"The hill with the dead tree protects the only access to your town. It will be a good idea to build a watch tower here once you advance to the feudal age." Conquerors AI took that advice a bit too seriously....
For fifteen years I played AOE from the CD against AI and thought I was quite good at AOE. Upon purchasing HD, it turns out I'm actually really dreadful.
Same here. I haven't played in a while, and never really got good online, but the only way for me to guarantee beating the Hardest HD AI is to rush and harass/kill its villagers in feudal. If I let it continue to collect relics and take over the map like it did in this video, it's harder to beat. Definitely harder than the original.
We all had that moment xD > play aoe2 offline since you're 8 years old > think you're really good at this shit > play first game online in a room called "total noobs only" and lose > realise you know nothing
I love how you said "...that they should be comfortable with." It's adorable to see you care even for the comfort of artificial intelligence as you send them into an all-out war with each other.
I will say something in favour of the AOC AI: it obeys and responds to chat commands. The HD one is often unresponsive, like late-game when I tell them to attack they don't respond. Their units instead remain standing around, doing nothing. I also don't like how they got rid of the gimmicky ones - I liked being able to say "Build a Navy" on a BF map and have them respond with a "Girl what?" There was also a fairly useless "What Age Are You In?", which you'd be able to tell anyway by just looking at what it says on the side. I don't disagree the HD AI is probably better overall, but I hate asking my ally to attack, send resources etc and receive a "Alas, I cannot help at this time".
B BG The resigning. Oh my God, the resigning. Whenever I'm playing on hardest and I FINALLY start getting the upper hand they RESIGN. It's such an anti-climax. I don't know what they were thinking with the HD AI. The AOC one had problems the HD one fixed, but it screws up other things. The Resonancebot is, of course, the shit. Along with it performing better than the HD AI, it responds, it's dependable, it even does stuff like THANKING me for sending tribute. It's these tiny things which make you appreciate it more.
Something really funny about resigning AIs is playing the first versions of conquerors in easier difficulties. In AoK they almost never, or just never resign, but in easy, if you are playing , a 3 vs 3. Sometimes one of them will resign right at the start. I remember this was pretty common in the first version of conquerors.
Somecooltoad That seems to ring bells, yeah! I got that a lot especially in the Map Editor, when I'd make my own custom scen and forget to give the AI any resources. They'd start gathering wood and actually get close to recovering, but then they just resign. Still, that's preferable in my book when compared to resigning just because they're starting to lose. Not entirely sure if that's some kind of algorithm which triggers it, like "### amount of points lost in ### minutes", but it needs to not be. Speaking of AoK, am I the only one who always had AI set diplomatic status to neutral, no matter what? It made team games kind of frustrating.
+Porglit Interesting point. I was thinking maybe it had its eye on imperial age, but you might be right. Not sure why it would build a castle if that's the case, but maybe it built the castle after its economy was getting wrecked and its wonder plans were ruined.
+Spirit Of The Law Imperial Age? Read the resignation note again. It wanted to build the wonder in the Dark Age! x'D Not only weak, the original AI was also dumb xD
Yeah I think the old AI was programmed for 75 pop games rather than 200. But yeah I remember with it if you can hold off it's first attack it won't really attack again and then you can roll in with trebuchets and an army and clean up
Depends on the version. I remember AoK was more aggressive but didn't focus on defenses a lot, when The conquerors was more defensive and focused on bulding defenses, then striking in Castle age. However both versions make the same mistake, they don't tend to make more than 2 barracks or 2 of any offensive building. And every time they attack , they rarely go full scale. while the current Ai will always push you to defend yourself while advancing ages
the biggest change for me was: if you played a game with more than 1 ai without teams and without the ability to form alliences the old ai would go all on you. they'd play like they are allied. the new one does not do that.... and yes i prefer playing against ai over playing pvp
there are lots of us. i also mostly only play against the AI. I actually don't like playing random people, only my friends, that's why i don't play this online.
Yeah, I remember playing against the old AI. The extra resources it got meant that it would reach Castle in about eight minutes and rush you. As long as you could wall up and withstand the initial onslaught it became pretty easy though.
You can see that the new AI' has really picked up more tricks from actual players and acts more player like than the original one which played waaaay to passive in the end. Really confused me how little military production it had overall. Maybe it was triggered by the fact it didn't scout the enemies base. I remember my AoC matches with my dad vs ai and it was always sending out really small waves of like ... 8 longswordmen and 4 crossbowmen or so. The new ai just maximizes econ and production and outright steamrolls you with units. Its actually fairly hard to play against if you let it build up.
In 1996, Kasparov was beaten by IBM’s Deepblue algorithm in chess. Would the same apply for aoe2? By this I mean, if the best (self-learning?) artificial intelligence algorithms were used to build an ai for age of empires 2, would it beat the best human players? There are a few rules to benchmark correctly: * the ai can not cheat (nor does the human :)) * the ai can only use information that would also be available to a human: everything that is visible on the map (and not like, access the amount of resources of the enemy to build probability matrices for their strategies) * the ai of course can use priors (build in strategies and knowlegde), as humans do the same. E.g. Britons will probably produce a lot of longbowman, * the mouse click speed is matched: the computer can only give 1 command every half a second for example, but of course, can extract unlimited information from the game at a particular time, because humans can look around quite fast on the map too * the ai may communicate over the net to pool information learned over millions of games, as humans do to
Another difference I would always encounter when playing AoC is that if you let them build up they would send in a small army at a time whereas when I got HD Forgotten Empires, the AI just flood in with units. On a 500 pop game I looked through the end stats and there largest army was 450!
