I finished AOE3 and AOM campaigns on medium. I’ve spent 60 hours on IV. I know all about hotkeys and build orders and never having your TC inactive. I’m a pretty serious single-player AGE guy.
In IV the first difficulty level (“DL” from now on) is for your Grandmother. As it should be, you need something for newbies. It’s impossible to lose. But when I go to the second difficulty level when I meet their army it’s 30% bigger than mine. Their ENTIRE city is surrounded by stone walls. And I get clobbered.
There are what, seven DL’s here? So why do we have stuff like ‘insane’ and ‘super-hard’ but we can’t have ONE difficulty level that’s just a bit harder than Grandmother mode?
Seven difficulty levels and they go from ‘super easy’ to ‘we will build a huge army’.
I’ve finally started to like the game (that’s taken awhile) but I wish they could give us a lighter ramp up between the first two levels. First easy level is too easy and second level is too hard.
You do not damage their economy because you do not have the ability to properly manage your villagers and constantly produce military units, the AI does not know how to deal with pressure, accept your mistakes if you want to progress
They are saying that if you attack the enemy in the first few minutes of feudal to destroy villagers, or force them off of gathering, the AI will crumble quickly. I’ve found they sometimes stop building military altogether with enough pressure.
I agree with you on the ai difficulty settings, the first one is so passive you would almost have to try to lose to it. From intermediate all the way to hardest it feels very similar. The difference between hardest and difficulties above that is the AI gets extra resources, their strategy remains the same.
Beyond scaling difficulty I’m rarely challenged by the AI in AoE IV anymore. AoE II DE extreme AI feels like a decent challenge to me still. It’s not just you and it definitely needs to be polished.
100-110 villagers is enough for late game. Since you only need 4 villagers on food for each tc the remaining villagers are dedicated to gathering resources for building military, researching upgrades, going to the next age, or expanding economy.
Unless your strategy relies on it prioritizing military is the best option.
The key is to optimize your gathering to have military producing at all times, aside from aging up since you need to bank a lot of food and gold.
Well I keep trying new things and it’s always the same. I have 40-50 military units, the AI will have sixty. They’re even getting to Feudal age a little faster than me. How can this be? My town center is never idle, I’m constantly cranking out villagers, I never get housed, I upgrade the techs at the appropriate time.
And yet the AI always has a bigger army than me when I’m playing intermediate.
I play AOE3 on the third difficulty level and win 90% of the time.
So frustrating. I just tried a mod to cut my villager cost and build time - it doesn’t seem to do anything. I think I’m back to 3. And hoping AOMR is playable.
With this Build Order you easily beat the Intermediate AI, after the 33 villagers I put them to collect stone so that you can see that what is needed is to properly manage the villagers
