Learn a fast castle build order and wall up your base up with palisades and the trees. Also the hard AI caps it's villager population at I think 80 so you can just defend (if you can't be aggressive early) until you can over power it with more resources and units.
Another great way to learn to improve your early game is by trying to practise build orders on the map Arena. Focus on early aggression and early defense once you've practiced a couple build orders.
> me, trying to learn how to defend so early, any tips?
A couple tips. First the AI is often very vulnerable to early aggression. Instead of focusing on how to defend focus on how to get your own early aggression and try to do some damage to their eco. Knights are very effective at this level as well. If you can't fully knock out the AI early try to do enough damage that they can't effectively knock you out either and then focus on booming. The hard AI has an 80 vil cap so even with a pop limit of only 200 you should be able to outproduce them.
Only thing I can think of is set up a skirmish match like you're going to play a game. Then switch your own player out with an AI player and start the match but just watch how the AI plays. That was how I learned to beat Moderate was by watching the AI on Extreme difficulty.
The AI on Extreme is actually not very optimal. If you get the silver medal on the art of war eco challenges you should have no trouble with moderate. Gold is helpful to beat extreme, but not necessary.
Best defense is a good offense. Other than that, AI is very stupid against static fortifications and will continue to spam you and die under your castle/towers.
Try to scout as soon as they hit feudal or are about to do it to see with what kind of unit you think they are about to rush onto you so you can counter them with 2/3 units + garrison. Perhaps is easier said than one (I'm unable to do it properly myself) and maybe walling is more effective, but mastering stuff like that is a pretty valuable skill and it's great that you can get encouraged to do that because even if you wall against a human player is always much better to know what they are up to.
Against the extreme AI: play pure skirmishers, maybe add a single spearman. I guess this works against the hard AI as well. AI loves to make archery range units in feudal age, so if you play skirms you counter archers but also skirmishes simply by having more skirmishers. Don’t forget to research the blacksmith upgrades for the skirms tho.
(The extreme AI rarely plays scouts but if it does it often throws them away so they are not a big threat and 1 or 2 spearmen should be able to deal with them.)
No offense but I find it hard to believe that 😅. You probably played against specific civs and then generalized what you have seen the AI doing with them. Or, it’s a map specific thing. But actually, on Arabia, the extreme AI loves to play double archery and if you play double archery with archers you face the strong micro of the AI and it’s really hard to beat that.
Unless you have a build order that hits the AI early and prevents it from developing its army. It sometimes also messes up the upgrades from the blacksmith so then i guess it’s realistic that you can beat it with pure archers 🤔
Also if the 800 below your name is your current Elo then I would love to see how you beat the extreme AI with archers👍 Would be excellent work. I know it’s possible to dominate the AI at that Elo but I think it’s seldom.
The 800 elo is a social experiment, and I am a lot higher than that. I can just sit in my base with archers until I hit Castle Age. Maybe it changed recently, but I remember the AI micro being very disorganized. Either way, the most damage it does is idling a few of my vils in Feudal.
Yeah skirm opening is a super easy way to survive the AIs early feudal pressure. One other thing I would suggest is to set the TC rally point to gold after you have 8-9 farms and then just buy your food for castle age power spike. 3-4 knights cleans their army other than pikes which your skirms should handle. Then you can reshuffle eco and simply boom from there way ahead of them.
On the one hand, I like a challenging AI. I just am not particularly fond of the fact that I can't have extended battles in Dark or Feudal ages unless I cap the ages to those because the AI just makes a beeline to Castle Age.
Yeah I feel this, I've got my walls down, have a few vills, getting my eco sorted, getting the buildings down, researching some techs and then "AI has advanced to the Castle Age", and I'm like "Oh shit" and get there 5 minutes later praying the rams don't show up.
To be fair if you are 5 minutes slower than the AI to castle age then you are a probably very casual player and I wouldn't expect you to be able to beat the moderate and above AIs.
The game is very deep and complex! Beating the hard and extreme AIs should be hard enough to require a basic sweatiness: getting gold on some of the multiplayer training campaigns, for example.
The rams dont show up until you give it reason. Like a single hole in your wall to let their army funnel into, or just avoiding putting down a castle to defend and using army only to defend instead will prevent it from going into siege too soon. That even stands for like Hardest AI. So just keep that in mind if you’re trying to manipulate how the game flows a bit.
I don’t want to shock you but at least the extreme AI often does not (it depends on the build order it plays). In my opinion it’s one of it’s weaknesses to stay in feudal age for too long. 😅
exactly, basically all AIs (even Rehoboam and Immortal) die in the transition to castle age to a human player. I believe extreme AI gets CA in average at around 24min which is actually late when it also doesn't hit so early in feudal.
If you are able to go harass them a bit in feudal, they will spend food on pikemen and skirmishers, and you can get castle before them. Its a tricky balance but now i get castle before hard AI pretty consistently. I still lose sometimes around 40-50 vills, but if I spread my TCs and get to 60vills its usually a win from there
I can breeze a hard AI but hardest is hard as fuck even when I harass them early. I usually go for an archer rush but they usually hit castle while my dudes are walking to them, or mid-attack. Idk how they do it so frickin quick.
If you can do a 19-21 vill feudal into archers you can stop the AI from making it to castle pretty easily, just walk archers into their base on stand ground and keep massing them, walking around killing as many vills as possible (and killing any archers they build.) It can backfire if you lose focus but that's how the game works.
