Tactics vs. AI

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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What tactics do you employ when you are overrun by AI and/or are in a stalemate with them, and you need to recover but they keep patrolling and finding your hideout and stomping in you when you try to get your econ back again?

And in these situations, they magically can do 1000 things at once to be persistent pests.

Curious what you do, land maps and water maps.

I sought refuge with one villy in a transport and parked it at corner of map until they wiped all my buildings out. I went ashore when I thought the coast was clear, rebuilt 20 villys, they sniffed me out, and stomped me, so I go off to corner with transport again. I built navy to control coastline and succeeded in doing so, despite their AI algorithm sending viily after villy to rebuild docks while I kept destroying their villys and docks. So, I tried to re-establish econ in a remote coastal area that was clear a long while. Got to 150 pop, econ great, many fishing boats, too, started building military. Tried my best to stay out of sigjt. They sniffed me out and stomped me. 1 vs. 2 AI just becomes a slog at this point. I will eventially win, but 3 hrs of this so far is annoying

I get tired of the endless waves and streams of enemies once they find you. No matter what you do to dent their econ, they build right back like machines. Have had multiple games like this when the endless rivers of troops come your way. 5 hrs later I will win. Looking for better tactics. (Or more realistic AI)

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1x1 vs AI on extreme.

  1. Use the largest map available (ludicrous is best).
  2. Take a map that has a lot of wood; lacking wood later on will choke you.
  3. Create a stable early on and around 10-20 horsemen to explore the entire map: divide it mentally in 9 quadrants and send one for every quadrant of the map, at least.
  4. Grab as many relics as you can. I mean AS MANY AS YOU CAN. Build several monasteries (always 2 together) and send monks like crazy to hunt them. You should find the relics easily, because you’ve explored the map, remember?
  5. Build home centers everywhere. At least one or two in every quadrant of the map. Build villagers to gather food from farms and others to cut wood in each one. So, if the enemy destroys one or two (and it will…), you won’t be concerned. Spread around the map, use every piece of land, make it yours.
  6. When you’ve got a strong enough economy, build 6+ stables and click twice on one of them to select them all at once. Build paladins like crazy. You’ve got the gold, you can do it. Gather as many as you can and set them to “No attack stance”. That way, they will only do what you tell them and not care about the enemy, i.e., they will not defend themselves and loose precious time and health fighting them instead of pursuing the tasks you have assigned to them. Have them cross the map towards the enemy’s town and attack all their home centers and mills. They will be forced to build an entire new town somewhere else!!
  7. You expected this. Now reap the enemy’s monasteries in the “old” town and get those relics too! After a while you’ll have all of them (like 40-50 on ludicrous) and the enemy will have none. It will have to live from the land, that is, you will find it easy to chase its villagers chopping wood. Much easier than chasing them when they are surrounded by castles and a big army. And yes, chase and kill all the bastards!
  8. While doing this, look for their new home town and erase that too from the map with paladins or cavaliers, whatever you’ve got. Main thing is destroying the home center and the mills. Have paladins chase and kill as many villagers as possible too.
  9. The enemy is going to build and rebuild home towns several times! Don’t give up. Ah, and keep destroying its houses, that way it won’t be able to create large armies.

TIPS:

  • I sometimes box in my relics behind thick layers of walls in a corner of the map. The fewer walls they find to destroy, the better, most of my protection is made of trees. But if I leave my monasteries in the open, I count the relics I’m holding in them and build the same number of monks (and one or two vilagers), that I put aside to take them to another place of simply put them into a new monastery that I build nearby immediately after their destruction.
  • Instead of destroying all the home centers you can choose to destroy all castles. Both lead to their surrender sooner or later. The newer Ai is more resistant to that, but it still works. It’s like a principle of the game.
  • Don’t concentrate excllusively on battles. That will only wear you out. Yes, they are fun and you must fight them, but you have to hit him incessantly on his weak points.
  • Work all the gold mines on the map, don’t leave any to the enemy
  • Use the “eye” in the castle (sorry, forgot its name) to see the enemy on the map. If you attack it for a while and don’t keep unnecessary stuff around (old lumber and mining camps, and the like) that will call its attention it won’t bother much and keep to itself. So, don’t give it any clues of your whereabouts. Keep quiet, spread around, small towns everywhere, use the spots it’s not using to build your bases, gather resources and give strong blows to its resources.
  • If you attract its attention it will attack you. If you don’t do anything it won’t bother after a while. That’s when you act. I build strog, large military centers in those empty spaces without military presence everywhere, just to be ready in case. If the enemy finds and attacks one of these centers, I defend myself a while to attract its entire army to it (won’t fail!!) and then I amass a powerful army at another military center and crush some of its weak spots! That is, I generally don’t attack him head on, because it will only wear out my resources. I keep it away from my important spots, keep it distracted, I manage its deployments instead of having it managed mine. I start losing (my home center goes first), but I end up winning the game.
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Woohoo! THANK YOU, wind_highlander!! Wow, that sounds like great info and advice. I look forward to trying some of these strategies! :100:

And welcome to the forum! What an entrance :clap:

EDIT: Yeah, took me over 5 hours on the game I was playing when I made OP… which was a medium-sized map of some sort. When I start fresh on a new game, I can keep your words in mind and hopefully not have a 5+ hour slog.

