PUP AI discussion

I think it actually was DECREASED because of the AI changes they made. And 2 DE AIs don’t cheat, I believe, but I could be wrong.

There’s very slight cheating in terms of it having some knowledge it shouldn’t have, but it only affects its decision making, not its progression, so if it beats you, you can still learn from what it did.

please role bring back the old ai. why is it in the game right now? the pup is running and you read that most people hate this ai. delete it. if this ai stays, than its finaly time to leave the game.

aoe 2 ai say something else

Yes, I mention it in the next post I made. What I said about “nearly every game” is still correct.

The AoE2 AI still cheats. Just not as overtly.

It always knows exactly how many military units you have.

Yes, that is much better than most games.

It’s also taken a long time and a lot of work from many people to get to this point.

It was terrible for much longer than AoE4 has existed.

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if i watch a replay at aoe2 i can see what the ai is doing, and it looks comprehensible.

aoe4 is right now ridiculous

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There is absolutely no reason to claim that they “improved” the AI. That is false advertising on the devs’ part and I’m quite angry.

The AI still makes super bad decisions. They just decided to make those decisions excusable.

In AoE3DE, the AI cheats but you can punish it for it’s bad decisions. And it is always getting better at punishing you for yours. AoE4 hardest is just this huge giant bullying a child. It doesn’t matter if its taking smart decisions because its always bigger than the child.

In a way, all AI cheats - a computer by definition has more APM, and I’m perfectly okay with that. I dont feel bad when I lose to a computer. I feel bad when the computer is designed to never lose.

This AI is not improved. Its just designed to stop us from complaining.

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Well it’s real to beat him :slight_smile:
I agree with you just need to improve the AI and not give him extra bonuses.

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The made a bunch of changes to the AI. The resource gain modifier only affects the hardest difficulty.

I don’t think anybody’s claiming the AI makes good decisions all the time. Or that people have to like the resource gain change. But let’s not pretend other changes weren’t made just because of unhappiness of other aspects of the patch.

AIs cheat more than this. They often don’t respect Fog of War (unsure of the status in Age IV), they often know your army comp (again, unsure of the status in Age IV) and a bunch of other things that contribute to them making decisions that seem smart.

Again, feel free to not like the AI getting more resources (on the highest difficulty). But you really need to understand that video game AIs aren’t Turing-complete masterpieces that in this case the devs decided to ruin in this patch. They gave it another cheat, on top of cheats it absolutely already has, to see if it gave players more of a challenge. That’s the long and short of it.

Agreed with most comments, making an AI without cheats is tough, and indeed some cheats are fine.

The trouble with the double resource change however, is that it was coupled with an earlier attack priority. This breaks the early game for most players. Yes it’s still dumb, but in AOE4 resources disparity is much more pronounced in the early game - there isn’t much tactic or tech; you either have the numbers or you don’t. There aren’t many superior strategies to employ. And I think this is what makes it particularly unfun for many players.

There’s the second, admittedly temporary issue that it broke match making for quick games. Players are no longer sure of their skill level against the new AI. 2X res isn’t an incremental change you can adjust on the fly for, it’s a huge leap in AI strength. It means queuing for hardest may now land you with teammates who aren’t prepared for this AI. Whereas prior to this you could carry weaker players in a team, that’s no longer a luxury a team can afford.

One solution would be to play on Hard instead. I just played Hard and the AI felt abysmally weak (I have 1000+ hours & lvl 300+ for context). Hard isn’t a replacement for Hardest despite the other non-resource tweaks (not that the devs claimed it was). Overall it feels like a game mode has been ripped away from quick match with no recourse.

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3d Bee vs IA

Bee just beat the AI, very difficult level, made a fast Castle and spammed the man-at-arms. The AI doesn’t know that the man-at-arms’ counter is the knight.
Tip for cheating AI: Make a counter algorithm shown below and the trick of the machine is that it will always know what units the opponent produces and then it produces its counter.
As a name for this level: Unbeatable

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I agree, this is the big problem. It’s a very large jump from Hard to Hardest.

And very good point about those queuing for vs AI. I think they are often forgotten even though they probably represent a significant chunk of players.

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Exactly. Look at the shock on his face at 4:24:08, he goes on to tilt his head, swears and asks “what’s going on?”. If this is the reaction from a top 20 player, one can imagine how the rest of the player base is faring.

I don’t know what his APM was, but my wife heard his keyboard and asked “are there machine guns in your game?”. Suffice to say it’s significantly higher than the average player. If a player of 3DBEE’s caliber couldn’t end the game in feudal (and he couldn’t; he was on the defensive after his raid got shutdown, he also tried to deny the AI’s Castle age as well as a keep and failed at both), then the average player will find it that much harder.

I play against the AI with all the resources at maximum, to practice battles similar to micro Flavuis, but I would like the advanced configuration to allow limiting the number of villagers (because the resources are at maximum) since the machine produces them unnecessarily

I relate to this. Co-op is now a lottery because if one team mate quits early or is eliminated early (and this is a regular occurance on this new patch on hardest AI), then it’s gg for those remaining because the differential is simply too hard to overcome.

didnt work it seem with the replies

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This is exactly right.
I managed to beat the Rus AI just now in a conventional 45ish minute game - but only because at various moments it didn’t just select its whole army and attack-move my starting TC.

I’d be surprised however if anyone can beat the Malian AI without tower rushing in dark age. The AI had a 1k resource army size at 6 minutes. 3k at 8 minutes and then 4.5k at 10 minutes, even though its managed to lose 2.5k in a botched fight at my TC. At 12 minutes its hit castle, has 70~ pop of rapidly upgraded army supply, and unsurprisingly just walks into my base. It had collected 3 times my resources, and was only really getting started.

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Devs should remove the cheat code of double resource gather rate or any AI cheat.

Make AI smarter , not boost their resources automatically without earning how on getting resources.

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thing is, every AI is cheating in some way, like unachievable APM, which every AI has, then some, but not in aoe, have straight up map hacks, i think coh2 ai had those, can’t say if aoe4 has em or not, but i’d like to see that being looked at, then tricks like mentioned above, knowing what units the opponent has with no scouting etc.
the reason i don’t like to call knowing units with no scouting or unlimited apm cheating, is it technically ensures the scouting ai (shared in aoe2 and 3 DE in auto scout feature) isn’t as good as a human would be, which with auto scout in those games is crucial, auto scout is useful if you want to let initial scout to fully reveal the map without shift queuing waypoints for it every now and then, so ye age 2 and 3 DE have solid reasons for those sorts of ai design calls