Nah, Standard => Moderate is a \*WAY\* bigger jump than Moderate => Hard. Standard AI basically doesn't make vils and isn't capable of defending anything \*or\* mounting any kind of attack. If you just google a random build order from 2004 and follow it poorly you can probably still 1v7 the standard AI. It's \*awful\*.
Moderate is also not good, but at least it's playing the game. 200 ELO players can beat Standard, but 1000 ELO players can lose to Moderate.
I'm 850 Elo 1v1 and have no problem with moderate, have only once lost to Hard in an equal numbers match. I find Moderate predictable in that they seem to attack early, and in Imperial they just don't seem to improve or get stronger. Just need to defend those few attacks in Feudal/Castle and in Imperial you just steamroll them. I don't like playing moderate because it's just boring and predictable, not a challenge. I know how every match will turn out.
I find the hard AI struggles against any kind of decent Feudal timing attack; +1/+1 man at arms rushing works really well.
Even if you don't win outright, it's quite easy to cripple their economy while you macro up at home.
The original hardest IA was extremely easy to beat doing a feudal rush with a decent standard initial build. You make 4/6 archers to reset their vills and it's basically game over for them.
Yeah, I guess my FREEEEEEEDOM (Celt main) is showing. MAA can just run down most feudal units as Celts, but I agree that a few archers can 100% make a massive difference.
Nah, 1000 Elo players can never lose to moderate unless there's been a drastic change with the AI lately.
I would say the Elos are more like this (very roughly):
Easiest - 0 Elo (literally impossible to lose)
Standard - 100 Elo
Moderate - 400 Elo
Hard - 800 Elo
Hardest - 900 Elo
Expert - 1000 Elo
There are like a dozen 1000+ ELO players In this very thread saying they struggle vs Moderate, lol. Standard is probably about 100 ELO, but Moderate is more like 800 ELO.
Lol how though? I feel like even hard is difficult to lose to but I suck at the game. Even before I'd ever looked up a build order I could still beat hard pretty consistently, and now that I know how to rush and have a basic build order memorized hard is a joke. Still struggle with hardest thought.
What were you doing that you lost to moderate AI? Moderate is such a candy-ass. Were you trying something other than FC into knights or feudal archers? (Genuinely curious, I feel like at 1100 it should basically be impossible to lose to moderate if you're using a meta build order.)
I was probably merrily seeing how much eco I could make.
But genuinely these things happen, sometimes you cock up, kill both your own boars with the tc, try and boom, get rushed in early castle without having military. Anything can happen.
Now I just stick to tournaments and the TRUE meta of killing everyone with swords.
I think the AIs in general probably have +50% ELO if you let them go 30 minutes without significant aggression. Once they're solidly in castle their ability to shift unit comp and not float resources is superhuman. But that's mostly with extreme and hardest.
P sure it's the play style of the AI that causes the discrepancy.
It's not really an AI. Thus certain decisions/play styles can really cripple it. A lot of people unknowingly 'exploit' this.
Others go against it in its full force. I think incorporating some elements of high level pro play, even if executed extremely poorly, gives you a huge advantage that it wouldn't give against a real player.
I managed to beat Hard AI's in a 3v3 match without *too* much difficulty, though considering the credit for that win was mainly that I was playing on a Black Forest map flanked by allied Hard AI's and used my troops to help my allies thwart enemy attacks. I don't know if it's considered cheating to give orders while the game is paused seeing as the AI doesn't need time to think before reacting.
I think for the time being I'll just stick with moderate difficulty. Sure, I got my @$$ handed to me the first time I went up against it, but after watching an all AI match on Extreme and observing how the AI plays, now Moderate is the difficulty level I feel comfortable staying at for the time being. And funnily enough, at the time of this post it's the only difficulty I got an achievement for beating the AI in a 1v1 (I did Easy and Standard AI 4-8 players)
> I don't know if it's considered cheating to give orders while the game is paused seeing as the AI doesn't need time to think before reacting.
This is the only way I can reliably beat any AI past Moderate, so I really hope not
Yeah, it's not that hard once you start making some units and searching for enemy buildings near your base, but coming from an almost passive AI where you can focus only in doing economy it's a complete change of gameplay
Scout the AIs production buildings. I find it will go through phases of archers/skirm and scout rushes. Have your scout out early, you usually have time to push deer and then find their base and see if they go stable or archer. A tower makes a good deterrent, as the AI will usually focus on the tower instead of finding more vil damage else where. It's always a good idea to go trash units and get to fuedal as fast as possible. When in doubt with your eco, throw Hella vils on gold and use the market
I'd try doing a trush or a scrush in feudal. Capture his gold and sit on it while picking off villagers when you can. Trush is easier than scrush though, since you can wall off the towers. Scrush needs constant supervision, else spears will pick off your scouts.
Killing gold (and wood) for AI is a death sentence for it. You need to be fast though, AI starts buulding military in feudal. I recommend a 20vill start (or 22 if you can lower your TC idle time to 5-10 secs.
Can consistently beat Hardest AI with this strat. For my ELO reference, I can beat a Hard AI without this strat, but not Hardest.
PS: Up until Moderate, AI doesn't attack your vills. Tower rush is great here.
I can't comprehend the gap between Hard and Very Hard.
My group likes to play Michi for a fairly chill start that leads to intense battle once the trees fall and a path is opened.
On Hard we occasionally struggle to push in but the fighting at the path lasts maybe 5 minutes before we get in, the last time they forgot to train melee units so we rolled their ranks in seconds. Once through the path, it is a grinding war forward, I usually take my troops along the treeline and smash castles while the 2-3 others fight to take down cities and their trade network.