But the "original AI" of the HD is also different from the actual original AI of the non-HD game For instance, in regicide matches in the non-HD game, the King stays still under the building he was garrisoned until it is completely destroyed and then he runs away; while in the "original AI" of the HD, the King runs away right after the building is no longer able to keep him garrisoned. So they lied to us, it's not the original AI.
Tested it for myself. 1 new AI vs 3 old AIs. The new AI beat them with no difficulties. He could have done it much earlier but decided to have a big army to defend his empire (which normally is a good choice if you play alone against 3 players).
This playstyle of the original AI that encourages turtling seems to have been common in the RTSes of the day. C&C Generals also had a hard AI that boomed very hard at the beginning (not sure whether it got extra resources or constuction time, but it always beat me to the vehicle factory, and poured out tanks like crazy) and then died off since it didn't build or only built one or two of the buildings that supply you with resources indefinitely, so as soon as it lost map control or all the resource deposits were empty, it came grinding to a halt. Changes to that behaviour upped the AI difficulty in their addon Zero Hour, even though their newly introduced factions also messed with the balance immensely. Another example I think could be Battle for Middle Earth II, which reused the ring base design of the first game, even though that makes you a prime target for special abilities, and doesn't allow multiple copies of one building, but since all resource structures are indepletable there, it didn't matter that much. You were still guaranteed to win if you killed their fortress and didn't outright die at that point, since they never rebuilt it.
The original ai goes into "dumb mode" whenever it gets out scored. If you play 1v2 or 1v3 vs the old ai on hardest, you can win by just out booming all of them then playing castle into archers and seige. The new ai is much harder to play haha. especially vs multiple. Interesting to learn all the differences!
Having seen two of your games against the Hardest AI in HD, I was kind of shocked, how aggressive the AI suddenly was. I have only played against the AoC which - as you already summed up - trains you to play defensive for an epic demolition in the late game.
A thing I miss about the new AI from the old AI is that the new AI doesn't build walls or towers and the only moment the new AI builds walls is when it starts making a wonder. The new AI just makes the walls but doesn't upgrade them and it rarely repairs or rebuilds the built wall if destroyed or damaged.
This "Original AI" is worse than the real Original AI. The latter would advance to feudal at 04:00 and to Castle at 09:00. Then it would do some long swordsmen and cav archer while it would be constructing a forward castle around HD AI's base. This new "original AI" became absolutely silly, and is easier than the old moderate AI.
Love the new AI, it was made by promi, a community ai scripter who made the great promi ai. Have a look through the ai .per files to see how much is going on, its pretty impressive. Unfortunately the ai commands are limited and while some things were added for HD (taken from the user-patch) it needs more updates to make it more effective. Hopefully they fully implement the user patch ai addons eventually so we can get the full promi ai
A way the old AI is better: Walls. It will wall off maps such as black forest and defend itself. if you even start the new AI on a Fortress map IT DELETES ALL ITS WALLS!?!?!?
Hey, could you maybe investigate the AI build order on water maps? They manage to get huge navies pretty quick, and I'm sure they build differently than on land maps.
The Hardest AI on AoC gets additional resources to make up for the lack of programming in SP. It sort of compensates the lack of boar luring aswell. The extra resources on the Hardest difficulty and any resource setting are +500 each resource compared to the player. So, if you have Low/Standard resources, the AI will get 700 Wood/Food/Stone and 600 Gold to enhance its gameplay. On the Standard difficulty the AI will get the same amount of resource as the player, every difficulty level defines its own resource benefit for the AI on AoC. This is one of the reasons the Original AI performs poorly on AoHD and better on AoC.
I'm taking notes from this. I'm new at the HD AI so I was rekt in a match by Indian camels in normal difficulty. I was trying to defend with pikes but I guess I'm still very used to old AI. I need to learn and practice more about these rush strategies.
The new AI is definitely better, but I wonder why it attacks so uncoordinated? Original AI does use formation and keeps its army, when attacking, together. New AI does just send all units forward, resulting in a thin line, sending unit by unit into death. Any idea why that is/why the devs went for this for the new AI?
Well, the new Forgotten AI tends to micro its units serparately. This may result in sending them to death individually, but at equal numbers it's a huge advantage over formations in my opinion. Formations are easier to conter for humans, because units of the same type are closer together, so you can focus and counter them. This is way harder with the AI's individual micro, because halbs, champs and arbs tend to be mixed, so you can't just release your Paladins on them - they would be down soon due to the mixed in and impossible to focus halberdiers
Yeah i noticed the original AI doesn't tend to attack a lot until Castle age. Up to castle age, you may see small skirmishes of men at arms and possibly archers to put pressure but it's not too often, while the new AI seems to adapt better to the situation at hand. But something that's really weird. is that i used to see explorers in my town in the original Conquerors. And for some reason in the original AI in hd they do that square exploring and don't bother looking for the enemy player. I don't think this "original AI " is the same from the original conquerors. It may be the AI from Age of Kings. Like I said, in conquerors they visit your Town Center with explorers pretty early on and will put pressure until castle age, when things will really get serious. Unless i don't remember well. It may be that in the original AoK the enemy was more aggressive but took longer to advance to castle age than in conquerors. I remember one of the two was more aggressive than this AI. I don't remember the AI of this game being so passive.
