Extreme AI is next after that one. Funny enough if you do a standard rush build, it's pretty easy to get it off its game. Also AI never seems to wall so there's that too.
I notice the AI has been a lot more reactionary than in the past. If it sees scouts, it'll spam spears, or if it's archers, you'll see lots of skirms.
I usually go 4 scouts, get a couple of vill kills and harass the eco in general. Once you see spears, transition to archers and then pick off the spears one by one and of course the vills too.
Meanwhile you should be on your way up to castle and then xbows and it should pretty much be over by then. But the fact that the AI doesn't wall makes it super easy.
scouts into skirms tends to be pretty strong. The AI really likes archers and will build spears after seeing the scouts, skirms counters both units. If you do it with a civ with decent cavalry you can transition into knights in castle age. Add in siege to finish them off or monks if you are struggling against knights.
I've never gotten barbarian to work. But you can just give the AI a handicap, that works pretty well. Or 1v2 hard AIs is a bit harder than 1v1 extreme AI, and 1v2 hardest is a bit harder than that.
The AI has 1 big weakness, on all difficulties: walls.
The ai rarely attacks them, so stonewalling the parts you dont want it to go is one way to about it
Even a mixed building/house/palisade wall works great. AI doesn't target the weakest point and breakthrough, will just aimlessly attack buildings trying to destroy them, even when there's an opening.
Usually the extreme AI floods feudal units and you can just go castle without being punished since they waste time trying to take your barracks with skirms and spears, then you wipe their whole army with 4 knights.
And when the AI does attack the walls often they don’t use siege which just means a few archers can stand by and slaughter melee unit’s mindlessly bashing their swords against rocks.
Hard isn't a problem for me, hardest however.... I can only beat that in certain maps, with certain civs atm. The difference between hard and hardest is extreme.
You can beat the hardest AI quite easily on maps like 'Earth'. Sure, they attack you on water and make landings on your part of the world, but you can counter that pretty easily by making castles/towers near the shore.
Yeah, it’s a pretty significant jump for new players like us. Finding build orders and learning a few basic macros has gotten me further, but army management is my current nemesis.
Very important to set control groups per unit types and move them around individually.
In many ways the AI trains you to become an ineffective player in online play. Onagers for example are terrible against the AI because it has god micro, but fantastic against human players because we just can't react that fast. If you get good with them and attack grounds you'll wreck in multiplayer.
I personally feel like the gap between moderate and hard to be too big (got the game slightly before you by a month or two) and after I beat it once I basically can keep beating it consistently now ( maybe even two of them). My point is that hard isn’t that bad but for the huge gap in difficulty between moderate and hard, there could have easily been some sort of middle step between the two to help newer players. Though I think it became so damn easy because I just learned how to constantly produce villagers and the basics of unit composition.
I don’t think it’s that big of a jump once you realize how the AI plays. Early aggro is incredibly effective against hard AI but if you try to out boom it then you’re going to struggle if you just stepped up from moderate.
the Hard AI is limited to 80 vils so out booming it is pretty easy. If you can drag the Hard AI into late post imperial you should be able to win by simply having more resources. The top two difficulties aren't capped, so they are very difficult to out boom.
The hard AI is tough but definitely doable. It’s capped at 70-75 vils so if you can do an early feudal rush and pick off some vils, then totally wall and defend your base until castle and get knights, then boom to 70ish vils, imp, mass an army and continue to 100-120 vils, and attack around the 45 min mark you’ll win as long as you maintain gold income and unit production
That's true. Gather relics as well. And just drain them until they can only field trash units. Btw the hardest AI does go to 130 vills, and has that number at around the half hour mark. That's a whole different ball game.
Keep practicising until your first twenty minutes are flawless. It's not the most fun part, but practicing does really help. And choose a civ you know the ins and outs of.
I also had to overcome like a mental barrier to just produce, produce, produce. Like a bodybuilder that needs to eat twelve meals a day. After like 70 vills I have a tendency to feel: 'now is enough'.
