Why are the AI so dumb?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Is this a good game? Yes. A really fun definitive edition of a classic game I spent so much of my youth playing.

But wow, the A.I in this game leaves a lot to be desired, whether its you, or the enemy in campaigns, they are really dumb. Their movement is wack, they get stuck a lot, sometimes they’ll just think its impassible because a villager is there (why don’t they automatically move out of the way?) and theres a lot of chokepoints where the map design / troop design fails.

I also dislike how attacking a city works with the army stances. If you put on defensive stance, they won’t actively attack buildings (unless they are offensive buildings attacking your army), if you put on aggressive, usually they’ll attack but sometimes veer too far following an enemy all the way across the map and never giving up, there’s no inbetween here.

The pathing is so bad too as reported in AOE3:DE The pathing in this game is too bad. specially in villagers. I leave aoe3, so stresed to be fun

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I have been playing Aoe2 for almost 20 years mostly just to watch AI against AI battles. If it is about enemy AI, I would say that DE AI are incredibly stupid, especially their army unit behavior. Indeed they are much better than in HD version due to the improved economic build, but their army behavior is just terrible compared to in HD version.

I have lists of tons of DE enemy AI stupidity. The first list is the stupid attack command behavior:

  1. AI army tends to attack the one who hits first and gets hit so bad. This always makes them chase units in the back who hits first, ignoring the other units, and they just get hit by enemy units in the front. This can also be seen in any of campaign games when player hit enemy unit with ranged unit, they become triggered to chase that unit. After that, they get stuck in our melee units and get attacked all over time which is incredibly stupid. Also, the units in the right side of the map can be triggered to move to the left side of the map just because a skirmisher laying a single hit to lumber camp there.

We can see MikeEmpires videos where all AI units always (100%) tends to attack the one who hits first, making the pathing terrible with a lot of stuck stuff and nonsense walk. The moment when the units attack properly is after they get stuck for a few second and stop. It’s frustating to watch even if they are same patrolled, the AI behavior isn’t the same as the player. They always walk and get attacked for nothing.

  1. AI army has their own attack order with spamming flags. Considering the behavior that they stop if getting stuck, AI units seem always to reset attack command whether after they kill unit, are triggered to attack specific unit, or are getting stuck and stop. This leads another dumbest attack behavior. AI army tends to behave so randomly when charging. AI units don’t always attack the closest ones, ignoring so many potential units to kill easily while they are getting hit. For example:
    • a Paladin killed a halberdier, and he doesn’t automatically attack the unit close to that halberdier. He moves 3 tiles away to attack random hussar. In that process, that PALADIN GETS SEVERAL HITS just to move to attack random unit. If we watch the AI pov, we see that paladin has queued-flag so randomly on enemy unit.
    • another example is when destroyed TC ungarrisons idle villagers, a paladin might kill the one on the rightest side. After the villager dies, the paladin doesn’t hit the villager close to the dying villager but moves to attack villager on the other side. This is so random and dumb.
    • furthermore, this stupid behavior make enemy units with low HP usually get ignored.

  2. A further case of point 2, melee units USUALLY ignore Rams and Trebuchet while ranged units ALWAYS somewhat chose Rams to target. This is dumb and pointless. Three rams can kill their castles and TCs since they are ignored by melee units which basically their hard counter, and their ranged units just die just because they attack something that tank 270 projectiles. Why wouldn’t they just attack proper enemy properly and efficiently? The only good thing about this is that BBC always tries to snipe enemy siege units correctly.

  3. Another dumbest thing regarding the previous points is they make Siege Onager JUST TO KILL THEIR OWN UNITS instead of enemy units. AI Siege Units can weirdly have up to 33 queued-flags when attacking. Since AI army tends to attack the one who hits first or attack units so randomly, Celts Siege Onager might kill 5 Woad Raiders just to kill a random halberdier. Both Siege Onager and BBC aren’t prevented from hitting unit that is close to ally unit.

This is very different from HD AI version (the previous game) as the AI army always attack the enemy units they meet. When they launch a push, they’ll automatically attack enemy units within their line of sight, and after killing that unit, they move back to the target area to push while DE AI always sends Scorpions into nowhere getting demolished for free just to attack a random unit whose hit inflicts trigger. Meanwhile, HD version AI scorpions are so dangerous since they always attack behind the other units/meatshiled as both always attack units within their LoS.

HD AI version also prevents Siege Onager and BBC from killing their own ally units. If they find the enemy unit close to their ally units, they attack the other further units that wouldn’t hurt their allies as much as they can. Meanwhile, DE AI sends and loses 10 Siege Onager mostly just to kill their on units.

There are still tons of DE AI stupidity found by me, I’ll give some:

  1. They spam skirmisher like there is no tommorow. Even if they have 10k golf in the bank, they make skirmishers.
  2. They spam numbers but never prioritize blacksmith last upgrades in the process (Blast Furnace for melee, Ring Archer Armor for ranged). Even I usually found that Turks don’t research Iron Casting yet for their Hussar at minute 60.
  3. Good Hussar civilization barely make hussars. Even Poles, Italians, Saracens, Magyars which have no good spearmen-line keep spamming Pikemen and of course Skirmisher.
  4. Most of Paladin civs barely/don’t make melee cavalry UU (Lithuanians, Burgundians, Bulgarians, Teutons, Franks, Persians, etc). Lithuanians never make Leitis, Franks make Throwing Axemen only if the opponents are Goths.
  5. Slavs never make Champions as infantry civ.
  6. Armenians barely make Champions in late game
  7. Armenians barely make Champions in late game. They make Warrior Priests which are costly, and they never research Sanctity nor Fervor.
  8. Persians never make Kamandaran crossbowman since the erra of boiling oil getting removed.
  9. Romans never make Scorpions. They make crossbowman instead. They also barely make Legionary in late game similar with Armenians.
    …
    .
    ..

Previously, I wasn’t talking about HD AI in DE game, but it was the HD AI in the original previous game. Even the original HD AI are so different than HD AI in DE. There are still so many things wrong with DE AI. For example: Vikings, (especially) Spartans and Athenians make knights/cavaliers in late game like there are no other much better units that cost way more efficient

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