The classic AI has a very standard built system for a small pop game. Larger pop games tend to end out with it becoming passive after the first rush attack. I have only found that (given I am still playing AoC on the original disk, too lacking in gold to get HD on Steam) certain civ's AI's are more aggressive than others. 9 times out of 10 a Chinese AI for the original will aggressively attack late game but not rush. The same came out for Spanish, Byzantines and Goths for the original AI from the original disk version. The Hun AI is meant to be aggressive but will do a rush of sorts then passive out for a good half hour then it will try again on hardest. These are just observations I have made from the original AI, but the original Hunnic AI will sometimes "bug out" at high pop games, the Vikings and Celts did the same thing in the original during high pop games. In short, the original AI is less likely to do things players today do, and is more likely to attack, then passive out for 30 minutes, then try again with what it's got. So far the only exceptions I have found to this rule are the Chinese, Japs and Teutons, as all three will continue to aggressively attack if you let them. I don't know the difference for HD's AI in comparison to all this but one thing remains to answer: What would HD AI compare to the original in other civ's?
I dont know if it is just for me but the HDAI seems to be more laggy and none tactic. i have been noticing that the tend to mostly stand still more, and when they walk tend to freeze for a sec from time to time. the original AI used to mass a army and send it to kill me while HD sends one after one to me. the original ai that was my ally used to help me more, if a attack someone they where there with their whole army and if i wad attackt they send dome troops to help me while hd dont
+Niklas Eriksson I agree their units do tend to do a lot of standing around and weird freeze walking. The AI would be much harder if it managed it units well.
+Spirit Of The Law i have also been seeing idle villagers for the hd ai. im starting to think it may be some errors in the scripting, i hope they fix it
+Spirit Of The Law It's worst when you tower rush it. Any villagers that you hit with tower fire go into a weird spasm, retreating then trying to go back to their original task, ad infinitum until they die. I've found this to be an easy exploit if you can get in there early enough (before the AI can build rams).
you can still wall up and boom it's fine. But you need to think about siege defence and raids. If you don't do anything like that to at least divert attention you're done by 65 pop. Just gets real mad at your gates until it busts one down and gets real mad at your TC. I play on hard tho
Nice! I haven't played any of the new versions of the game yet, but been hearing that it's A.I. is more aggressive, was wondering exactly what that meant and now see. As for the old A.I., I played around with a game before and allowed it to build up it's economy over an unusually long amount of time vs a typical game and found that it eventually pumps out a massive army, but just turtles up with walls & towers and waits for you to attack it. Well, other than the small groups it would occasionally send out, but its routes were generally obvious and intercepted easily, which caused it to gradually attack less and turtle even more. Granted, I don't remember exactly what difficulty this particular "test" was at and there may have been a good amount of water on the level between us, which could be why the A.I. decided to isolate itself so much, though this one here looks like it was on its way to replicating what I seen before until the new A.I. disrupted its build order.
Why why why do AI enemy armies movie in choppy, long lines like that? In the original game they'd move in tight battalions as per usual. This wouldn't be a huge problem except for two things: 1. When playing scenario, the enemy does not engage me 2. Enemies gather around these weird, imaginary checkpoints and remain idle for minutes at a time (??) If anyone's got the fix, fill me in thanks
I just started playing this game again after a couple of years, one of the AIs just spammed castles, just a few villagers and a whole bunch of castles .-.
I'd imagine the stagnation of the original AI in Castle Age might have something to do with the expectation of 75 pop cap in the "olden days." I'd be interested to see the same match-up on those terms.
+Spirit Of The Law Could you do a tournament with the ai where the fight 1 VS 1? the one that losses leaves the tournament. Hardest Ai Random map. you could use all the Empires you want. it would make for a awsome series. - Your Greatest Fan
Old AI definitely seemed to be saving for a wonder or Imperial Age, but maybe it just doesn't know how to save properly. It can have 3000 gold but because it's still waiting for 1000 food/stone, it doesn't spend any of that. Just a thought.
I remember play the Conquers on a Pentium 1 233, man the game ran slow, the original AI was programmed with this in mind and the lagged interface. I have also noted the HD AI is very unforgiving to new players, or anyone used to the original. A note I will add is the Original AI only researched at the black smith where it had all five categories of upgrades, and only rarely on hardest would continue beyond that point.
At which point the original AI stopped bulding walls? Did it came with Conquerors? Just remembering from my chilhood days of age of kings, I remember 2 things - AIs had resource advantage and they always built walls just as they hit feudal.
Played AOC when it first came out and got to a point where beating multiple AI was easy. Downloaded the Steam version a couple months ago, and though I must admit some rust, I find the new AI much better at adapting.
I played AoE 2 (with expansions) a lot back in the day. I had a lot of fun with the AI, but at some points it did become boring, because they did nothing but send waves of units every now and then, just to keep me busy and they didn't focus any vital buildings or units. What I want in an AI is to adapt to different strategies and perhaps try some human ones, like rushing, proxy buildings etc.
What I hated the most was when AI players walled themselves in with two layers of towers in a square around their spawning location. It was tedious to attack and didn't even make sense. And whenever I played nomad maps or whatever it was called, they wouldn't know what to do, because they had no towncenter and they'd give up after like 5 minutes.
The new Ai plays normals and starts spamming an endless stream of units or all units of it freez. While the old Ai builds walls and attakt in organized groups. Is mine just buggie?
This isn't surprising at all. The two AIs are at least a decade apart in programming. The HD version has all sorts of tactics and maneuvers that were tried and tested to be successful by players.
I've played a fair few AI games in my time, and I reckon theres a bit of a random call for them to go for either walls or towers, but not often both....
