That’s exactly what I am saying, DE AI is built for II. Did 3 DE AIs even come close? My guess is probably not!
And again, I bring your attention to the asymmetrical Civ aspect. Would DE’s AI help run the mongols? Likely not! The challenges in this game are different. I do think the AI plays “normal civs” better than these unique civs that rely on unique mechanics. IE the french, and even the Dehli/Abbasid are ok. Altho the Abbasid they don’t seem to use the camel leader bonus…
Right, and what I was saying was that just because the game engine has changed, and there are now different units now with different attack/defensive attributes doesn’t mean the underlying logic has to be completely new. They can take lessons learned in AOE2 DE and just apply it to AOE4. We’re not talking about an exact replica, which obviously wouldn’t work as it was a different game. If I was at work and my project manager told me to port a legacy feature from a previous version that we had up until then left out, it wouldn’t be a job well done unless I had at least made it as functional as it was in the previous version.
I don’t have much else to add here, tbh. My point is that in the 4th iteration of the game, the AI shouldn’t be worse than its predecessors. If it is, then they either don’t seem to care about it or rushed through development to the point where they left some features under-developed for the sake of meeting deadlines. I don’t really know what it is but speaking as a programmer, I’m not exactly the most forgiving on it.
As a programmer and as someone that has done AI, I am forgiving of it. If it was easy, most games would have it. But 2 remains the exception, not the rule.
As for the rest, I have said it before. Just give them huge bonuses and let them loose. That’s what they did in the other games, and you can use overwhelming strength to compensate for AI weakness.
I remember being able to just barely beat moderate AI on AoE2HD and now I can beat the hardest AI on a 8-player free for all game? Naah this is not right. The AI just do not even try.
If they notice my love for turtle they go wonder and with that they mash 90% of their units around the wonder. To counter that all I need are a bunch of mangonels with my army.
If they push they push in small armies that a fully upgraded keep and a few military units can handle. But even if they get inside my base they get scared once they see my military unit get some units out. So when they clearly got the upper hand they just go back. They don’t know what to do, it’s like they don’t care. Sure, they held me back from attacking the wonder (that I have a nice chunk of min left to take out) but to not see the obvious chance to completely wipe me out, when it’s a 1v1 game, is strange.
The AI is going to need a lot of work over time.
What would be nice though in the mean time would be some handicap modifiers. These could be used for human or AI players in custom games. If you could adjust things like unit/building health, collection rates, damage, etc by percentages then you could tailor the difficulty more at every level.
The ai also suffers from the HRE clunkiness. Its use of prelates is terrible and it seems that the ai would also wish for a litte bit more user friendliness when playing the HRE. The HRE sucks anyway. Boring, one dimensional, barely any cool techs or units, only thing that’s good is MAA. Landsknecht is trash, rest is baseline with nothing interesting. Worst cav, worst archers, worst mechanics, worst lategame. Just terrible design with lots of stuff left to do. There is no civ identity. It’s a generic infantry civ with prelates. All the cool stuff is with other civs.
Most fun ais to play against seem to be French and English. Mongols, Chinese, Delhi also suck very badly when played by the AI. Abbasids and Rus is alright.
I only fight French and English.
Can confirm the AI suffers with island maps.
Playing Hardest AI
I destroyed the AIs wonder with 2 minutes remaining. AI had a huge amount of resources with 30 idle villagers next to the wonder with only 2 repairing it. Was able to destroy their wonder twice with a 4-6 carrack ships
I feel like they have satellites and can see everything you are doing, its impossible to do anything sneaky against them
Actually I’ve had good experiences with Delhi.
Mongol AI is very erratic. Sometimes good, other times lame.
Most of all, whether the AI plays well depends on the maps.
But one thing that must be fixed is that the AI gets scared of outposts and sometimes just calls off raids even when it is quite evident that the AI would win if it engaged.
Honestly, just let Forgotten Empires deal with the AI. They are doing a phenomenal job with the AI in AoE2DE and AoE3DE.