A good guide to become a better player:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdTQyhaXKBk&list=PL2FJAAVz1Meujd2u7N8GD8fOwEfR9qXuV&ab\_channel=Hera-AgeofEmpires](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdTQyhaXKBk&list=PL2FJAAVz1Meujd2u7N8GD8fOwEfR9qXuV&ab_channel=Hera-AgeofEmpires)
Hardest/extreme AI seem impossible to beat unless you cheese them, and cheesing them is super easy with one of the following methods:
1. Trush
2. D\*\*che
3. Partial walls with towers near the gaps. They never attack the walls and keep retreating every time the tower shoots. Later they actually try attacking the towers, at which point you turn those gaps into meatgrinders with siege and archers. AI runs out of gold eventually, and you destroy them.
4. Strong ranged units on top of hills. AI attacks them forever instead of going for your eco, eventually running out of gold.
Method 3 is easy to partially do on accident unless you just disallow yourself from using walls or towers. Cause no matter how you place those, the AI will handle them very stupidly. Oddly enough they know how to handle castles well.
I actually just beat hard with a tower rush. The AI surprisingly responded with counter towers, but they just could keep up. So technically I finally won, but it felt super cheesy. I’ll likely try to get on top of my archer and scout rush game using hard before I move on to hardest.
Yeah, it tries to respond to a trush by making its own tower elsewhere and by attacking your builders. What makes it so dumb is it doesn't attack your villagers until they start to build, and even then it only uses its own villagers to attack. So you can just send them right next to the enemy TC, build two palisades quickly in between two of the enemy's own houses, then build the tower in there. Then it'll repeatedly garrison and ungarrison villagers for some reason, ruining its eco and hardly even shooting your tower.
Persian d\*\*che works similarly. It's far too easy to drop a TC next to theirs.
I've found that the size of the map also makes a huge difference in how difficult the game is. The larger the easier. It gives you way more time to get defences up and work on your economy, and unit production. And defending is so much easier in AOE2 than attacking.
For me the biggest jump was from hardest to extreme. I just cannot beat extreme unless I use some sort of rush strategy or extreme cheese which wouldn't work against a human oponent. :<
drush, MaA and scout rushes are fairly common in online play (scouts seems to be falling out of favour, seems to be a bit ineffective in current meta). They are all legitimate strategies. Tower rush and Persian douche are pretty lame though.
MAA in feudal is the only way I can beat extreme AI, and if there’s anyone else in the game, my econ is so crippled from the early aggression necessary to pull it off that I just roll over and die
I just wanna build a neat town and gather resorces, i wish there was a friendly difficulty where the Ai just wanna be besties with me and the game ends once i build 7 wonders.
Extreme AI is next after that one. Funny enough if you do a standard rush build, it's pretty easy to get it off its game. Also AI never seems to wall so there's that too.
Between hard and extreme there is still very hard
Hardest*
Yes that one. Sorry, my game is in German
For some reason the base game wording is poor while all the translations are correct. My game is in French and it says "hard/harder/extreme".
Didn't know those words are the same in French as in English.
They are not, but if I told you "plus difficile" you wouldn't know if it means harder or hardest.
Je suis Joe King.
That's great.
Very harden
Ah k, that's fair play then.
Oh yeah forgot about that.
One time the hardest Mongols AI on Arabia full stone-walled. I was surprised. Probably had to do with my use of cobra cars.
They only seem to wall when relic victory is turned on and they captured all of them.
They are also ultra stupid against Castle drops.
Castle drops almost feel like cheating.
Yeah, they just run into it.
Idk about that with the newest update, but maybe I just fall off super quickly once I start attacking.