+Peachrocks5 I tested it a while back on my unpatched Age of Kings CD version and I saw the AI getting an extra 500 of each resources at each age. For Age of Conquerors I thought the AI didn't get extra resources, but I may have had the 1.0c or 1.0e patch when I saw that, which were the standard for the a long time, but a person wouldn't automatically get by doing a fresh CD install now. These days I think the main one with the original CD is the Voobly community patch, and I'm not sure if the AI for that one is getting extra bonuses. There's too many versions to keep track of now, and it's possible they differ in terms of bonuses for the AI. I'd be interested to hear which versions have modified AIs
I confirm this. The Original AoK and AoC AI in those games (not the HD or remastered veríons) blatantly cheats in your face and starts with a difference of roughly 250~500 points ahead of you. That should explain why it advances so fast between ages. I mean, at 4 minutes of game time it is already in Feudal Age and in 6-7min in game time is already in Castle Age. By the time you get to Feudal the AI has built a formidable army and it all depends on playing defensively until you can catch up later in Imperial Age. Walling also helps since it gives you extra time to react. Altough rarely, but sometimes it will militia rush very early or archer rush you early. There is really nothing you can do besides exploiting the flaws of the computer, like building gates in front of theirs so they don't gest past from their own base. Also in maps with lots of water I struggle to beat the AI. They will harass your town with their bombard ships and galleons whenever they can. However, it is crucial to know which civ they go (if you set it on random), and get an idea of which kinds of troops you need to produce in order to counter them. Failing to do so will result in your town being sieged since at that moment they will mass you and you will be pretty much fucked at that point.
What I don't like about the new AI in AoF is that it NEVER attacks villagers, thus creating stalemates in AI vs AI. It never, ever attacks the core of the economy.
I would love to see what the old AI does if you knocked out everything and just left a few villagers and TC… Take all your troops back to your town and just spectate what the old AI does when it has to start again
its weird that whenever i play against the original AI, ALL the Ai seems to screw up and are much more reserved and don't age up past feudal very quickly
Spirit, perhaps use the Spectator Dashboard for those replays or does that not work for HD replays? That way you whould have real time comparison of income, villagers, vill distribution etc...
I recently noticed a strange thing in the stats: although the new AI had only around 70 vils (whereas I had around 100), AI had collected in general sevaral hundreds (!) of different ressources more than me. Thats almost impossible without cheating, because my vills were not idling that much.
I miss the old AI which would randomly try and ally with you at the start of the game, and then ask for food.
galuple aahahahh
"The hill with the dead tree protects the only access to your town. It will be a good idea to build a watch tower here once you advance to the feudal age." Conquerors AI took that advice a bit too seriously....
William Wallace?
@@cedrikullrich4298 Battle of Stirling
Attila was right, he couldn't build a wonder in dark age. Stop bashing him ! #All AIs are beautifull
For fifteen years I played AOE from the CD against AI and thought I was quite good at AOE.
Upon purchasing HD, it turns out I'm actually really dreadful.
Same here. I haven't played in a while, and never really got good online, but the only way for me to guarantee beating the Hardest HD AI is to rush and harass/kill its villagers in feudal. If I let it continue to collect relics and take over the map like it did in this video, it's harder to beat. Definitely harder than the original.
We all had that moment xD
> play aoe2 offline since you're 8 years old
> think you're really good at this shit
> play first game online in a room called "total noobs only" and lose
> realise you know nothing
Same
I've seen the new ai win 1v5 on hardest lol.
What about the barbarian AI?
I love how you said "...that they should be comfortable with." It's adorable to see you care even for the comfort of artificial intelligence as you send them into an all-out war with each other.
So wholesome
I will say something in favour of the AOC AI: it obeys and responds to chat commands.
The HD one is often unresponsive, like late-game when I tell them to attack they don't respond. Their units instead remain standing around, doing nothing. I also don't like how they got rid of the gimmicky ones - I liked being able to say "Build a Navy" on a BF map and have them respond with a "Girl what?" There was also a fairly useless "What Age Are You In?", which you'd be able to tell anyway by just looking at what it says on the side.
I don't disagree the HD AI is probably better overall, but I hate asking my ally to attack, send resources etc and receive a "Alas, I cannot help at this time".
B BG The resigning. Oh my God, the resigning. Whenever I'm playing on hardest and I FINALLY start getting the upper hand they RESIGN. It's such an anti-climax. I don't know what they were thinking with the HD AI. The AOC one had problems the HD one fixed, but it screws up other things.
The Resonancebot is, of course, the shit. Along with it performing better than the HD AI, it responds, it's dependable, it even does stuff like THANKING me for sending tribute. It's these tiny things which make you appreciate it more.
Something really funny about resigning AIs is playing the first versions of conquerors in easier difficulties. In AoK they almost never, or just never resign, but in easy, if you are playing , a 3 vs 3. Sometimes one of them will resign right at the start. I remember this was pretty common in the first version of conquerors.
GIMME YOUR SPARE RESOURCES
Somecooltoad That seems to ring bells, yeah! I got that a lot especially in the Map Editor, when I'd make my own custom scen and forget to give the AI any resources. They'd start gathering wood and actually get close to recovering, but then they just resign.
Still, that's preferable in my book when compared to resigning just because they're starting to lose. Not entirely sure if that's some kind of algorithm which triggers it, like "### amount of points lost in ### minutes", but it needs to not be.
Speaking of AoK, am I the only one who always had AI set diplomatic status to neutral, no matter what? It made team games kind of frustrating.
