I’ve noticed the naval AI being too passive when playing at higher difficulty. I don’t remember noticing this issue in the original game. The AI does create warships and these also attack when in proximity, but they never use them as a means of aggressive expansion and/or to invade with land units.
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Yes. It seems naval ai isnt implemented. There were some patchnotes a few months back where devs said they were taking amazon, caribbean and ceylon from the “all maps” random pool when playing against AI until it has “trained” enough, but then they didn’t say anything. I hope its comming, tho
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Yeah, the AI was always like this, even on the original game. I remember as a kid that I feel like a pro because I could beat 2/3 Expert AI on the Amazonia map, because the AI almost never did nothing and just let me boom o my side of the river. 
(And I remember that the Age of Mythology have a similar problem.)
This is a pretty know issue. Even the Spiffing Britt made a video about this a while ago that has over 500k views.
Age of empires 3 AI is not good the water.
2 Likes
The Improvement Mod for the original game did a good job fixing this issue then, as that’s where I spend most of the time playing the game. I still think it needs to be addressed as this issue makes the AI feel half-finished, especially for expansionist/naval civilizations like the Portuguese.
Yes, the AI cannot play on water maps.