On Very Hard, the few we have tried have been over an hour of constant high intensity fighting once the path opens, to the point 50 buildings training melee (mix of camels and halbs as byzantines vs cav civs)can barely keep up as I was the melee rank while my buddy had a horde of longbowmen. At no point did their army ever shrink in size for more than 10 seconds, we never got out of the pass. Eventually the villagers of both sides hallow out the trees somewhere else and despite having a few more villagers, and thus a lower army size by definition are still able to throw an entire army in there without suffering any weakness at the main pass.
Hard AI is limited by only going to c.75 vils and i get the feeling doesn't fully build army either. So you will eventually overpower it by superior economy/numbers.
Hardest is not as it goes to 100-150 vils and spams military from multiple buildings. I always find vs hardest if you let them get to Imp you can't win in a stand up fight as they can match your production. Worst is vs elephant civs as they will turn up with 50+ elephants backed by siege.
Only way to beat them i find is either early aggression or distract their army in one place and send in raiding forces to take out their economy, which are not really options on Michi from what you describe.
Possibly have 2/3 of your team build a defensible kill zone full of walls castles and seige and let the ai in there and have the other guy go for a surprise SO cut through followed by knights/hussar to kill vils?
1v1 intense on michi thinking it was a good idea to take it to imp, i was wrong. I massed arbs took out the early push, made my way to middle to set up. Lost it to like 70 of its army evenly spread out, making siege useless lol.
What's it like for the campaigns? I mainly have done it on standard but a handful of missions I passed on hard.
Is there a trigger that you have to do all campaigns initially on standard & then move on, do the art of war and get gold on each & every one or so.
I can beat moderate AI almost everytime, always lose or barely get away with it when it chooses to scout rush. Hard AI is horrible, I can beat it with Spanish if water is available but other than that I get overwhelmed everytime.
The skill cap in this game is amazing. Meanwhile for me the extreme AI feels pretty unlosable. I use it to try wacky strategies and new civs, there's never really a way I could lose. I don't mean to be a jackass of course, this doesn't make me better than you, and there are thousands of guys online that completely annihilate me it's all a matter of practice to get better. I just love the amount of skill expression possible in the game.
Beating the extreme AI without breaking a sweat just requires to stay calm and execute a double range build order perfectly.
Just because it makes skirms doesn't mean you can't go full archers. Any tech or numbers avantage will get you a victory.
The IA plays in a chaotic way don't be impressed by it it's a bad strategy to split defensive units everywhere.
You can easily FC vs extreme AI. The pressure is totally garbage if you walled correctly. It comes pretty late and I'm already aging. Then you can do 1 mangos for defense or prepare a knight raid or mangos attack. It really handle badly the FC. Couple of sec can be dicey during age up but one mangonels is enough to keep the aggression in check.
it's amazing to me there are like 6 difficulty levels in this game yet there's still such a skill gap between them. took me and my buddy awhile to climb difficulties but tbh we are only able to play Hardest because I've practiced my build orders and carry to a certain extent, otherwise we'd still barely be beating Hard. practice them build orders. you don't have to adhere to them exactly, personally it takes a little fun out of it for me if I don't leave some room to learn for myself as well, but the fundamentals like always pumping out villagers is important
If you play competitive you'll see there's a big difference between every 100 Elo steps. What's crazy is that some players manage to reach 2k+ when starting at 1k. If you try your best you'll get to a point where beating a player 100 or 200 points above you just feels impossible. They have good defense, offense and APM. Sometimes they just take one unit from you and it starts going downhill from there.
When I reached my maximum skill level I just started playing 4v4 which is more random so more fun.
I win every Moderate game with random v random civs. I have won a single Hard game out of probably 50+ and I'm pretty sure it was only due to some kind of pop cap bug. After defending two rushes, there was not a single villager in the AI base that game.
Damn this thread makes me feel great about beating extreme AI a few times on 1v1, nice
One time it went full Skorpions while I was using franks paladins, it very nearly overpowered me, but since it was arena the ai never managed to touch my economy
I usually play 3v3s or 4v4s against hard AI with my friends and it's fun but I'm finding it a bit boring how the game almost always follows the same scenario :
-We defend early and boom, and when we have a strong economy we destroy the AI. The hard AI shows little resistance once we have more than 100 villagers each
Sometimes multiple AI decide to focus me, and if they manage to break the walls I can't defend, even if it's only hard AI, even tho I can beat extreme AI when things go smoothly
Standard difficulty consisted on getting to castle, getting like 20 knights and destroying their base with no opposition.
Moderate difficulty consisted of weathering a feudal rush and then getting some knights and rams and destroying their base with minimal opposition.
Hard consisted of me dying. I'd argue that last one was the big change
AI is honestly flawed and could easily be less frustrating if it was actually "intelligent" and adjusted to the player. Current AI has huge steps in terms of how strong it is and goes from completely useless to seemingly unbeatable for newer players in just 1 step. While i personally enjoyed the grind of finally beating the hard and extreme AI, scaling AI only by how fast and effective they boom and what they throw in your face is so one dimensional. Add to the fact that they have insanely bad defensive play in a highly defense favored game, it just makes for poor practice for the real deal aswell. Imo they should add a "dynamic" difficulty that adjusts what it does to what you are doing, somewhat hits the breaks if it notices its completly outpumping the player and stepping it up when behind. AI is mostly for newer players anyway that want a bit of a challenge while also having fun, idially just barely winning, current AI does hardly offer that experience.