Alas, I cannot help that at this time.
I put the population limit on 75 and the original AI rekt the new one really hard.
Ketenkrad96 can we see tat video?
but the original ai cheats.....
Did it with 100, HD insisted on having 70 villagers
Because the original AI is optimized for 75 pop limit (most campaign pop limit)
9:38 "Kind of a smart move, to come around this side."
**knight attacks pikeman**
**pikeman runs away**
Yeeaahhh... smaart...
If 1v1 he should do that.
really smart pikeman running for save own town center
Original AI lost a villy to a wolf :(
Maybe it was saving all those resources so it could build a wonder, but couldn't get enough resources stacked to start one, which is why it resigned
+Porglit Interesting point. I was thinking maybe it had its eye on imperial age, but you might be right. Not sure why it would build a castle if that's the case, but maybe it built the castle after its economy was getting wrecked and its wonder plans were ruined.
+Spirit Of The Law how many AOC AIs does it take to beat 1 Aoe2HD AI.
Edit: also how many in deathmatch
+Spirit Of The Law Imperial Age? Read the resignation note again. It wanted to build the wonder in the Dark Age! x'D Not only weak, the original AI was also dumb xD
Couldn't be, the victory settings was on Conquest.
EDIT: I'm dumb
+Spirit Of The Law
and spirit where's the next road to 1800 pls
The original ai complained he couldn't build a wonder in the dark age. Not that he couldn't build one, period.
+James Brooks Yikes. Attila's not the type of dude you want to go around mistakingly calling a liar, either.
Spirit Of The Law yeah he's got a temper. Hopefully he isn't your opponent in the you v very hard ai ;)
Yeah I think the old AI was programmed for 75 pop games rather than 200. But yeah I remember with it if you can hold off it's first attack it won't really attack again and then you can roll in with trebuchets and an army and clean up
Depends on the version. I remember AoK was more aggressive but didn't focus on defenses a lot, when The conquerors was more defensive and focused on bulding defenses, then striking in Castle age. However both versions make the same mistake, they don't tend to make more than 2 barracks or 2 of any offensive building. And every time they attack , they rarely go full scale. while the current Ai will always push you to defend yourself while advancing ages
the biggest change for me was:
if you played a game with more than 1 ai without teams and without the ability to form alliences the old ai would go all on you. they'd play like they are allied. the new one does not do that....
and yes i prefer playing against ai over playing pvp
there are lots of us. i also mostly only play against the AI. I actually don't like playing random people, only my friends, that's why i don't play this online.
Sounds like Starcraft to me
Ha! you can't fool me! It's obviously a HD match between a 1300 and a 1500 with mad micro skillz
:3
The reason the Huns use tower (original) is because it doesn't have fortified walls
If you are with 75 pop cap then towers are a great asset, since your army can only be 50 units max.
Yeah, I remember playing against the old AI. The extra resources it got meant that it would reach Castle in about eight minutes and rush you. As long as you could wall up and withstand the initial onslaught it became pretty easy though.
Yup pretty much.
The Original AI sold 200 stone right after getting up the market: 5:20 - New AI did not.
You should make a 2vs1 instead! With 2 original vs 1 new
This is like watching a program fight another program while using another program > _ >
+Khazlol Not "like," it literally is.
Make every civ vs every civ.
+Bloomex on every map, of course.
+Bloomex on every diffculty
+Bloomex i actually want to see this
In one video. On a split screen.
Zhelyazko Badarov with 1 part of the screen for every troop and building
Whoa. After just watching an epic battle between Janik+Skull vs TheViper+MBL, AI seems so silly.
Lesson: lure boar or lose.
Right? Right??
You can see that the new AI' has really picked up more tricks from actual players and acts more player like than the original one which played waaaay to passive in the end. Really confused me how little military production it had overall. Maybe it was triggered by the fact it didn't scout the enemies base.
I remember my AoC matches with my dad vs ai and it was always sending out really small waves of like ... 8 longswordmen and 4 crossbowmen or so. The new ai just maximizes econ and production and outright steamrolls you with units. Its actually fairly hard to play against if you let it build up.
In 1996, Kasparov was beaten by IBM’s Deepblue algorithm in chess. Would the same apply for aoe2? By this I mean, if the best (self-learning?) artificial intelligence algorithms were used to build an ai for age of empires 2, would it beat the best human players? There are a few rules to benchmark correctly:
* the ai can not cheat (nor does the human :))
* the ai can only use information that would also be available to a human: everything that is visible on the map (and not like, access the amount of resources of the enemy to build probability matrices for their strategies)
* the ai of course can use priors (build in strategies and knowlegde), as humans do the same. E.g. Britons will probably produce a lot of longbowman,
* the mouse click speed is matched: the computer can only give 1 command every half a second for example, but of course, can extract unlimited information from the game at a particular time, because humans can look around quite fast on the map too
* the ai may communicate over the net to pool information learned over millions of games, as humans do to
120 actions per second is pretty low for a human.
well, not sure why i thought it was Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, but now i want her to play against the AoC AI
Another difference I would always encounter when playing AoC is that if you let them build up they would send in a small army at a time whereas when I got HD Forgotten Empires, the AI just flood in with units. On a 500 pop game I looked through the end stats and there largest army was 450!
Big support from Italy, I really appreciate your work :) keep on!
But the "original AI" of the HD is also different from the actual original AI of the non-HD game
For instance, in regicide matches in the non-HD game, the King stays still under the building he was garrisoned until it is completely destroyed and then he runs away; while in the "original AI" of the HD, the King runs away right after the building is no longer able to keep him garrisoned. So they lied to us, it's not the original AI.
