Suggestion: Update Villager AI

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Despite most aspects of the game being under human control, a lot of the things your units do is still powered by AI. For example, it decides what your military units will attack first, or which tree your villager will chop next. This is essential to gameplay and I’m glad that related issues like pathing and woodcutting are being addressed.

There are still two situations though, where the villager AI gets in the way however.

First, when being attacked by the enemy starting scout. The AI here for your vills is already pretty smart: an unloomed villager in dark age will run away from am attacking scout. Once it gets loom, it will turn around and attack. But once your opponent gets to feudal age, and the scout becomes too strong, it again runs away. In normal situations this is all fine. The problem however, is that if a scout that has less hp, or even only 1 hp, attacks a villager, either unloomed in dark age or loomed in feudal, it will still run away, despite the fact it can fight a low hp scout. I think the AI should be tweaked to automatically make the villager attack the starting scout (not all scouts) that it can defeat based on hp. You could argue that you as the player should just pay attention to vills, and sure, but in that case why are we ok with villagers auto-engaging scouts in dark age if they have loom? It’s just terribly frustrating to find a 1 hp scout sniped one of your villagers, even though it could have easily been killed.

The second issue concerns boar luring. Since a boar can easily kill a loomed villager (except a goth vill), you do not want to have your villager ever engage the boar during the lure. Unfortunately the AI of villagers tells it to attack wild animals that attack it, such as wolves (this is good). What isn’t good, however, is that this same thing can happen during a boar lure. Specifically, this occurs when you, after aggroing the boar, you click the vill to another resource (say, a tree next to your tc, or a sheep underneath or near it). The moment the boar attacks, the vill will switch work roles and in doing so, automatically turn around and start shooting the boar, something you Never want happening. This sometimes even happens when you just click your vill past the TC on the ground, even though that’s how you are supposed to do it. Therefore, I suggest the AI be changed here that a villager will never automatically attack a boar if it is being attacked by it, just like it would automatically attack a full hp scout: because it could never win the engagement.

Tl;dr: make villagers auto-attack in fights with scout cavalry (and eagle scout) in which it can 100% win, and make sure villagers don’t turn around during a boar lure for any reason.

2 Likes
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For the first one, that seems pretty reasonable, but I think it would be better if it only affected the starting scout. If it effects all scouts it kinds of nerfs scout rushes, which might be part of your goal, I’m not sure. We know they can check the starting scout, because it’s the only one able to use auto-scout. The second one though, how will it know if it has only shot the boar once before this kicks in. If you have to manually tell it to shoot the boar a second time for long distance lures that could get annoying. I can understand how your issue mentioned might be annoying, but I don’t recall experiencing it, and I don’t really want a solution that might make luring a boar harder for other people. I’m not opposed to this though, and if it was done right then sure, it could be added.

1 Like
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I meant only the starting scout of course, I wouldn’t want to nerf my favorite opening rush :wink:

Let me edit that

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Then, we could suggest an ‘attack stance’ for villagers, that will tell them whether they should run away or attack back, against any kind of enemy.

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And please stop making vills flee when they’re building something and they get attacked, it’s hard enough to keep vills alive, but a well microed skirmisher can severely hamper villagers building times just by doing 1 dmg to them one by one. This is ridiculous.

And if possible, replace the normal villager stance with military unit stance for supremacy villagers, a 80HP 9atk 3/4 armor villager that flee from skirmishers and pikes is pathetic.

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Villagers not being bothered by attacks while building or repairing would be stupid. Attacking villagers that rewall behind attacked walls would become less effective, you can’t deny towers and castles anymore… Also Spanish villagers are allowed to be so strong precisely because they can’t auto attack.

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Why would it? Military units in defensive mode just stand still dying to arrows if enemies are a bit far away from their LoS.
It’s not like villagers are so strong anyway, so archers would eventually kill them easily enough, my concern is with less stronger units like skirmishers, skirms do like 1 damage even with fletching to vills with loom, but that is enough to constantly stop a villager from repairing/building something, unless the vill controller constantly spam the build/repair button until the task is done, how is that good? Imho that is pretty stupid.

As for spanish villagers, without the auto attack, unless you micro them all the time, the attack boost is almost irrelevant then. Still better than nothing, but a shame indeed.

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Maybe if they only ran away when they took 5 or more damage in a single attack.

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Look at it this way, if all these requested Qality of Life features get implemented, the game would be easy for everyone. Instead, git gud (for example, learn how to force drop resources or how to finish off that wounded scout) and it gives you an edge over your oponents.

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My suggestions weren’t ‘quality of life’ improvements (as in additions to the game which it wasn’t doing before, taking that burden away from the user).

My issue is with things the game is currently doing that it really shouldn’t because it hampers Gameplay.

That said, responding to people’s concerns with ‘git gud’ isn’t going to help anyone. The game should accomodate players of all skill levels and play styles to play the game, and not just the top players and other tryhards.

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Like, learn to click faster or use a macro to click 100 times to build a castle under archer/skirm fire?
That is “git gud”? :joy:

Why did the devs implement auto-farm and auto resource gather then (like when you build a lumber camp), make everything manual instead, so you can “git gud”. Also remove rally points and select all military/all same buildings, too easy, move/select units one by one, “git gud”.
Pathetic excuse.

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Did you even read my message? Do you really want to get walled out forever because your ranged units can’t hinder rewalling anymore, do you want the most ridiculous castle drops to succeed despite you correctly targetting villagers with your army?

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If you can’t kill the villagers because you lack the proper “firepower”, the best you can do is hinder the construction speed by some amount (30/50% or slightly more?), because the builder can just spam click to ignore the attacks.
You would still be walled out or castle dropped if you can’t kill villagers, right now this situation is just a matter of who spams the most clicks in the smallest amount of time.
Of course if the opponent/defender has 4 villagers and you have 20 crossbows no amount of clicks can save those vills, but if you have 2 crossbows vs 10 villagers (or 5-6 skirms vs 10 villagers), you’ll still get walled/castle dropped anyway, just a couple of seconds later.

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No, what I’m saying is that you would allow such things to happen despite adequate military from the defender’s part. Yes they can spam click, and yes it slows down the construction, which is quite a big deal and way more than “a few seconds”. So in the end we do have a way to hinder construction, there is also a way for people to finish buildings despite being under pressure even if it’s worse than normal construction, and you want to throw all this aside?

Also this is kinda hijacking the OP, all that Morgathor want is more consistent behaviour regarding villagers and the starting scout, and here it devolved into “I want villagers to ignore being hit by advanced military units for one precise task”

1 Like
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I proposed a minor magyar buff related to this: “villagerd deal extra damage to starting scout (or kill it in one hit like thet do with wolves)”

This kind of change would help to protect against most early rushes a bit.

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Wtf that’s just crazy

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I didn’t want to start a thread only for something that was so specific, but as a thread about villager AI was already here I wanted to bring that aspect to the general attention, and why I thought it was worthy of a change.
You don’t agree, fine, but you could just ignore or flag my posts if you felt I was hijacking the OP. Ok case closed, no more talking about this.

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We should take away the auto attack against scouts alltogether, that would also nerf walling bc you could prevent a single loomed vill from walling by paying attention to your scout.

With the current ultra wall meta this would make sense and make scout/m@a play something usefull again since you could sometimes stop walls

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At least that would make it consistent across the ages, that’s true. Still wouldn’t mind a consistent auto-attack against the starting scout though