Good game ruined through updates and mods - horribly unbalanced now

[MaxPayne]

This used to be a good game. It is no longer fun. You will not be able to win against intermediate AIs without using mods. And people cheat through the mods - they create mods and make themselves so powerful that they cannot lose. This game is no longer fun. It is horribly unbalanced now and is now just frustrating.

[Cacomistle]

Publicado originalmente por Turnip Lord:

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

It's attacking with some army that blows up your base in 20 seconds at 7 minutes... and also trebuchets were 1 shotting your stone walls? How? If the former was true, you'd have died, and the latter couldn't be true because how is it destroying stone walls with trebuchets it never built because it killed you? If the ai had literal infinite resources, I'm not sure it could get a trebuchet out in 7 minutes.

Literally the bot's army arrived at the walls of our base and within 20 seconds of firing the first trebuchet my friend was knocked out of the match (he had 2 landmarks which were quickly one shotted by trebuchets), then the AI moved on to my base which was over to the side a bit. I don't really understand your question about being dead, one of my landmarks was a Kremlin in a random spot so I never actually got knocked out of the game, just watched the bot march in and delete everything inside the base, don't know if that answers your question.

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Frankly, I think this perception comes from people who are misunderstanding what's going on. They play against an ai that's broken, and then when the ai functions properly they think its cheating.

I don't know man, I'm not claiming to be the best player but I understand how these games work. Throughout the years of playing COH there have been countless times where I've seen the AI do things that just cannot be explained away by "the AI is buggy and therefore takes you by surprise when it plays normally". There was a time when I had been playing coop against standard bots with a friend who was a bit newer to the game. Usually I could 1v2 standard or hard without any issue so even if my teammate was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the bed it didn't really matter. Then one day we did like 6 matches and got absolutely destroyed every time. The problem wasn't resource management or the AI getting to endgame units faster. Literally the AI was just melting our units 4x faster than usual. They would send a standard rifleman squad up to a deployed MG crew and just merk them in about 5 seconds. As an experiment we tried playing on hard instead and the issue wasn't present there at all. This lasted like 2 weeks with seemingly no logic as to what could have caused this sudden change, the game wasn't even being updated by that point. Just one example but there were many others.

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Just rather than 40 minute treaty, you're playing against the like 50% chance that the ai sucks and does nothing (aoe4 has bugs that make it significantly worse, quite frequently),

I have seen the AI basically bug out and sit in their base doing nothing many times and no, I didn't confuse this with the way it's supposed to be. When I say the AI was cheating, I'm talking about mongols reaching castle age within the first 4 minutes and having a blob of battering rams at my walls about 90 seconds later. Then I take a peak at their base and they literally have no food sources, no trees cut down, basically no activity other than 2 landmarks and a small trading caravan. This exact scenario is something I've seen many times. I even tried putting one of them on my team to watch them and see if I could figure out how they're doing it. Basically all they do is gather gold in the most inefficient way possible and build barracks and a few horsemen, then suddenly they have resources for castle age...

Have you watched a replay to see what its actually doing? If you have, you should be able to explain specifically how it got to your base with rams at 5:30. If you haven't... I don't believe you. Coh2/coh3 ai doing extra damage would be a bit hard to prove, but if the aoe4 ai has several rams in your base before 6 minutes into the game, you can simply watch the replay to see how.

I don't think its out of the question that the ai could bug in a way that makes it stronger. I've never seen it happen, but some of the bugs that make it worse are rare so perhaps this is a rare bug too. But, if you can't explain it to me, then I don't trust you to understand the game well enough to identify a bug.

Might sound harsh but I've seen like 10 separate claims of resource cheats in aoe4. A couple were exploits with clear and obvious proof that they were cheats, and the rest were players who didn't understand basic mechanics of the game. If you don't have an explanation of what the cheat was (as in, specifically how they cheated. For instance you can watch the absurd ai and see that they drop off double resources), then I will automatically assume you don't know. The fact that it sounds like you put them on your team instead of simply watching the replay makes me especially lead to the latter conclusion.

Or just point me to the replay and I can figure it out. I looked at the replays of "turnip lord", which I assume is you cause there's only one turnip lord. There were only 2 losses vs ai (I can't imagine you won because the ai you described is stronger than the absurd ai), one was an instant resign, and the other the ai most definitely did hit castle age at 4 minutes or attack you with rams before 6 minutes. So unless I've got the wrong profile, or unless that game you instant resigned was some sort of replay bug, I don't see it. Also I'm very skeptical that what this actually means is the ai hit feudal at 5 minutes, and attacked with rams 3 minutes later (because I see that A TON, people just say stuff happened several minutes before it actually happened), and if you got hit by some 8-9 minute ram rush that's not cheating.