Tested it for myself. 1 new AI vs 3 old AIs. The new AI beat them with no difficulties. He could have done it much earlier but decided to have a big army to defend his empire (which normally is a good choice if you play alone against 3 players).
i died at "blue seems spiteful"
What do you think, how would the AoK's (cheater) AI perform against the new AI?
Imo I think the cheater ai will lose!
AoK's still lost, I have tested.
Sooo..... if the old AI is optimized for 75 Pop, how would a 75pop game play out?
Apparemntly old AI wins because new AI overproduces villagers leaving little pop for army.
@@nemou4985 who told you that lie? The new ai has a different script for 50 pop, 75 pop, 100 pop, 150 pop and 200+ pop. it always beats the old one
This playstyle of the original AI that encourages turtling seems to have been common in the RTSes of the day. C&C Generals also had a hard AI that boomed very hard at the beginning (not sure whether it got extra resources or constuction time, but it always beat me to the vehicle factory, and poured out tanks like crazy) and then died off since it didn't build or only built one or two of the buildings that supply you with resources indefinitely, so as soon as it lost map control or all the resource deposits were empty, it came grinding to a halt. Changes to that behaviour upped the AI difficulty in their addon Zero Hour, even though their newly introduced factions also messed with the balance immensely.
Another example I think could be Battle for Middle Earth II, which reused the ring base design of the first game, even though that makes you a prime target for special abilities, and doesn't allow multiple copies of one building, but since all resource structures are indepletable there, it didn't matter that much. You were still guaranteed to win if you killed their fortress and didn't outright die at that point, since they never rebuilt it.
One thing I always hated with the Original AI was it's steadfast "I shall never resign" as long as it had a production building somewhere on the map.
deos map all visible change the AI's behaviour?
do what i do to the ai: wall in their tc while they are in dark age. works every time...
Thanks +Spirit of the Law, now I know why I turtle, boom and then flood the enemy in every RTS. AoE2 The Conquerors was my first real strategy game...
Would love to see a rehash of this bringing in the custom HD workshop AI's!
I haven't played AoE in ages, only remeber how to play by watching your videos xD I used to have so much fun doing it though
The original ai goes into "dumb mode" whenever it gets out scored. If you play 1v2 or 1v3 vs the old ai on hardest, you can win by just out booming all of them then playing castle into archers and seige. The new ai is much harder to play haha. especially vs multiple. Interesting to learn all the differences!
Exactly.
I've never won 1v4 though
Spirit, have you ever done a video on the Resonance Bot? I'd love to see you play with it against other bots on the hardest, and see how you judge it.
So it was basically Smith vs Neo
Having seen two of your games against the Hardest AI in HD, I was kind of shocked, how aggressive the AI suddenly was. I have only played against the AoC which - as you already summed up - trains you to play defensive for an epic demolition in the late game.
Rip Attila the Pun you'll be remembered
Did the old AI try to build a wonder? This would explain the unspent resources: It could have planned buying the needed resources with gold
A thing I miss about the new AI from the old AI is that the new AI doesn't build walls or towers and the only moment the new AI builds walls is when it starts making a wonder. The new AI just makes the walls but doesn't upgrade them and it rarely repairs or rebuilds the built wall if destroyed or damaged.
This "Original AI" is worse than the real Original AI. The latter would advance to feudal at 04:00 and to Castle at 09:00. Then it would do some long swordsmen and cav archer while it would be constructing a forward castle around HD AI's base. This new "original AI" became absolutely silly, and is easier than the old moderate AI.
You know about bonus resources it has got in AOC, right? It's basically cheating.
Great video. Love your channel!
Love the new AI, it was made by promi, a community ai scripter who made the great promi ai. Have a look through the ai .per files to see how much is going on, its pretty impressive. Unfortunately the ai commands are limited and while some things were added for HD (taken from the user-patch) it needs more updates to make it more effective. Hopefully they fully implement the user patch ai addons eventually so we can get the full promi ai
A way the old AI is better: Walls. It will wall off maps such as black forest and defend itself. if you even start the new AI on a Fortress map IT DELETES ALL ITS WALLS!?!?!?
true, it kind of bugs me when it does that and never plays defensively.
What we want is an AI that learns how to trash talk you
Hey, could you maybe investigate the AI build order on water maps?
They manage to get huge navies pretty quick, and I'm sure they build differently than on land maps.
The Hardest AI on AoC gets additional resources to make up for the lack of programming in SP. It sort of compensates the lack of boar luring aswell.
The extra resources on the Hardest difficulty and any resource setting are +500 each resource compared to the player. So, if you have Low/Standard resources, the AI will get 700 Wood/Food/Stone and 600 Gold to enhance its gameplay.
On the Standard difficulty the AI will get the same amount of resource as the player, every difficulty level defines its own resource benefit for the AI on AoC. This is one of the reasons the Original AI performs poorly on AoHD and better on AoC.
I'm taking notes from this. I'm new at the HD AI so I was rekt in a match by Indian camels in normal difficulty. I was trying to defend with pikes but I guess I'm still very used to old AI. I need to learn and practice more about these rush strategies.
LordBen24 I think Goths are the answer to that! Recently been playing as them quite a bit :p
New AI after castle age just going full beast mode
The new AI is definitely better, but I wonder why it attacks so uncoordinated? Original AI does use formation and keeps its army, when attacking, together.