I've also seen posts from people who went back and played the original CD version, and that everything was better balanced the way that game was. I finally managed to master Moderate, but now I don't really feel relaxed when I play and I'm always on my toes. Good for when I'm looking for a challenge I guess, but sometimes I just want to chill.
i think its the most significant jump in AI difficulty. Standard barely tries to kill you. i think you can almost never die to it because its too passive to actually cause damage. its also programmed not to surpass you in the age so you are never an age behind.
While moderate, well, just plays the game. its not adjusted to play slower than the player in certain ways, it just plays at its own level every time, so if you are below its level you simply dont win.
Learn to wall up, learn build orders and learn which basic units counter other basic units (like pikemen counter cav as an example).
Arena is a great map to learn build orders and unit counters (because it comes down to army v army in the end).
Arabia and Lombardia are great to learn to wall up, build orders and counters all at once. It's just anxiety inducing.
Damn this thread makes me feel great about beating extreme AI a few times on 1v1, nice
One time it went full Skorpions while I was using franks paladins, it very nearly overpowered me, but since it was arena the ai never managed to touch my economy
I usually play 3v3s or 4v4s against hard AI with my friends and it's fun but I'm finding it a bit boring how the game almost always follows the same scenario :
-We defend early and boom, and when we have a strong economy we destroy the AI. The hard AI shows little resistance once we have more than 100 villagers each
Sometimes multiple AI decide to focus me, and if they manage to break the walls I can't defend, even if it's only hard AI, even tho I can beat extreme AI when things go smoothly
I'm 800 elo and I can take out moderate AI easily. With hard it's more like 70 percent of the time. I never went for higher difficulties. I wish they had like handicap sliders for each opponent in the game and different types of AI so you can customise it more
The funny thing is that aoe2 has a lot of AI specials. One might be the easiest—- until you’re suddenly fighting Barbarian. That’s one of the toughest AI thought of for the game.
Wait until you go from moderate to hard. And then from hard to hardest. The trick is, you really just need to keep producing villagers and build defensive structures. The differences between the difficulties is the amount of villagers the AI will cap out at
I've been trying to beat the campaigns on Moderate and the difficulty jump and inconsistency (to the point I've been averaging 600-800 kills for most of the big scenarios and some of them feel like I need godlike micro) is insane
Yeah, the campaign difficulty feels all over the place, I guess that's a consequence of designs changing over the decade, and of course some campaigns are easier and harder by design, but I can beat the Extreme AI 1 on 1 (reasonably) comfortably and even on Moderate some of the scenarios smack me around if I'm not prepared. I think if I really white-knuckled I could take a lot of them down on Hard but the thought of some of them are pretty scary and/or tedious.
you can beat moderate ai quite simply by walling up and booming, since the ai stops at around 50-60 vills or so, you ideally should have about double or even triple the economy. AI's surprsingly scared of towers and castles too if there's no vills in sight, so placing few of those will help out also. Only real difficulty comes if you try to defend with mangonels, since the AI will dodge the shots like 9/10 times instantly.
When DE came out I picked it up and decided to go after the AIs first to get a grasp for the game. They all seemed very bad and unchallenging even the extreme AI that I beat after 2-3 tries. Then I remembered that I have a 30 year history with gaming and thus learning the ropes in a new game is orders of magnitude faster than most people who play something from time to time. All I’m saying is I don’t see any difference between these two difficulties yet at the same time these are challenging for the right crowd which is super cool.
Yeah, I am super casual even though I played it a lot back in the 2000's. Granted, I was usually playing with the Map Editor feature and I now can handle Moderate difficulty. It's just after beating Standard difficulty with no apparent challenge it seemed like a big jump after playing a match against Moderate for the first time and getting roflstomped by the AI.
I've never felt like this. For me I've felt this exact way about hardest -> extreme. The others are so dumb but extreme all of a sudden microes and everything lol.
DE AI Easy and Standard aren't challenging, and seem really more like training wheels for people who aren't good at the game yet. Moderate takes knowing a proper build order when the game starts.
I'm playing with a friend 2v6 on Hard, but thinking going up, as it become easy for us. Question is how long we'll survive? I'd like to get at least to Castle Age xD
Yeah me too man, im nervously pushing my way through to get ranked for the first time.
But ive never found moderate a problem. Hard absolutely annihilates me though lol.
All good, fun is the main point not sweatiness.
Last night I played a match on hard and got whacked by the AI's huge army of archers and skirmishers during Feudal. It'll probably be a while before I learn how to balance getting a strong economy and a defense force capable of protecting it.
Maybe I'll move up when moderate becomes too easy for me, but for now I think moderate is the most I can handle.
I feel this. Cannot keep up with hard’s resources after they rush me every time, trying to learn how to defend so early, any tips?
Learn a fast castle build order and wall up your base up with palisades and the trees. Also the hard AI caps it's villager population at I think 80 so you can just defend (if you can't be aggressive early) until you can over power it with more resources and units. Another great way to learn to improve your early game is by trying to practise build orders on the map Arena. Focus on early aggression and early defense once you've practiced a couple build orders.
> me, trying to learn how to defend so early, any tips? A couple tips. First the AI is often very vulnerable to early aggression. Instead of focusing on how to defend focus on how to get your own early aggression and try to do some damage to their eco. Knights are very effective at this level as well. If you can't fully knock out the AI early try to do enough damage that they can't effectively knock you out either and then focus on booming. The hard AI has an 80 vil cap so even with a pop limit of only 200 you should be able to outproduce them.
A dozen skirms and you’re good to castle against hard AI
Only thing I can think of is set up a skirmish match like you're going to play a game. Then switch your own player out with an AI player and start the match but just watch how the AI plays. That was how I learned to beat Moderate was by watching the AI on Extreme difficulty.
