Ridiculous difficulty on FIRST mission

I have never had any issues playing AoE1, 2 or 3 single player. All the old games were optimized and great fun to play.
Even in closed beta I had lots of fun despite bugs.

Started playing today the first campaign (not tutorial) on Normal difficulty and got my ■■■ kicked even after enabling cheats (food and wood). AI sends 3-5 units EVERY minute.

What I think is that devs just enabled skirmish AI instead of tweaking it properly.

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The AI in the Missions is just bad. I had missions where the AI send all town members in my place and then they died and the AI give up GG… in one of the LAST missions. In the Tutorial Mission with the Priest where you need to take over a catapult the Catapult just run in my Base after 20 Seconds My priest take it GG…

PLS FIX THE AI

Here you can see the Priest thing : https://youtu.be/r8q9Lgc22nk

It seems like the AI uses often a standard random map AI strategy or one similar to that. And because the AI starts with a lot of units and are scouting for you, they attack you early, no matter what difficulty you selected.
The devs should rework the AI strategies in the problematic missions.
But good news are, that the devs working hard (but it is difficult) on the suicide villager issue^^

On moderate theyre ridiculously strong. Havent tested higher than that cus I got my ■■■ handed to me 3-4 times on moderate. I wonder how brutal is…
edit; the game is just ■■■■, its unplayable with these horrendus ■■■■ servers and the game isnt even close to being finished, gg release microsuft.

@Zeev said:
I have never had any issues playing AoE1, 2 or 3 single player. All the old games were optimized and great fun to play.
Even in closed beta I had lots of fun despite bugs.

Started playing today the first campaign (not tutorial) on Normal difficulty and got my **** kicked even after enabling cheats (food and wood). AI sends 3-5 units EVERY minute.

What I think is that devs just enabled skirmish AI instead of tweaking it properly.

You are exaggerating, I cleared the first mission(NOT tutorial) first try on normal… Sure the AI sends alot of troops, but just focus on defend in the begining and then it becomes easy.

Greek missions? Was very easy. I’m now in babilonian campaign and missions seems very easy for me. All completed in max difficult and there is no challenge for me now.

Difficult missions are in age 2 hd forgotten expansion, special one chinese. I have not seen all content, but seems that Age definitive campaign difficult is easy, ridiculous compared to age 2 hd.

I was able to beat the first Greek mission on hardest using the following strategy:

  • Send all your units to eastern corner, avoid combat
  • Build a dock and a TC next to the water behind the cliffs. Complete the wall with houses and a barracks to completely seal yourself away from the enemies.
  • Fish for food and get to the next age while repairing your walls in case you are attacked.
  • Once you reach tool age, make the required farms, train an army and attack red. You can ignore yellow and brown.

With this strategy your remote position should make the enemies less aggressive, while the lake has plenty of fish for you to develop your own base. This is one of the harder missions in all of the campaigns, so if you are new to the game, I recommend you start somewhere else.

I just kept restartring the mission, sometimes they don’t attack you so frequently, but you need to be lucky

First mission i passed wuite easy, but second mission, i haven’t played for 5 minutes and they attack, 3-4 scout jump in my village kill everyone and destroy everything. 4 axeman killed only 1 or 2 scout.
I tried with my photon man army, just after begining, they allready have the army ready, cca 10-15 axe and <10 scout. How to play against that with no photon man?

The second hittite mission on hardest is completely crazy. You’re given 8 unupgraded units in tool age and have to fight catapults, chariots, and “pharaohs” which are hero priests with like 150 hp within like 4 minutes of the game starting.

Yeah I was surprised even on the tutorial mission by the AI throwing units left and right at my position right from the start. I could beat them with my peasants but still, weird, weird, weird.

@GluurakLP said:
The AI in the Missions is just bad. I had missions where the AI send all town members in my place and then they died and the AI give up GG… in one of the LAST missions. In the Tutorial Mission with the Priest where you need to take over a catapult the Catapult just run in my Base after 20 Seconds My priest take it GG…

PLS FIX THE AI

Here you can see the Priest thing : https://youtu.be/r8q9Lgc22nk

Yes, I also got the catapult just in the first half minute…

The AI is just ridiculous, they will doing their thing wrong. See this post to get the idea how AI could go wrong
AI: Achievement Unlocked: Build a lot of Storage Pit Near Each Other

The easier difficulties must be broken, i’ve playing in Hardest and the game is pretty easy to beat.

This is one of the few fun missions in the game because it is actually challenging. I do agree, however, that difficulty often means nothing. The first Greek mission is almost the same on easy or hardest.

For me, most missions offer no challenge even on hardest. Why? Because the AI is brain dead. This annoys me so much because even though the original AI was VERY simple it at least was consistent and functioned. It gathered resources from its base, build up a force and attacked you. This AI is completely inconsistent and rarely functions as it should. On maps with water crossings, for instance, the AI completely bugs out and will gather resources from the other side of the map without any gathering buildings. It seems they prioritise maximum inefficiency, adding to this they love to suicide all their villagers and not reproduce. Many times have I attacked ghost towns. Its a complete nostalgia/ immersion killer and makes missions so easy i might as well have used cheat codes.

It really does feel like the random map AI was just thrown in to the campaigns, with its same faults and with it failing to adjust to the non-standard maps.

The question is, how could they ruin it?
I mean, you can do it by 2 different methods, or combine:

  1. Editor triggers.
  2. Writing from scratch in Notepad, then compiling it to AI file. If I could make it when I was a kid 15-20 years ago, why they cannot?

I just went and built my base in red’s berries. When you see how many berries they get, it’s little wonder they can send wave after wave… Unless you go and steal them, then you occupy that patch with club men, and can fend off the others.

@FelineProduct79 said:
First mission i passed wuite easy, but second mission, i haven’t played for 5 minutes and they attack, 3-4 scout jump in my village kill everyone and destroy everything. 4 axeman killed only 1 or 2 scout.

I tried with my photon man army, just after begining, they allready have the army ready, cca 10-15 axe and <10 scout. How to play against that with no photon man?

You need to research small wall immediately and wall between the forest and the river to the east. After the enemy can no longer get to your base, the mission becomes very easy.

Build walls and a single tower near the crossing. Boom, zero difficulty.

Seriously, the revamped campaigns are EASIER than the original, and by quite a bit.

Haven’t played the greek campaign since, but I remember just some months ago trying Age1 again und dying in the tutorial campaign for simiarl reasons - AI attacks early with archers (which it perfectly kites), and a stone thrower and I had nothing. Now its much easier, attacks are less frequent and I started with some Improved Bowmen and towers - much easier.
btw use towers, they are incredibly strong in this game.

@Ibuuyk said:
Build walls and a single tower near the crossing. Boom, zero difficulty.

Seriously, the revamped campaigns are EASIER than the original, and by quite a bit.

I agree that the new campaigns feel too easy on hardest, except for a few missions, but this is probably because there’s a bug in the AI’s behavior. Once that is fixed, I hope the campaign becomes a bit more challenging. At the moment it’s a bit underwhelming being able to walk over the enemies in missions that were very hard in the original. This is only true for the harder difficulties though. The AI seems very aggressive on the easier difficulty levels making the campaigns rather hard for new players.