New AI does just send all units forward, resulting in a thin line, sending unit by unit into death.
Any idea why that is/why the devs went for this for the new AI?
Well, the new Forgotten AI tends to micro its units serparately. This may result in sending them to death individually, but at equal numbers it's a huge advantage over formations in my opinion. Formations are easier to conter for humans, because units of the same type are closer together, so you can focus and counter them. This is way harder with the AI's individual micro, because halbs, champs and arbs tend to be mixed, so you can't just release your Paladins on them - they would be down soon due to the mixed in and impossible to focus halberdiers
Innocent III Thanks for clarification!
Prediction before starting: AoE2 HD by a landslide.
Better than a football match ⚔️
Yeah i noticed the original AI doesn't tend to attack a lot until Castle age. Up to castle age, you may see small skirmishes of men at arms and possibly archers to put pressure but it's not too often, while the new AI seems to adapt better to the situation at hand. But something that's really weird. is that i used to see explorers in my town in the original Conquerors. And for some reason in the original AI in hd they do that square exploring and don't bother looking for the enemy player. I don't think this "original AI " is the same from the original conquerors. It may be the AI from Age of Kings. Like I said, in conquerors they visit your Town Center with explorers pretty early on and will put pressure until castle age, when things will really get serious.
Unless i don't remember well. It may be that in the original AoK the enemy was more aggressive but took longer to advance to castle age than in conquerors. I remember one of the two was more aggressive than this AI. I don't remember the AI of this game being so passive.
Awesome video mate :D
The classic AI has a very standard built system for a small pop game. Larger pop games tend to end out with it becoming passive after the first rush attack. I have only found that (given I am still playing AoC on the original disk, too lacking in gold to get HD on Steam) certain civ's AI's are more aggressive than others. 9 times out of 10 a Chinese AI for the original will aggressively attack late game but not rush. The same came out for Spanish, Byzantines and Goths for the original AI from the original disk version. The Hun AI is meant to be aggressive but will do a rush of sorts then passive out for a good half hour then it will try again on hardest.
These are just observations I have made from the original AI, but the original Hunnic AI will sometimes "bug out" at high pop games, the Vikings and Celts did the same thing in the original during high pop games. In short, the original AI is less likely to do things players today do, and is more likely to attack, then passive out for 30 minutes, then try again with what it's got. So far the only exceptions I have found to this rule are the Chinese, Japs and Teutons, as all three will continue to aggressively attack if you let them. I don't know the difference for HD's AI in comparison to all this but one thing remains to answer: What would HD AI compare to the original in other civ's?
On another note the original Mayan AI will not ally with you but will try to extort resources from you in return for them not attacking you.
I dont know if it is just for me but the HDAI seems to be more laggy and none tactic.
i have been noticing that the tend to mostly stand still more, and when they walk tend to freeze for a sec from time to time. the original AI used to mass a army and send it to kill me while HD sends one after one to me. the original ai that was my ally used to help me more, if a attack someone they where there with their whole army and if i wad attackt they send dome troops to help me while hd dont
+Niklas Eriksson I agree their units do tend to do a lot of standing around and weird freeze walking. The AI would be much harder if it managed it units well.
+Spirit Of The Law i have also been seeing idle villagers for the hd ai. im starting to think it may be some errors in the scripting, i hope they fix it
+Spirit Of The Law It's worst when you tower rush it. Any villagers that you hit with tower fire go into a weird spasm, retreating then trying to go back to their original task, ad infinitum until they die. I've found this to be an easy exploit if you can get in there early enough (before the AI can build rams).
So that's why I get my ass kicked by the new AI. I was used to fighting the old AI so I walled up and boomed.
you can still wall up and boom it's fine. But you need to think about siege defence and raids. If you don't do anything like that to at least divert attention you're done by 65 pop. Just gets real mad at your gates until it busts one down and gets real mad at your TC. I play on hard tho
Nice! I haven't played any of the new versions of the game yet, but been hearing that it's A.I. is more aggressive, was wondering exactly what that meant and now see.
As for the old A.I., I played around with a game before and allowed it to build up it's economy over an unusually long amount of time vs a typical game and found that it eventually pumps out a massive army, but just turtles up with walls & towers and waits for you to attack it. Well, other than the small groups it would occasionally send out, but its routes were generally obvious and intercepted easily, which caused it to gradually attack less and turtle even more. Granted, I don't remember exactly what difficulty this particular "test" was at and there may have been a good amount of water on the level between us, which could be why the A.I. decided to isolate itself so much, though this one here looks like it was on its way to replicating what I seen before until the new A.I. disrupted its build order.
Why why why do AI enemy armies movie in choppy, long lines like that? In the original game they'd move in tight battalions as per usual. This wouldn't be a huge problem except for two things:
1. When playing scenario, the enemy does not engage me
2. Enemies gather around these weird, imaginary checkpoints and remain idle for minutes at a time (??)
If anyone's got the fix, fill me in thanks
I just started playing this game again after a couple of years, one of the AIs just spammed castles, just a few villagers and a whole bunch of castles .-.
I'd imagine the stagnation of the original AI in Castle Age might have something to do with the expectation of 75 pop cap in the "olden days." I'd be interested to see the same match-up on those terms.
The original AI actually built walls.
it said it could built a wonder on the Dark Age, no wonder it lost, not even knowing which age it was. :)
I'm just here for the kick ass intro
+Spirit Of The Law Could you do a tournament with the ai where the fight 1 VS 1? the one that losses leaves the tournament. Hardest Ai Random map. you could use all the Empires you want. it would make for a awsome series.