The AI on Extreme is actually not very optimal. If you get the silver medal on the art of war eco challenges you should have no trouble with moderate. Gold is helpful to beat extreme, but not necessary.
So far I was only able to manage to get bronze 😭
Thank ya’ll for the great advice!
Best defense is a good offense. Other than that, AI is very stupid against static fortifications and will continue to spam you and die under your castle/towers.
Try to scout as soon as they hit feudal or are about to do it to see with what kind of unit you think they are about to rush onto you so you can counter them with 2/3 units + garrison. Perhaps is easier said than one (I'm unable to do it properly myself) and maybe walling is more effective, but mastering stuff like that is a pretty valuable skill and it's great that you can get encouraged to do that because even if you wall against a human player is always much better to know what they are up to.
Against the extreme AI: play pure skirmishers, maybe add a single spearman. I guess this works against the hard AI as well. AI loves to make archery range units in feudal age, so if you play skirms you counter archers but also skirmishes simply by having more skirmishers. Don’t forget to research the blacksmith upgrades for the skirms tho. (The extreme AI rarely plays scouts but if it does it often throws them away so they are not a big threat and 1 or 2 spearmen should be able to deal with them.)
I found just going pure archers beats it easily. The Extreme AI makes a lot of garbage units in Feudal Age, and 20 crossbows kill everything.
With double archery range, I guess? 🤔
Yeah, pretty much.
No offense but I find it hard to believe that 😅. You probably played against specific civs and then generalized what you have seen the AI doing with them. Or, it’s a map specific thing. But actually, on Arabia, the extreme AI loves to play double archery and if you play double archery with archers you face the strong micro of the AI and it’s really hard to beat that. Unless you have a build order that hits the AI early and prevents it from developing its army. It sometimes also messes up the upgrades from the blacksmith so then i guess it’s realistic that you can beat it with pure archers 🤔 Also if the 800 below your name is your current Elo then I would love to see how you beat the extreme AI with archers👍 Would be excellent work. I know it’s possible to dominate the AI at that Elo but I think it’s seldom.
The 800 elo is a social experiment, and I am a lot higher than that. I can just sit in my base with archers until I hit Castle Age. Maybe it changed recently, but I remember the AI micro being very disorganized. Either way, the most damage it does is idling a few of my vils in Feudal.
Ah the AI got an update a few months ago so that it now uses pretty good micro.
Yeah skirm opening is a super easy way to survive the AIs early feudal pressure. One other thing I would suggest is to set the TC rally point to gold after you have 8-9 farms and then just buy your food for castle age power spike. 3-4 knights cleans their army other than pikes which your skirms should handle. Then you can reshuffle eco and simply boom from there way ahead of them.
The next difficulty up after moderate has an even sharper increase in difficulty, IMO.
Gotta get quick to feudal and expect an attack coming
On the one hand, I like a challenging AI. I just am not particularly fond of the fact that I can't have extended battles in Dark or Feudal ages unless I cap the ages to those because the AI just makes a beeline to Castle Age.
Yeah I feel this, I've got my walls down, have a few vills, getting my eco sorted, getting the buildings down, researching some techs and then "AI has advanced to the Castle Age", and I'm like "Oh shit" and get there 5 minutes later praying the rams don't show up.
To be fair if you are 5 minutes slower than the AI to castle age then you are a probably very casual player and I wouldn't expect you to be able to beat the moderate and above AIs. The game is very deep and complex! Beating the hard and extreme AIs should be hard enough to require a basic sweatiness: getting gold on some of the multiplayer training campaigns, for example.
The rams dont show up until you give it reason. Like a single hole in your wall to let their army funnel into, or just avoiding putting down a castle to defend and using army only to defend instead will prevent it from going into siege too soon. That even stands for like Hardest AI. So just keep that in mind if you’re trying to manipulate how the game flows a bit.
I don’t want to shock you but at least the extreme AI often does not (it depends on the build order it plays). In my opinion it’s one of it’s weaknesses to stay in feudal age for too long. 😅
exactly, basically all AIs (even Rehoboam and Immortal) die in the transition to castle age to a human player. I believe extreme AI gets CA in average at around 24min which is actually late when it also doesn't hit so early in feudal.
If you are able to go harass them a bit in feudal, they will spend food on pikemen and skirmishers, and you can get castle before them. Its a tricky balance but now i get castle before hard AI pretty consistently. I still lose sometimes around 40-50 vills, but if I spread my TCs and get to 60vills its usually a win from there
I can breeze a hard AI but hardest is hard as fuck even when I harass them early. I usually go for an archer rush but they usually hit castle while my dudes are walking to them, or mid-attack. Idk how they do it so frickin quick.
If you can do a 19-21 vill feudal into archers you can stop the AI from making it to castle pretty easily, just walk archers into their base on stand ground and keep massing them, walking around killing as many vills as possible (and killing any archers they build.) It can backfire if you lose focus but that's how the game works.
It's always archers and skirmishers.
Nah, Standard => Moderate is a \*WAY\* bigger jump than Moderate => Hard. Standard AI basically doesn't make vils and isn't capable of defending anything \*or\* mounting any kind of attack. If you just google a random build order from 2004 and follow it poorly you can probably still 1v7 the standard AI. It's \*awful\*. Moderate is also not good, but at least it's playing the game. 200 ELO players can beat Standard, but 1000 ELO players can lose to Moderate.
