I know, noone cares single player games but still i want to make an offer to developers in this forum.
Beating the AI is not hard in medium and hard levels cuz when you attack with rams and few troops in the second age it collapses. But when you let it live, the AI is almost unbeatable cuz, after the castle age, it will have almost limitless gold and food, and it will rush you as unstopping waves. There is no strategy in it. Just spamming.
I offer banning trade in single player games as an option to limit the infinite gold. This will add an economic and strategic aspect to the game like aoe-2 instead of endless spamming and clicking.
This is more of a safe market issue. There are plenty of single-player maps where neutral markets either don’t exist, or are in risky enough spots that they might as well not exist.
While I don’t mind some maps having safe trade, there are currently too many maps that have both safe trade and sacred sites that spawn super close to each player (thinking of you high view) that lead to drawn out games with basically infinite resources. If a map has safe trade, it should force people to contest middle as a tradeoff. Maybe one or two exceptions for people who love stuff like AOE2 black forest type maps or something.
I though about re-introduce the mechanic from original Age of Empires 1 , at least in seperate game mod.
The docks pruduce “merchandise value”, which limits the trade, so player can not to attach unlimited traders (ships) to the dock and make infinite gold like in AoE2 and AoE4