which is the livestock are sent to gather by any ol’ TC, but when it goes and looks for livestock to slaughter it specifically looks at the main base location (usually the starting TC), so if there’s a second TC like in your picture there, it can send them to the wrong one.
The livestock just keep going from one TC to another.
That’s consistent with what I’ve read. The AI sends its herdables to a random TC if it can’t find a more suitable building like a livestock pen or hacienda.
Have you ever seen the AI gather from any of them? I could’ve sworn I had seen it.
Never. It never gathers.
@Osprey23103109 You were right. Found the issue:
Wow… nice.
So it will never use the livestock because the civ is not the Japan campaign enemy?
Nice. Hehe. Devs hope you see this!
The AI sucks in general, they build millions of mills and estates they don’t need, most of them are empty and they start farming while still having natural resources around them. I wish they’d focus an entire update on the AI alone to sort that out.
They don’t suck as much. They do fine enough on land maps without walls. Long way to go though - the extra mills and stuff, sometimes they just have 80 vils on food if they want to achieve some target. Not sure if its the best way.
The AI on the PUP branch is really bad though… but thats okay.
And there hasnt been almost any changes to ai in the Pup… man, we have been waiting this update for long and the AI is the same. I think devs should just tell us they are not going to touch ai/campaigns any more so us can put all of our resources into updating it.
Almost 3 years in and the ai still can’t cross water.
Trying to improve the AI is funny. There are countless threads going into all sorts of civ designs, unit designs, and history, but when it comes to AI it’s usually just “be better”. Then when you make changes it’s usually difficult to see if they even work.