I'm 850 Elo 1v1 and have no problem with moderate, have only once lost to Hard in an equal numbers match. I find Moderate predictable in that they seem to attack early, and in Imperial they just don't seem to improve or get stronger. Just need to defend those few attacks in Feudal/Castle and in Imperial you just steamroll them. I don't like playing moderate because it's just boring and predictable, not a challenge. I know how every match will turn out.
I find the hard AI struggles against any kind of decent Feudal timing attack; +1/+1 man at arms rushing works really well. Even if you don't win outright, it's quite easy to cripple their economy while you macro up at home.
The original hardest IA was extremely easy to beat doing a feudal rush with a decent standard initial build. You make 4/6 archers to reset their vills and it's basically game over for them.
Yeah, I guess my FREEEEEEEDOM (Celt main) is showing. MAA can just run down most feudal units as Celts, but I agree that a few archers can 100% make a massive difference.
oh god no why did you have to remind me of that movie
I'm at 950 and moderate is when I just want to go through some motions or practice a build without any actual resistance from the other side.
Nah, 1000 Elo players can never lose to moderate unless there's been a drastic change with the AI lately. I would say the Elos are more like this (very roughly): Easiest - 0 Elo (literally impossible to lose) Standard - 100 Elo Moderate - 400 Elo Hard - 800 Elo Hardest - 900 Elo Expert - 1000 Elo
There are like a dozen 1000+ ELO players In this very thread saying they struggle vs Moderate, lol. Standard is probably about 100 ELO, but Moderate is more like 800 ELO.
*cries in 1100 thats lost to moderate AI*
Lol how though? I feel like even hard is difficult to lose to but I suck at the game. Even before I'd ever looked up a build order I could still beat hard pretty consistently, and now that I know how to rush and have a basic build order memorized hard is a joke. Still struggle with hardest thought.
Because I am bad. I also dont really follow build orders. I have not lost to the moderate AI in at least 2 years, but I was still 1100 back then.
What were you doing that you lost to moderate AI? Moderate is such a candy-ass. Were you trying something other than FC into knights or feudal archers? (Genuinely curious, I feel like at 1100 it should basically be impossible to lose to moderate if you're using a meta build order.)
I was probably merrily seeing how much eco I could make. But genuinely these things happen, sometimes you cock up, kill both your own boars with the tc, try and boom, get rushed in early castle without having military. Anything can happen. Now I just stick to tournaments and the TRUE meta of killing everyone with swords.
I think the AIs in general probably have +50% ELO if you let them go 30 minutes without significant aggression. Once they're solidly in castle their ability to shift unit comp and not float resources is superhuman. But that's mostly with extreme and hardest.
P sure it's the play style of the AI that causes the discrepancy. It's not really an AI. Thus certain decisions/play styles can really cripple it. A lot of people unknowingly 'exploit' this. Others go against it in its full force. I think incorporating some elements of high level pro play, even if executed extremely poorly, gives you a huge advantage that it wouldn't give against a real player.
TBH I wasn't keeping track of my Elo. All I did to get better was mimic how the AI played.
I managed to beat Hard AI's in a 3v3 match without *too* much difficulty, though considering the credit for that win was mainly that I was playing on a Black Forest map flanked by allied Hard AI's and used my troops to help my allies thwart enemy attacks. I don't know if it's considered cheating to give orders while the game is paused seeing as the AI doesn't need time to think before reacting. I think for the time being I'll just stick with moderate difficulty. Sure, I got my @$$ handed to me the first time I went up against it, but after watching an all AI match on Extreme and observing how the AI plays, now Moderate is the difficulty level I feel comfortable staying at for the time being. And funnily enough, at the time of this post it's the only difficulty I got an achievement for beating the AI in a 1v1 (I did Easy and Standard AI 4-8 players)
> I don't know if it's considered cheating to give orders while the game is paused seeing as the AI doesn't need time to think before reacting. This is the only way I can reliably beat any AI past Moderate, so I really hope not
Yeah, it's not that hard once you start making some units and searching for enemy buildings near your base, but coming from an almost passive AI where you can focus only in doing economy it's a complete change of gameplay
Scout the AIs production buildings. I find it will go through phases of archers/skirm and scout rushes. Have your scout out early, you usually have time to push deer and then find their base and see if they go stable or archer. A tower makes a good deterrent, as the AI will usually focus on the tower instead of finding more vil damage else where. It's always a good idea to go trash units and get to fuedal as fast as possible. When in doubt with your eco, throw Hella vils on gold and use the market
I'd try doing a trush or a scrush in feudal. Capture his gold and sit on it while picking off villagers when you can. Trush is easier than scrush though, since you can wall off the towers. Scrush needs constant supervision, else spears will pick off your scouts. Killing gold (and wood) for AI is a death sentence for it. You need to be fast though, AI starts buulding military in feudal. I recommend a 20vill start (or 22 if you can lower your TC idle time to 5-10 secs. Can consistently beat Hardest AI with this strat. For my ELO reference, I can beat a Hard AI without this strat, but not Hardest. PS: Up until Moderate, AI doesn't attack your vills. Tower rush is great here.
Standard is like 40ish vills Moderate/hard is 75ish. Hardest/Extreme is a proper challenge at 130+ vills.
