I don't get how to play this game. AI is extremely aggressive and instantly attacks my base

[Frostღ]

Playing against few ai is really boring and if there's anymore ai on map, they all rush instantly to my base non stop.. Even on the 2nd easiest option i find myself destroyed before age 3

I loved Age of Empires 3 and had no problem playing it fine but here they instantly rush you with horses and siege engines within 10 minutes.. There is no way they legit get the sources for that in the time

[PeteSkTemplar]

Rush to feudal and immediately wall yourself around but front where you should place your units for defence. AI "sees" where your workers are or that you have no or too few soldiers so if you get more units (30/40) then suddenly AI stops bothering you (first two diffs). Try revealed map instead of concealed.

[Despiser]

You'll get used to it. Then as you get better you'll have to defend your AI allies because they are utterly useless at defending themselves.

[Dayve]

On intermediate difficulty all they send is small groups of 5-10 units. Use some basic strategies for starting out a new game. Make sure town centre is always producing villagers, put first 8 villagers on food, then 3 on wood, then 3 on gold, keep producing them constantly and adding them to resources. Get up to age 2 ASAP, build a barracks and archery range, start producing spearmen and archers. 10 of each ought to be enough to deal with anything an intermediate AI will throw at you.

[Magpie]

Setting up a good counter can work really well early game you don't have to worry about cannons ect. Take the longbow from England good unit and can counter horses with it's ability. spear men are another good option with archers as back up forming and anti caverly wall to protect archers. Overall i would focus hard on an early economy you should never stop creating villagers. but at the same time have the means to defend them.

[TheDiaper]

Watch streams and see how pro players play, then youll realize how bad the AIs are.

[Static]

Try a map like black forest with a lot of choke points and either wall up with troops or put troops at all the choke points, that'll buy you time to really start to get used to playing the game. The ai plays really really different to AOE 3's ai.

[MakkaHS]

Just play with some friends and support each other. We did a 3v5 hardest with no real issues.

https://imgur.com/a/tHDh4fc

[KPSoulReaper]

Originally posted by MakkaHS:

Just play with some friends and support each other. We did a 3v5 hardest with no real issues.

https://imgur.com/a/tHDh4fc

I was about to say this.

Watch some videos on youtube on strats & builds; just like in SC 2.
Get the basic Starting Workers and a few units / Defensive Structures down pat and the rest of the game's learning curve will come in time.

Easy & Intermediate Enemy AI should be no problem once you get a lot of the basics down pat. The AI can't beat the teamwork of friends communicating or good random players vs. the AI.

Hope it gets better. for you.... :)

[What-ever]

I advise you to try the same. Rush age 2, slap down a barracks or archery range and send your units to the enemy base after racking up a small army of 15-20. Stay clear of their towncenter but just try to kill some vills. You will see how good offense can be in this game, The AI is really bad at defending and you can easily cripple it with an early attack.

Use your scout to see what kind of buildings the enemy has built in order to feel out what potential unit composition you will encounter.

Other than that you likely just need a bit of practise. The more you know the general game plan, the faster you can implement it.

And suddenly hardest AI is a joke because you can outproduce, rush or outboom them.

For me the only hard thing that happens vs harder AI that is giving me a hard time is having a real open base for too long, not producing enough military units or walls/outposts to safely store your vills when attacked.

If you do that, it can get super annoying because the AI likes to split up groups and send them all over your base.

[Awstrd]

Here are my tips:

- Keep producing villagers until your pop is at around 125
- When it comes to food in the early game, hunting gets you food the fastest. If the map has fish, its a good idea to dock and make fishing boats. Try to put off making farms until there are no animals/berries around, as those are a more efficient food sources than farms
- Build additional Town Centres (or landmarks that produce vils if your civ has them). I usually build 2 additional TCs, and with my original one I have a total of 3, all of them producing vils
- Build 2 markets on the edge of the map and make traders to have a source of gold late game.
- Use hotkeys. They allow you to do things like select buildings to quickly research and produce units, and call up your army to deal with threats.
- In terms of army composition, a solid build is archers, knights/lancers, bombards.
- Try to keep your base somewhat compact and expand behind your base rather than in front, so that everything is easier to defend and less exposed
- If you need to expand outwards to get resources like gold, etc, a good way to protect yourself from raids is to assign 5 vils to the resource and build an outpost beside it. If enemies show up and your army cant respond right away, just garrison your vils in the outpost. Usually the outpost can kill feudal area raiding parties, and in later ages it can delay the enemy and protect your vils long enough for your army to arrive. Even if your expansions do end up getting destroyed, if you have 3 town centres producing vils, you can recover your losses pretty easily.
- Try to avoid making walls and focus on having a mobile army to defend yourself. While walls can be very useful on maps like black forest and mountain pass, they are less good on more open maps which are the most common maps you will encounter.
- When it comes to static defence, I recommend buildings keeps around the entry points to your base (and dont forget to add the springald and cannon emplacement to them). They are expensive, but are also very good at killing enemies (in contrast to walls, which merely slow them down).

To illustrate all of the above tips in action, here is a video recording I made of a 1vs3 Hardest AI skirmish with a concealed map on Dry Arabia. Played as the English vs English, Rus, Franks, the latter generally being considered the best civs.

https://youtu.be/HaHqzfLCT-s

[Frostღ]

Thank you for the nice replies!

[Plastic Master]

Well, it is not a sim city game.
You have to develop your empire by building buildings and defend or attack your enemies at the same time by calculating risks and rewards.

If you just build a wall and think you are safe, it is not!
1st it means you have put yourself in a prison and your enemies can use all the resources outside your wall as you gave him the complete control of the map. Never do that.
Always take control,

if your enemies chasing you, that is perfect, you are controlling them where to go.
Watching pro players', it would also improve the way you play this game. But also at the same time it would damage your imagination.