Improvements and adjustments to the standard AI files. Makes the AI more aggressive both on land and water maps. Many low-hanging mistakes fixed, many economic optimizations, and enabled some of the abilities (like HRE emergency repair) although unfortunately we don’t have the same access to the internal AI files like in Company of Heroes 2 and thus I don’t think I can improve the AI a lot further without more cheating.
My AI can be downloaded in the mods section of the game. It’s a tuning pack.
What we can’t currently access :
-
ai\personality*.scar files. In Company of Heroes 2 we can access and modify those files in a tuning pack. Now, not even Win Condition has access to those files. This is a huge hit to the customisability of the A.I
-
All the machine learning and the associated parameter tunings. Yes it does have a machine learning feature that learns from players but it seems to only work on micromanagement and unit compositions
Because of that I’m not comfortable calling this anything other than just a “Lite” mod. Maybe someday Relic allows us to modify those or we have a good workaround.
Difference between difficulties :
Easy - Max villager of 42, will rush you with dark age units (and fail miserably putting them behind, hence easy.) I tried my best NOT to simply rate limit things like the original AI does, but let them make goofy mistakes like being popcapped or building too many houses early and such. Also limits combat siege (Mangonels, Ribauldequins, Springalds and such) to 2 per type and anti building siege (ram, trebuchets, bombards) to 1 per type to prolong games.
Intermediate - Max villager of 69 (NICE!), pretty much unrestricted and will behave as Relic programed it to be. Probably the boomiest of all difficulties since they prioritize upgrades (as with Relic’s own algorithm)
Hard - Max villager of 96, optimized as best as I could. No cheating, at all. Comparable and slightly harder to the Hardest of the original AI. Some civs will go for second TC earlier.
Hardest - Hard, but with 100 Food/ 150 Wood/ 100 Gold extra starting resources and 15% gathering bonus equivalent to a gathering upgrade. (+50% for Stone, since stone doesn’t really affect AI aggression at all, but it buffs mongols the most for them to be up to par with the others.)
This represents my best efforts to provide a smarter, better AI, not just one that cheats more.
“But why the hardest cheat?” you ask. Well, without cheats AI will always have lesser economy than the players due to the way AI works. If you notice the AI does not use rally points and their newly created villagers will always idle for a few moments/seconds before the AI updates their tasks. Those precious few moments adds up a lot because no matter what the AI will have slower Feudal. Also, the AI isn’t very good at assigning gatherers so they for instance, split 3 food 3 wood at start and it’s not changeable currently.
At the moment you can not fully modify the AI files and change the AI as it is done in AoE2DE. The main AI files are locked and cannot be changed.
Basic AI functions are strictly scripted.
Developers have given players the tools to modding the game BUT I think that the tools should allow a full modification of the game and including the AI scripts as it was in AoE2DE.
I hope we will be given this opportunity in the near future.
P.S Zycat AI Lite mod is not made by me, I just want to draw attention to this problem.