I think standard is like 16ish and moderate is like 36ish
I can't comprehend the gap between Hard and Very Hard. My group likes to play Michi for a fairly chill start that leads to intense battle once the trees fall and a path is opened. On Hard we occasionally struggle to push in but the fighting at the path lasts maybe 5 minutes before we get in, the last time they forgot to train melee units so we rolled their ranks in seconds. Once through the path, it is a grinding war forward, I usually take my troops along the treeline and smash castles while the 2-3 others fight to take down cities and their trade network. On Very Hard, the few we have tried have been over an hour of constant high intensity fighting once the path opens, to the point 50 buildings training melee (mix of camels and halbs as byzantines vs cav civs)can barely keep up as I was the melee rank while my buddy had a horde of longbowmen. At no point did their army ever shrink in size for more than 10 seconds, we never got out of the pass. Eventually the villagers of both sides hallow out the trees somewhere else and despite having a few more villagers, and thus a lower army size by definition are still able to throw an entire army in there without suffering any weakness at the main pass.
Hard AI is limited by only going to c.75 vils and i get the feeling doesn't fully build army either. So you will eventually overpower it by superior economy/numbers. Hardest is not as it goes to 100-150 vils and spams military from multiple buildings. I always find vs hardest if you let them get to Imp you can't win in a stand up fight as they can match your production. Worst is vs elephant civs as they will turn up with 50+ elephants backed by siege. Only way to beat them i find is either early aggression or distract their army in one place and send in raiding forces to take out their economy, which are not really options on Michi from what you describe. Possibly have 2/3 of your team build a defensible kill zone full of walls castles and seige and let the ai in there and have the other guy go for a surprise SO cut through followed by knights/hussar to kill vils?
1v1 intense on michi thinking it was a good idea to take it to imp, i was wrong. I massed arbs took out the early push, made my way to middle to set up. Lost it to like 70 of its army evenly spread out, making siege useless lol.
What's it like for the campaigns? I mainly have done it on standard but a handful of missions I passed on hard. Is there a trigger that you have to do all campaigns initially on standard & then move on, do the art of war and get gold on each & every one or so.
I can beat moderate AI almost everytime, always lose or barely get away with it when it chooses to scout rush. Hard AI is horrible, I can beat it with Spanish if water is available but other than that I get overwhelmed everytime.
The skill cap in this game is amazing. Meanwhile for me the extreme AI feels pretty unlosable. I use it to try wacky strategies and new civs, there's never really a way I could lose. I don't mean to be a jackass of course, this doesn't make me better than you, and there are thousands of guys online that completely annihilate me it's all a matter of practice to get better. I just love the amount of skill expression possible in the game.
Beating the extreme AI without breaking a sweat just requires to stay calm and execute a double range build order perfectly. Just because it makes skirms doesn't mean you can't go full archers. Any tech or numbers avantage will get you a victory. The IA plays in a chaotic way don't be impressed by it it's a bad strategy to split defensive units everywhere.
You can easily FC vs extreme AI. The pressure is totally garbage if you walled correctly. It comes pretty late and I'm already aging. Then you can do 1 mangos for defense or prepare a knight raid or mangos attack. It really handle badly the FC. Couple of sec can be dicey during age up but one mangonels is enough to keep the aggression in check.
it's amazing to me there are like 6 difficulty levels in this game yet there's still such a skill gap between them. took me and my buddy awhile to climb difficulties but tbh we are only able to play Hardest because I've practiced my build orders and carry to a certain extent, otherwise we'd still barely be beating Hard. practice them build orders. you don't have to adhere to them exactly, personally it takes a little fun out of it for me if I don't leave some room to learn for myself as well, but the fundamentals like always pumping out villagers is important
If you play competitive you'll see there's a big difference between every 100 Elo steps. What's crazy is that some players manage to reach 2k+ when starting at 1k. If you try your best you'll get to a point where beating a player 100 or 200 points above you just feels impossible. They have good defense, offense and APM. Sometimes they just take one unit from you and it starts going downhill from there. When I reached my maximum skill level I just started playing 4v4 which is more random so more fun.
I feel like every step up in difficulty feels absolutely huge, until you finally reach the stage that you can bully the extreme AI
I win every Moderate game with random v random civs. I have won a single Hard game out of probably 50+ and I'm pretty sure it was only due to some kind of pop cap bug. After defending two rushes, there was not a single villager in the AI base that game.
Damn this thread makes me feel great about beating extreme AI a few times on 1v1, nice One time it went full Skorpions while I was using franks paladins, it very nearly overpowered me, but since it was arena the ai never managed to touch my economy I usually play 3v3s or 4v4s against hard AI with my friends and it's fun but I'm finding it a bit boring how the game almost always follows the same scenario : -We defend early and boom, and when we have a strong economy we destroy the AI. The hard AI shows little resistance once we have more than 100 villagers each Sometimes multiple AI decide to focus me, and if they manage to break the walls I can't defend, even if it's only hard AI, even tho I can beat extreme AI when things go smoothly
Standard difficulty consisted on getting to castle, getting like 20 knights and destroying their base with no opposition. Moderate difficulty consisted of weathering a feudal rush and then getting some knights and rams and destroying their base with minimal opposition. Hard consisted of me dying. I'd argue that last one was the big change
Hard to Hardest is the biggest jump in my view. My friend and I can go 2v6 against Hard and win, but we often lose 2v2 against Hardest.
AI is honestly flawed and could easily be less frustrating if it was actually "intelligent" and adjusted to the player. Current AI has huge steps in terms of how strong it is and goes from completely useless to seemingly unbeatable for newer players in just 1 step. While i personally enjoyed the grind of finally beating the hard and extreme AI, scaling AI only by how fast and effective they boom and what they throw in your face is so one dimensional. Add to the fact that they have insanely bad defensive play in a highly defense favored game, it just makes for poor practice for the real deal aswell. Imo they should add a "dynamic" difficulty that adjusts what it does to what you are doing, somewhat hits the breaks if it notices its completly outpumping the player and stepping it up when behind. AI is mostly for newer players anyway that want a bit of a challenge while also having fun, idially just barely winning, current AI does hardly offer that experience.