I notice the AI has been a lot more reactionary than in the past. If it sees scouts, it'll spam spears, or if it's archers, you'll see lots of skirms. I usually go 4 scouts, get a couple of vill kills and harass the eco in general. Once you see spears, transition to archers and then pick off the spears one by one and of course the vills too. Meanwhile you should be on your way up to castle and then xbows and it should pretty much be over by then. But the fact that the AI doesn't wall makes it super easy.
scouts into skirms tends to be pretty strong. The AI really likes archers and will build spears after seeing the scouts, skirms counters both units. If you do it with a civ with decent cavalry you can transition into knights in castle age. Add in siege to finish them off or monks if you are struggling against knights.
Barbarian after that
I've never gotten barbarian to work. But you can just give the AI a handicap, that works pretty well. Or 1v2 hard AIs is a bit harder than 1v1 extreme AI, and 1v2 hardest is a bit harder than that.
The AI has 1 big weakness, on all difficulties: walls. The ai rarely attacks them, so stonewalling the parts you dont want it to go is one way to about it
Been noticing this on moderate level. Even just a palisade wall funneling enemies towards my massed troops works every time.
Even a mixed building/house/palisade wall works great. AI doesn't target the weakest point and breakthrough, will just aimlessly attack buildings trying to destroy them, even when there's an opening. Usually the extreme AI floods feudal units and you can just go castle without being punished since they waste time trying to take your barracks with skirms and spears, then you wipe their whole army with 4 knights.
Yeah but you have to leave a hole with a kill zone.
And when the AI does attack the walls often they don’t use siege which just means a few archers can stand by and slaughter melee unit’s mindlessly bashing their swords against rocks.
Hard isn't a problem for me, hardest however.... I can only beat that in certain maps, with certain civs atm. The difference between hard and hardest is extreme.
I’ve been working on hardest too… it’s really tough. I can beat hard about 75% of the time but I can’t do hardest yet
You can beat the hardest AI quite easily on maps like 'Earth'. Sure, they attack you on water and make landings on your part of the world, but you can counter that pretty easily by making castles/towers near the shore.
>The difference between hard and hardest is extreme. I thought Extreme came *after* Hardest... Alright, I'll show myself out.
Moderate?
Yeah, that one. Brain doesn’t work well before fully caffeinating.
It is a huge jump - I smashed the lowest 3 difficulties, but hard is properly tricky (for us noobs). I'm getting there slowly...
Yeah, it’s a pretty significant jump for new players like us. Finding build orders and learning a few basic macros has gotten me further, but army management is my current nemesis.
Same boat here - basic strategy, BOs, avoiding idle time, a few hotkeys, and then... either my army gets wiped or my eco goes to sht 😂
Very important to set control groups per unit types and move them around individually. In many ways the AI trains you to become an ineffective player in online play. Onagers for example are terrible against the AI because it has god micro, but fantastic against human players because we just can't react that fast. If you get good with them and attack grounds you'll wreck in multiplayer.
I've only been able to beat Extreme with tower rushes. But that's cheating IMO because the AI bugs out.
I personally feel like the gap between moderate and hard to be too big (got the game slightly before you by a month or two) and after I beat it once I basically can keep beating it consistently now ( maybe even two of them). My point is that hard isn’t that bad but for the huge gap in difficulty between moderate and hard, there could have easily been some sort of middle step between the two to help newer players. Though I think it became so damn easy because I just learned how to constantly produce villagers and the basics of unit composition.
I don’t think it’s that big of a jump once you realize how the AI plays. Early aggro is incredibly effective against hard AI but if you try to out boom it then you’re going to struggle if you just stepped up from moderate.
the Hard AI is limited to 80 vils so out booming it is pretty easy. If you can drag the Hard AI into late post imperial you should be able to win by simply having more resources. The top two difficulties aren't capped, so they are very difficult to out boom.
The hard AI is tough but definitely doable. It’s capped at 70-75 vils so if you can do an early feudal rush and pick off some vils, then totally wall and defend your base until castle and get knights, then boom to 70ish vils, imp, mass an army and continue to 100-120 vils, and attack around the 45 min mark you’ll win as long as you maintain gold income and unit production
That's true. Gather relics as well. And just drain them until they can only field trash units. Btw the hardest AI does go to 130 vills, and has that number at around the half hour mark. That's a whole different ball game.
