The AI is terrible

@SavageEmpire566
Please see this topic

The next patch is coming out soon, maybe it will fix the errors of the AI.

Another thing the AI could be better at is walling themselves off. They often leave gaping holes in their walls or don’t really defend their walls. Certainly nothing like a defensive minded human would do, with towers and archers and high angle siege. Seems like no matter the difficulty once you start an assault on the base its game over. It would be nice if you ran into defenses hard enough to actually repel a human player.

side note: Everybody just chill out a bit, we got a new age of empires after almost 20 years, RTS games take time to balance and once something goes full scale new bugs are always going to show up. The dev’s are clearly trying to make a great game and they are trying to make the game we wanted them to make. So far they are succeeding, give them a chance to work out the kinks before you write off the game and call for their heads on a pike. This isn’t a Battlefield 2042 situation where they took something beloved and butchered it for money, clearly they are genuinely trying to make a good game, give them a chance to do it.

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Hi all :slight_smile:
I found a mod that improves the behavior of the AI (without cheating).

Installing the mod :
Go to the tab mods (in the game) and find the mod Zycat AI Lite and subscribe to it.

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Yep. Easy/Intermedete ai seems to send their units into my base on a suicide mission no matter the circumstances. I remember playinga s dehli once and forgot to wall off a tiny part of my base and the ai kept sending single archers through the gap only to be crushed by elephants lol. Easy ai also rushes spearmen all the time early on which I guess can be trouble for newer players but really all you have to do is garrision your villagers by the time 4 or 5 of them show up and you can wipe then out without much of a challenge.

The ai is annoying sometimes because they attack from different directions even though it’s a futile attempt but it still ends up distracting you early on. Overall can’t say I’ve had much of a challenge agaisn’t any level of AI though after having over 120 games played and around 860 ELO online.

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Soon a new patch comes out (25.10.2022) in it a lot of changes to the AI. I played in the PuP version and the AI plays better But at the moment there are unpleasant bugs :frowning:
But the AI still plays much better !
I really want the developers to give the opportunity to edit the AI files fully , at the moment such an opportunity is not there :frowning:
The main thing is still ahead :slight_smile: Let’s hope for the best!

By the way, here are some of my new topics:
Bug Topics

Topics on editing AI files

P.S. If you also like to play with the AI, then I advise you when you find bugs AI be sure to write on the forum to fix the problem.

Thank you all :slight_smile:
Looking forward to the new patch!

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A new Patch is coming out soon :slight_smile:
Changelog Update 24916 :

In the AI tab a lot of nice changes .

Hello All !
I want to let you know that the AI after the last update behaves much better :slight_smile:

If you find AI bugs, be sure to report them on the forum !

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I disagree, it’s just as bad if not worse in some ways.

AI armies completely ignore traders it passes on the way to targets. It never sets the trade line as a target.
You can taunt the AI villagers into indefinitely following your unit.
Villagers run from scouts even tho scouts are weak now.
When cornered, the AI will occasionally just ball up villagers and idle them.
They will stream villagers one by one past towers trying to get to a target build site.
They still can’t build walls completely, they leave gaps that make the wall useless.
They don’t have good target priority. In a mixed battle they don’t prioritize monks, mehters, or scouts.
This is AI they should be able to program them to micro like crazy - never overkilling, adjusting position and targets, etc. Instead they micro worse than me and I’m basically inebriated. I don’t think they micro at all, they just seem to attack-move blindly.
They barely ever make springalds anymore, they used to make a lot and be somewhat good at countering siege.

I meant that compared to the previous version of the AI works much better BUT has a lot of bugs.

For the developers to fix the AI errors, please create a thread with the errors of the AI on the forum.

It’s obvious plain as day in every game how poor the AI behaviors are. I shouldn’t have to make posts about it, it’s their game they’ve had it out for over a year

Here’s a clip of replay from a game I just played where I rushed an English AI with two spearmen. They ran into the TC, which is kind of strange because usually AI villagers will chase and attack the spearmen. Especially since english villagers can shoot. But I stood ground with a spear near the unfinished feudal landmark. This caused the AI to garrison all of its villagers for over 10 minutes.

Its ally sent a spearman over to kill mine, and it would have won the fight but it backed way at low hp. Then it ignored the weak spearman for over 5 minutes. The AI could have ungarrisoned and killed it easily but they sat in the TC.

This is a sign to me the AI still has a LONG way to go. It’s been a year and it’s still BROKEN.

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I agree with you. There is still a lot of work to be done on fixing AI behavior.

Well it’s nice to see this thread still going. Will be very interesting to see what happens when/if the devs ever start putting a lot of focus on the AI. I’m sure they can make it good. Right now, it’s just crazy easy to beat on every difficulty so kinda useless to play against

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Yeah it seems to receive a couple small fixes or improvements each patch, but so far nothing that’s actually made it difficult to beat. It’s still super easy even on the hardest AI.

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The issue is that the AI will repeatedly commit illogical actions all game.

Just to name a few only:

  • Resource drop off points can be built further away from resources than needed causing more walk time and less efficient eco
  • Army won’t fight half the time as units alternate between attacking and retreating. Results in AI army standing there letting you kill them sometimes.
  • Sends army into defensive structures like keeps to die to boiling oil. Also, cannons and other siege a lot of the time walks into attack range of keeps unnecessarily
  • AI won’t know what to do if you attack them, sometimes fighting knights with villagers and other times trying to wall infront of your army.
  • AI will also always pick the same landmarks each game. Never seen french go School of Cavalry and make knights
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As someone who almost exclusively plays against AI in RTS games, I agree. I can easily beat the hardest AI in AoE4 and not even rush doing it. I’m not sure how exactly the development of this game worked, but I think Relic made the game. The same people who made Company of Heroes. And CoH AI is way better than AoE4 AI. In CoH against the hardest AI, I actually felt a need to rush a little to get the upper hand, or else they will come to destroy me. In AoE4, however, the AI does not seem to know exactly how to destroy an opponent.

I played a skirmish with an easy ally AI, against the hardest enemy ally, just to mix things up a little. The easy AI started next to the hardest AI on the map. I just played SimCity with my town basically. The hardest AI attacked the easy AI, but could never seem to beat them for some reason. In the end, they just let them be and started attacking me instead. And the AI on water maps is unfortunately borderline useless as a challenge.

There is an AI mod that supposedly makes them much better, but I have not played around with it enough yet since it also then disables achievements. And the developer of the mod borderline disabled AI wall building, something I like when the AI actually tries to do it, which is not that often anyway. I suspect it’s simply the rise of Esports/ multiplayer that made AI development stagnate through the years. Like AI is basically seen as practice these days to make you ready for the ā€œrealā€ game. It’s sad as I enjoy playing on my own time and not having to worry about actions per minute and all that stuff.

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I can’t solve AI logic, very inconsistent.

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I think it’s just another symptom of the overall rushed and unfinished nature of the game. They seem to have leaned on ā€œmachine learningā€ to develop a majority of AI behaviors autonomously with minimal human programming. They put AI on the back burner and released a ā€œgood enoughā€ version until they maybe get time to improve it. But they already made their pre-sale money so there’s no real pressure to make it good for few thousand people.

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