Some of your ideas worked, though. I was mainly only able to employ the tactics of being in different parts of the map at once or near-once. And building up enough army eventually to strike the heart of their empires, rather than keep whittling away at the streams of units. Red AI quit once I started doing that more. Pink AI took a lot longer and was harder to penetrate into their land.

Making villager/lumbercamp distractions on different areas of the map at different times, and then using my transports to take them to safety when enemy approached, helped distract them and let me build up some nice econ. (Before they dominated the land, I had Spanish elite cannon galleons dominating the map perimeter shorelines so they couldn’t build docks, which lasted all game. This allowed my transports to live.)

I got enough econ to eventually make a TC in a remote corner of the map, more and more villys, a dock w/ fishing boats, a market to buy/sell resources, and stronger econ, in general. Distracted them on opposite side of map and then rushed to build a bunch of cavalry and archers, along with a castle and some towers to help defend my new base.

I’m not a big fan of the endless streams of AI military units, personally. This was only Moderate. I can’t imagine Extreme, lol.

Look what their endless streams/waves of robotic “I can control 1000 things at once” AI armies (along with incessant attempts to build stuff along the galleon-controlled shores) result in. I kill 3888 of their units, and their largest army was only 62?? It’s like whack-a-mole for 4 hours. I can’t wait for the day when the AoE AI uses machine-learning to play more like humans, restricted by what typical humans do. (No matter how good Viper and Hera are, they are not doing 1000 things at once. They’d beat me every time, no doubt (obviously). But I just wish AI felt more realistic)

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My population for most of about 4 hours was cannon galleons, fishing boats, and a few villagers on transports.

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Mmmmm… nice to see your stats, thank you.
I suggest that you play against one enemy first and then against two or more. The same goes for map size: try big maps first and, once you’ve improved your gameplay, reduce the map size. in other words, increase the difficulty over time.

I’d use a lot of tricks if I were you.

On water maps, there are those that offer you a big separated island to get by, like Archipelago, Northern Isles, Migration (an easy one) or Nile Delta that provide sort of a treaty/ time out when you can develop your econ and military might before they invade, cause you’re cut out from them. Or there’s Crater Lake, which displays an island in the middle of a big lake that allows you to survive for ages as long as you a) keep up a strong navy to protect its shores and b) export villages to mainland to cut a lot of wood that you’ll need for your farms and ships!

On non-water maps, I’d suggest Yucatan, where there are lots of bottlenecks that you can use to minimize the attack front, but where you can also wonderfully wall youself in, mostly in a corner. There are very nice corners in that map sometimes. Specially if you build a deeply layered wall (have you constructed one of those?) it takes a long time for the enemy to get in. And if you attack his city or military buildings somewhere else while he’s doing that, at least half of his army is going to be distracted again and leave the place to defend those stupid barracks.

Then, there are the relics. Relics mean $$$$ and that means that YOU WIN 100% of the time of you get them all (meaning you’ve got to deprive the enemy of them too!)

There’s something I always do: I collect stone (besides gold) like crazy. Why? Because I can build a lot of walls and castles with it! Not one castle, but 10 or 20 or more! And then I can spew out those special units they provide in big numbers; but I can also defend my cities much better or put them in those bottlenecks and have the enemy pass thru them, hahaha.

“Look what their endless streams/waves of robotic “I can control 1000 things at once” AI armies result in. (…) It’s like whack-a-mole for 4 hours. I can’t wait for the day when the AoE AI uses machine-learning to play more like humans, restricted by what typical humans do.”

I’d love that too! But human-like AI’s should be much more potent and smart than those whack-a-mole ones we face today, because they’ll learn from your gameplay and balance your strategies in no time! In a couple of games you’d be sort of playing against yourself! So… it’s a double edged sword. But I agree, “endless streams/waves of robotic “I can control 1000 things at once” AI armies” aren’t fun. And it’s not true they don’t cheat either. Of course they do!! It’s so obvious.