That’s the ballgame I keep losing haha. Any hints?
Keep practicising until your first twenty minutes are flawless. It's not the most fun part, but practicing does really help. And choose a civ you know the ins and outs of. I also had to overcome like a mental barrier to just produce, produce, produce. Like a bodybuilder that needs to eat twelve meals a day. After like 70 vills I have a tendency to feel: 'now is enough'. A good guide to become a better player: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdTQyhaXKBk&list=PL2FJAAVz1Meujd2u7N8GD8fOwEfR9qXuV&ab\_channel=Hera-AgeofEmpires](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdTQyhaXKBk&list=PL2FJAAVz1Meujd2u7N8GD8fOwEfR9qXuV&ab_channel=Hera-AgeofEmpires)
Hardest/extreme AI seem impossible to beat unless you cheese them, and cheesing them is super easy with one of the following methods: 1. Trush 2. D\*\*che 3. Partial walls with towers near the gaps. They never attack the walls and keep retreating every time the tower shoots. Later they actually try attacking the towers, at which point you turn those gaps into meatgrinders with siege and archers. AI runs out of gold eventually, and you destroy them. 4. Strong ranged units on top of hills. AI attacks them forever instead of going for your eco, eventually running out of gold. Method 3 is easy to partially do on accident unless you just disallow yourself from using walls or towers. Cause no matter how you place those, the AI will handle them very stupidly. Oddly enough they know how to handle castles well.
You can also beat them with a well-executed build order, but you need constant pressure because they are so good at producing units.
Maybe you can, but I can't D:
I actually just beat hard with a tower rush. The AI surprisingly responded with counter towers, but they just could keep up. So technically I finally won, but it felt super cheesy. I’ll likely try to get on top of my archer and scout rush game using hard before I move on to hardest.
Yeah, it tries to respond to a trush by making its own tower elsewhere and by attacking your builders. What makes it so dumb is it doesn't attack your villagers until they start to build, and even then it only uses its own villagers to attack. So you can just send them right next to the enemy TC, build two palisades quickly in between two of the enemy's own houses, then build the tower in there. Then it'll repeatedly garrison and ungarrison villagers for some reason, ruining its eco and hardly even shooting your tower. Persian d\*\*che works similarly. It's far too easy to drop a TC next to theirs.
I've found that the size of the map also makes a huge difference in how difficult the game is. The larger the easier. It gives you way more time to get defences up and work on your economy, and unit production. And defending is so much easier in AOE2 than attacking.
I play at moderate level. Hard is beyond me.
For me the biggest jump was from hardest to extreme. I just cannot beat extreme unless I use some sort of rush strategy or extreme cheese which wouldn't work against a human oponent. :<
The only time I've beaten the extreme AI I Persian douched it 11
drush, MaA and scout rushes are fairly common in online play (scouts seems to be falling out of favour, seems to be a bit ineffective in current meta). They are all legitimate strategies. Tower rush and Persian douche are pretty lame though.
MAA in feudal is the only way I can beat extreme AI, and if there’s anyone else in the game, my econ is so crippled from the early aggression necessary to pull it off that I just roll over and die
have a look at Hera's Mayan MaA into archer build. He made a video on YouTube about a year ago on that build order. Changed how I play the game a bit.
Try Extreme AI with 120% handicap, its fun
I feel you bro
I just wanna build a neat town and gather resorces, i wish there was a friendly difficulty where the Ai just wanna be besties with me and the game ends once i build 7 wonders.
You could play on Michi.
" i wish there was a friendly difficulty" There is - it's the lowest one. The AI is pretty chill there
After getting stomped in multiplayer myself. Playing against ai doesnt seem that bad at all
I've only beaten a hard AI once and it was because i did a standard knight rush
Anything above standard is a no for me dawg
Agreed. Yes.