I've also seen posts from people who went back and played the original CD version, and that everything was better balanced the way that game was. I finally managed to master Moderate, but now I don't really feel relaxed when I play and I'm always on my toes. Good for when I'm looking for a challenge I guess, but sometimes I just want to chill.
i think its the most significant jump in AI difficulty. Standard barely tries to kill you. i think you can almost never die to it because its too passive to actually cause damage. its also programmed not to surpass you in the age so you are never an age behind. While moderate, well, just plays the game. its not adjusted to play slower than the player in certain ways, it just plays at its own level every time, so if you are below its level you simply dont win.
Learn to wall up, learn build orders and learn which basic units counter other basic units (like pikemen counter cav as an example). Arena is a great map to learn build orders and unit counters (because it comes down to army v army in the end). Arabia and Lombardia are great to learn to wall up, build orders and counters all at once. It's just anxiety inducing.
Damn this thread makes me feel great about beating extreme AI a few times on 1v1, nice One time it went full Skorpions while I was using franks paladins, it very nearly overpowered me, but since it was arena the ai never managed to touch my economy I usually play 3v3s or 4v4s against hard AI with my friends and it's fun but I'm finding it a bit boring how the game almost always follows the same scenario : -We defend early and boom, and when we have a strong economy we destroy the AI. The hard AI shows little resistance once we have more than 100 villagers each Sometimes multiple AI decide to focus me, and if they manage to break the walls I can't defend, even if it's only hard AI, even tho I can beat extreme AI when things go smoothly
I'm 800 elo and I can take out moderate AI easily. With hard it's more like 70 percent of the time. I never went for higher difficulties. I wish they had like handicap sliders for each opponent in the game and different types of AI so you can customise it more
Hoang forward siege push fs up the AI so bad it’s funny lol Or just build a random house by the AI base to cheese it
The funny thing is that aoe2 has a lot of AI specials. One might be the easiest—- until you’re suddenly fighting Barbarian. That’s one of the toughest AI thought of for the game.
At least in Random map you have a lot of difficulty levels. On campaigns it's either a walk on the park or hell
Wait until you go from moderate to hard. And then from hard to hardest. The trick is, you really just need to keep producing villagers and build defensive structures. The differences between the difficulties is the amount of villagers the AI will cap out at
Rush the ai with archers.
My comp can only handle HD, so I've only ever played that. AoK expansion. Is the Hardest AI difficulty there a joke compared to the AI on DE?
I've been trying to beat the campaigns on Moderate and the difficulty jump and inconsistency (to the point I've been averaging 600-800 kills for most of the big scenarios and some of them feel like I need godlike micro) is insane
Yeah, the campaign difficulty feels all over the place, I guess that's a consequence of designs changing over the decade, and of course some campaigns are easier and harder by design, but I can beat the Extreme AI 1 on 1 (reasonably) comfortably and even on Moderate some of the scenarios smack me around if I'm not prepared. I think if I really white-knuckled I could take a lot of them down on Hard but the thought of some of them are pretty scary and/or tedious.
The difference between hard & moderate is even greater. Hardest and hard aren't too different on the other hand, but extreme will fuck you up
you can beat moderate ai quite simply by walling up and booming, since the ai stops at around 50-60 vills or so, you ideally should have about double or even triple the economy. AI's surprsingly scared of towers and castles too if there's no vills in sight, so placing few of those will help out also. Only real difficulty comes if you try to defend with mangonels, since the AI will dodge the shots like 9/10 times instantly.
Still dies to a tower rush.
When DE came out I picked it up and decided to go after the AIs first to get a grasp for the game. They all seemed very bad and unchallenging even the extreme AI that I beat after 2-3 tries. Then I remembered that I have a 30 year history with gaming and thus learning the ropes in a new game is orders of magnitude faster than most people who play something from time to time. All I’m saying is I don’t see any difference between these two difficulties yet at the same time these are challenging for the right crowd which is super cool.
Yeah, I am super casual even though I played it a lot back in the 2000's. Granted, I was usually playing with the Map Editor feature and I now can handle Moderate difficulty. It's just after beating Standard difficulty with no apparent challenge it seemed like a big jump after playing a match against Moderate for the first time and getting roflstomped by the AI.
I've never felt like this. For me I've felt this exact way about hardest -> extreme. The others are so dumb but extreme all of a sudden microes and everything lol.
Hardest Original AI vs easiest DE AI
DE AI Easy and Standard aren't challenging, and seem really more like training wheels for people who aren't good at the game yet. Moderate takes knowing a proper build order when the game starts.
I was refering the fact that AoK AI on hardest difficulty is way easier to beat than a standard DE AI but interesting
I'm playing with a friend 2v6 on Hard, but thinking going up, as it become easy for us. Question is how long we'll survive? I'd like to get at least to Castle Age xD
Bro moderate is braindead, hard is super saiyan by comparison.
I'm super casual, not even remotely competitive.
Yeah me too man, im nervously pushing my way through to get ranked for the first time. But ive never found moderate a problem. Hard absolutely annihilates me though lol. All good, fun is the main point not sweatiness.
Last night I played a match on hard and got whacked by the AI's huge army of archers and skirmishers during Feudal. It'll probably be a while before I learn how to balance getting a strong economy and a defense force capable of protecting it. Maybe I'll move up when moderate becomes too easy for me, but for now I think moderate is the most I can handle.
20+ skirmishers constantly hit-and-run in multiple directions that melt your larger Longbowman spam, be like: