So I played a lot of aoe2 hd on steam, and had difficulty against moderate and couldn’t beat hard. I got aoe2 definitive edition and tried moderate first and annihilated them. So I did a match against hard and I annihilated them as well. What is going on? I thought this new AI was supposed to be more challenging. I haven’t tried hardest yet, but will give it a shot tomorrow.
Same for me, new a,i seems easier than HD. Such a shame.
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Did you try the extreme difficulty level yet?
Lower difficulty levels have been adjusted according to feedback, moderate difficulty was perceived to be too difficult on the HD Edition.
We are still working on it and every feedback is helpful, if you have a recorded game to attach for us to look at that would be great too! 
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just played a 4v4 with 7 moderate AI, didn’t rush or anything but no one created more than 50 villagers or 30 military, with 200 pop cap. Is that normal? it felt like the AI was actually good but didn’t produce enough military so it would be easy enough to win against it.
I’m not really complaining, it’s just i find it a bit weird to balance the difficulty that way, but it may make a lot of sense.
The “easier AI than HD” destroyed HD AI and AoC AI on Extreme at the same time. You might want to reconsider that.
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No i don’t need to consider that. Since on Moderate and Hard HD seems to give much better challenge. I haven’t tried hardest or extreme yet. I was specifically talking about the two difficulties the OP mentioned which i my self found to be less of a challenge than HD versions. Although since the dev above has mentioned the difficulty was lowered on these settings it actually proves our point that they are less of a challenge on moderate and hard.
I’ll give hardest and extreme ago later and hopefully find a nice balance.
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AI doesn’t shine on all maps, fair point.
I played a single player game against a hard AI last night. I was impressed at how it accompanied rams with villagers so that they would repair them. Plus, they try sneak villagers at the back of your base to harass your economy. Tonight I will try the Hardest AI.
But overall, they seem to be vulnerable to dark age rushes.
Most of us are, so not a big deal
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Because they are not the same. DE’s difficulty increases on a more stable rate
I will say one thing, i like being able to tell an ally to build a wall around his town for treaty games. I would love it however if the enemy could also do this in treaty games? I am not sure how it would be done, maybe a setting at start to encourage it or perhaps when a player tells a.i allies to build a wall enemies also build a wall if they can spare the resources. It’s not perfect of course there can be gaps and such, but i tried it a few times on 4v4 treaty games and was quite impressed to see walls around an a.i civ. I haven’t seen this since the original.
Having played against extreme 1v1 now, I do find it to be perhaps between moderate-hard of Barbarian AI from my experience. This seems to be in line with what I see from streamers and content creators. I think that’s an improvement for sure, but it does seem like the AI is holding back almost in early game especially. I would like to see it improve over time to get more in line with Barbarian, at least until someone cleverer than myself can mod it to the new DE civs and balance.
Hello ferchalurch,
Hard difficulty of Barbarian has no limitations so it plays under the same conditions there as the standard DE AI does on Extreme (the DE AI does not play at full strength below that difficulty level).
Personally I’m sure TheMax himself (top player and creator of Barbarian) will update his AI soon before anyone else does. I’ve seen him post about it in the aiscripters community already.
And personally I’m also sure we will see a lot more community AIs soon since we improved the scripting capabilities for that on DE.
We are still working on the DE AI and that can include improvements to the AI’s strength on the extreme difficulty level, any feedback is always welcome and helpful!
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Would it be possible to have multiple strengths of AI in the same match? I’d like to be able to play vs 1x hard, 1x extreme AIs in the same match, for example.
It would also be great of we could set the profile of the AI - perhaps allowing one AI to play defensively, the other to play aggressively, etc.
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Hi!
I love that you’re putting work into the AI, as me and all of my Aoe2-friends mostly play against AI in coop. We think it’s fun and less stressful than PvP.
I have played some games against Hard AI, and I would say it’s roughly the same as the HD-version, with maybe somewhat worse micro (which might have been moved to harder difficulties, which is fine by me). It gives me a great challenge as long as I play on an open map and don’t rush it.
There are two things that have been on my mind since HD, that I would love to see in DE:
- A way to adjust the AI difficulty more finely, especially between Moderate-Hard level. Most of my friends are at that level, and I believe it’s the most common skill level for casuals. The problem is that often Moderate ends up being too easy, and Hard too hard. The easiest solution I see is to add one extra difficulty level in-between Moderate and Hard, that lies somewhere between those. You could call it “Intermediate”. Getting one extra difficulty level in there would make it much easier for people to progress from Moderate to Hard, and to find the perfect difficulty for coop games.
- Something else that would greatly increase variety is an “AI strategy” setting when starting a game. This would allow you to choose broad strategies such as “Rush”, “Boom” etc, and perhaps even more specific such as “Knight rush”, “Feudal rush” etc, and of course “Random”. Right now the AI mostly seems to go Fast Castle, so you usually only get long macro games. It would be really cool if the AI would go more specific and aggressive strategies sometimes, to get more variety and force you to scout and react. I have seen it happen in HD (knight rush), but only in very specific circumstances, so it seems very rare for some reason.
Lastly, I always missed the ability to choose a different AI difficulty on different players, so you can add both a Hard AI and a Moderate AI in the same game, making it easier to balance the difficulty, especially in team games. However, I’m guessing it’s a lot of work to implement, so I would prioritize the two things above first, although this would of course give us much added flexibility as well.
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As the title says they are super easy on even the hard difficulty. They only build themselves up but never attack or produce many troops (or they will literally make 5 troops max). I can kill them 1v7 it is so easy. Which is stupid cause then i put it put to the hardest difficulty and they destroy me no problem. So i played with my slot being the new ai and the ai keeps setting itself to superiority -3. i am assuming that is why they are so easy to beat cause when they get attacked they actually go up to superiority -1 and actually starts producing units. They still dont actually attack anyone though cause as soon as the enemy stops attacking they go back to -3. I cant be playing matches were theres no in between killing 7 of them on my own on hard and then getting destroyed completely by 1 civ on hardest. Even the new AI gets its butt kick by the HD ai. ■■■■ ive ran the game for 8 hours with my slot even being the AI and i went back to check on them at the 8 hour mark and not one civ was destroyed or even that damaged. They were all just hanging out. Ive played it on multiple settings to. Besides upping the difficulty way past what i can handle nothing seems to work. Iv tried setting the population to 200 and the game seems to works alot better. The AI is aggressive (although i still dont feel like their really that aggressive on moderate). Or maybe its still messed up but at the 200 max pop mark it gets better when lowering the difficulty. Im not entirely sure what the issue is all i know for sure is that i can 1v7 an entire group of hard level AI cause they just wont attack me. And that putting them on the “hardest difficulty” seems to work but im not nearly good enough to take them on at hype aggressive. I dont even care to go up that high anyways. Me and my buddies like playing it on moderate (All three are experiencing it as well). So it kinda makes the game no fun cause its either no challenge at all or insanely hard.
Im playing on steam, this has been a problem in every version since release, i use windows ten.
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Thank you for the report SkyrimDragon, we are working on this issue!
Until then a temporary work-around can be to use 200 as highest population cap.
i recently played a few games with a friend against hard AI in a random black forest map with 300 max pop and everytime the ai managed to build up a decent economy but even after 1h30 to 2h00 they ended up with a largest army of 18-20 which is ridiculous compared to hardest which build a better economy and get an army of 160+ … i feel like hard AI should at least be able to pull out 100 troops after 2hours in a 300 max pop map. during early beta hard AI was fine but got changed during the last 2 weeks of beta i believe .
Thanks for the response. I also wanted to add that i experience this issue in multiplayer and single player.