- Your Greatest Fan
This is pretty much like watching someone playing the game for the first time vs someone who knows what to do
think we could get a redo with more defensive factions, like the teutons or byzantines?
Old AI definitely seemed to be saving for a wonder or Imperial Age, but maybe it just doesn't know how to save properly. It can have 3000 gold but because it's still waiting for 1000 food/stone, it doesn't spend any of that. Just a thought.
I remember play the Conquers on a Pentium 1 233, man the game ran slow, the original AI was programmed with this in mind and the lagged interface. I have also noted the HD AI is very unforgiving to new players, or anyone used to the original. A note I will add is the Original AI only researched at the black smith where it had all five categories of upgrades, and only rarely on hardest would continue beyond that point.
Though not all the time, the Original AI can wall up. New AI never does.
At which point the original AI stopped bulding walls? Did it came with Conquerors? Just remembering from my chilhood days of age of kings, I remember 2 things - AIs had resource advantage and they always built walls just as they hit feudal.
2v1
Played AOC when it first came out and got to a point where beating multiple AI was easy. Downloaded the Steam version a couple months ago, and though I must admit some rust, I find the new AI much better at adapting.
I played AoE 2 (with expansions) a lot back in the day.
I had a lot of fun with the AI, but at some points it did become boring, because they did nothing but send waves of units every now and then, just to keep me busy and they didn't focus any vital buildings or units.
What I want in an AI is to adapt to different strategies and perhaps try some human ones, like rushing, proxy buildings etc.
What I hated the most was when AI players walled themselves in with two layers of towers in a square around their spawning location. It was tedious to attack and didn't even make sense.
And whenever I played nomad maps or whatever it was called, they wouldn't know what to do, because they had no towncenter and they'd give up after like 5 minutes.
The new Ai plays normals and starts spamming an endless stream of units or all units of it freez. While the old Ai builds walls and attakt in organized groups. Is mine just buggie?
This isn't surprising at all. The two AIs are at least a decade apart in programming. The HD version has all sorts of tactics and maneuvers that were tried and tested to be successful by players.
I've played a fair few AI games in my time, and I reckon theres a bit of a random call for them to go for either walls or towers, but not often both....
Doesn't original AI get bonuses on hardest where new AI does not?
+Peachrocks5 I tested it a while back on my unpatched Age of Kings CD version and I saw the AI getting an extra 500 of each resources at each age. For Age of Conquerors I thought the AI didn't get extra resources, but I may have had the 1.0c or 1.0e patch when I saw that, which were the standard for the a long time, but a person wouldn't automatically get by doing a fresh CD install now. These days I think the main one with the original CD is the Voobly community patch, and I'm not sure if the AI for that one is getting extra bonuses. There's too many versions to keep track of now, and it's possible they differ in terms of bonuses for the AI. I'd be interested to hear which versions have modified AIs
I confirm this. The Original AoK and AoC AI in those games (not the HD or remastered veríons) blatantly cheats in your face and starts with a difference of roughly 250~500 points ahead of you. That should explain why it advances so fast between ages. I mean, at 4 minutes of game time it is already in Feudal Age and in 6-7min in game time is already in Castle Age. By the time you get to Feudal the AI has built a formidable army and it all depends on playing defensively until you can catch up later in Imperial Age. Walling also helps since it gives you extra time to react. Altough rarely, but sometimes it will militia rush very early or archer rush you early. There is really nothing you can do besides exploiting the flaws of the computer, like building gates in front of theirs so they don't gest past from their own base. Also in maps with lots of water I struggle to beat the AI. They will harass your town with their bombard ships and galleons whenever they can. However, it is crucial to know which civ they go (if you set it on random), and get an idea of which kinds of troops you need to produce in order to counter them. Failing to do so will result in your town being sieged since at that moment they will mass you and you will be pretty much fucked at that point.
thanks Spirit Of The Law for opening my question....... :) ........PS.... he love wach Crash course XD
Nice video, as always. Speaking of AI, do you have any plans to cover the custom AI, such as ResonanceBot or BruteForce?
What I don't like about the new AI in AoF is that it NEVER attacks villagers, thus creating stalemates in AI vs AI. It never, ever attacks the core of the economy.
I would love to see what the old AI does if you knocked out everything and just left a few villagers and TC… Take all your troops back to your town and just spectate what the old AI does when it has to start again
its weird that whenever i play against the original AI, ALL the Ai seems to screw up and are much more reserved and don't age up past feudal very quickly
Just a thought: I remember that the old AI would never, under no circumstances, attack a gate. I wonder if the new AI does the same.
+Zhelyazko Badarov I've seen the new AI attack gates, so you can no longer just surround your base with gates to stump it.
What if they had a rematch on 75 pop?
Spirit, perhaps use the Spectator Dashboard for those replays or does that not work for HD replays? That way you whould have real time comparison of income, villagers, vill distribution etc...
I think the AoC AI is calibrated for 75 max pop games, maybe with that setting it would fare better.
i like ur videos!!
Wow the old AI plays terribly compared to the new one. I used to think I played better as a kid, but now know it really is much harder now.
WoW i never noticed that the AI is that good.
Is the old AI bugged? I think it's way too idle
I like the old one cause.... i know their weaknesses lol
I recently noticed a strange thing in the stats: although the new AI had only around 70 vils (whereas I had around 100), AI had collected in general sevaral hundreds (!) of different ressources more than me. Thats almost impossible without cheating, because my vills were not idling that much.