Something about the AI is bugged though. When you harass their economy early they stop building villagers. They will still build their base normally, construct walls and they even produce military. But they don’t get any new villagers even if you let them have some peace for a few minutes. It makes it hilariously easy to beat them since they won’t ever scale up.
The funniest thing is that when you’re starting a game, one of the tips that show up in the loading screen explains this very same feature, which I almost never see actually happening when playing. Is archer melee completely broken?
Yeah, I’ve noticed this too. Outposts really screw with their world. I can layer them, have like a dozen outposts with a cannon and the AI just seems incapable of actually assaulting that position after that. Granted it’s heavy fire, but in AOE2 DE, the AI really had no issue picking apart massed bombard towers. It would certainly slow them down a lot but they always managed to break through with often overwhelming force. AOE4 AI is just not capable of doing that I guess, even though they often have the siege for it. They just can’t make up their mind between attacking and retreating.
I haven’t played an island map yet, but if I had to sum up the AI’s core problems from games I’ve played, I would say it is these 2:
Constantly retreats during attacks, or changes movement, leading to them losing the battle. Incapable of taking on masses of outposts.
Constantly sends small waves of units, making it easy to defend against their attacks
Agree: it looks like AI doesn’t know how to play with all civilizations in all maps.
If AI plays with Frenchs or English in a land map, or even Chinese, they like getting agressive eary and play pretty good… however, they have issues keeping that pressure in imperial and are prone to crush into choke points (lower level AI in AoE2 used to fail for that too)
My guess that this will take some time to fix, but it would be great if they enable the tools so that the community can get into some mods for upgraded AI (the Barbaric AI in AoE2:DE is beautiful)
Thank you for your feedback! We appreciate the feedback and would love to hear more from you. We will pass on your suggestion regarding AI to the dev team, please also make sure to let us know if you have any other ideas about the game.
Thanks for the reply 
I think if the devs dont have the resources to create a decent AI they should just let the AI cheat… So they get more resources, build faster, age faster. Sometimes I want an alternative to stressfull multiplayer but hardest Ai is so weak I can play bullet chess at the same time
I have the following suggestions about the AI:
The AI currently gives up very quickly on going aggressive in the beginning. If they succeed in finishing you off, then all good. Otherwise they start Walling themselves in and don’t attack anymore until much later. That late, you usually have too many resources and will usually have an answer to the AI. So basically, the AI isn’t utilizing the weakness of human players in the early game, when every single economic and military unit matters.
The AI units sometimes get stuck in a loop of trying to fight and trying to retreat. The result is that they just end up oscillating weirdly in the same spot and get picked off.
Retreating all the way to your base with all units is a bad idea… AI should leave a few buildings to die and retreat with the majority. Otherwise you can easily pick off AI units as they retreat back home.
AI for some civs will not use all their bonuses. For example, Rus AI does not use its scout to kill animals on the map. French AI won’t build school of cavalry to age up and instead build the Chamber of Commerce and sometimes not even use it for trading. AI won’t try to convert etc.
The AI cannot defend against an English longbow rush. Just cannot. No matter what it does, the AI will always be killed by an English longbow rush. It does try to produce counters but longbow mass from council hall kills all its counters. I am assuming that the longbow rush doesn’t need balancing ? I don’t know.
Overall, I feel a more aggressive play from the AI is enough for it to feel more challenging. As long as the AI is constantly attacking you and not letting you attack it, it can be pretty nice… In a defensive situation the AI will most likely lose, since human players have more intuition than lines of code.
AI scripting can be made by the community: it is less stressful for devs to focus on solving technical issues instead of trying to understand the game and making a more challenging AI. Instead, the community can handle that challenge and that will produce a great feedback between both parties.
On top of that, balance updates and changes in meta game will happen more and more frequently, so that will mean additional work for devs in order to update the AI to follow those changes. Instead, if they leave that to the community, the job will be done on that side and as those mods are made available, they may be included in the game as part of the base content.
people care about AI? Why?
Not everyone play competitive: a lot of us like playing vs AI, alone or cooperative.
I have some friends who play ranked, and since I suck at playing, we play coop against AI.