[Turnip Lord]

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Publicado originalmente por Turnip Lord:

Or just point me to the replay and I can figure it out. I looked at the replays of "turnip lord", which I assume is you cause there's only one turnip lord.

Doesn't sound like that's my profile. No I haven't gone into the replay yet, I just bought the game on steam yesterday and when I played it before about a year and a half ago through gamepass I never experienced anything like this so had no reason to investigate. I'm not really fussed whether you believe me or not, particularly not with regards to AOE4 because I've only been experiencing this issue for a total of 2 days and maybe ~15 matches. With regards to COH I played the games for years and I am firmly of the opinion that the AI in those games is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and bugs out in a random way on match start every time. The fact that this issue existed in COH2 through a decade of post-launch development and then went on to persist into COH3 made me suspect that it might have found its way into AOE4 in post-launch updates, but I can't say that for certain.

To address the other part of what you're saying, the thing is, your position is that. most likely I ( and other people who experience problems with the AI) am just orders of magnitude worse at the game than I think I am. Well, more specifically, that I am so bad that I am literally incapable of playing the game whatsoever when it works correctly. OK, fair enough, but even if you're right, that would be absolutely garbage game design, and the OP's point more or less still stands that the AI is inconsistent and unbalanced. I say unbalanced because there's 8 difficulty levels, the first one being akin to playing against an AFK, and then the second being enough of an inconsistent ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for a not-insignificant proportion of players, that they can't even get their bearings and learn the game because the bot either doesn't fight back at all or is, from their perspective, completely invincible. Not speaking from my own experience here but more from the experience of new RTS players. There's this illogical tendency on the part of both RTS developers and RTS players to suggest that it's normal to be completely unable to play the game on the lowest difficulty if your resource management isn't optimized down to the 95th percentile or whatever the equivalent excuse is for any given RTS game, and to me it's basically just an excuse to have garbage AI and never do anything to improve it. My view on this since I started playing COH2 years ago is that Relic designed their AI in the most lazy way possible so that the "difficulty" comes exclusively from the bots "cheating" (scanning your base and all your units through fog of war, making the exact units needed to counter your units, spawning units that they don't have the resources to make etc.) rather than making intelligent decisions, and the reason for the inconsistency is that AI which functions by using dirty tricks to create the illusion of difficulty has a very low threshold for error. And I don't think playing vs AI is a big focus of Relic's playtesting or design agenda in general.

[Cacomistle]

Well I'm not arguing against the idea that the ai is inconsistent. It clearly is. The ai in aoe4 is not very good.

Also on the part that the coh2 ai maphacking, aoe4's ai actually doesn't do that. I mean, not explicitly at least (it spams a lot of scouts and uses its apm advantage to run around everywhere), but it doesn't actually maphack. That was one of the most annoying things about the coh ai, it uses maphacks to see where your army is... so it can avoid ever fighting you.

But aoe4's ai is bad in different ways than the coh ai. It doesn't cheat till the difficulties that say it cheats. Its just an inconsistent experience because of bugs and weird behaviors.

Also I understand the feeling you got from the coh ai, but the experience of it sucking and dying 1 game and then next game it feels like its spamming units non-stop and its units are like for some reason more cost efficient I think is what happens without it "cheating" (as in, not cheating more than its supposed to cause it pretty much cheated on every difficulty). Like, I think expert ai had a bonus to its accuracy and dodge rate... but it was hard to ever notice cause it'd so often just run past you without shooting back. Or if you just ran at it, it'd often run away and you'd just shoot in in the back.

So the few times where it actually fought back properly, it suddenly felt crazy strong... because it had crazy cheats, it just took fights so poorly you often didn't really even notice.

[Turnip Lord]

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Well I'm not arguing against the idea that the ai is inconsistent. It clearly is. The ai in aoe4 is not very good.

Yeah I get it.

BTW did some more matches today and basically it is the same situation I faced in COH 2 and 3 where Standard/Intermediate is completely unplayable but higher difficulties are normal. Honestly I think this is just a bug in the relic engine that has some kind of unpredictable repro scenario and the reason why people with higher skill level don't notice it is because most people who are decent at the game don't bother playing against AI on lower difficulties.

[Judeo-communism]

Publicado originalmente por Turnip Lord:

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Well I'm not arguing against the idea that the ai is inconsistent. It clearly is. The ai in aoe4 is not very good.

Yeah I get it.

BTW did some more matches today and basically it is the same situation I faced in COH 2 and 3 where Standard/Intermediate is completely unplayable but higher difficulties are normal. Honestly I think this is just a bug in the relic engine that has some kind of unpredictable repro scenario and the reason why people with higher skill level don't notice it is because most people who are decent at the game don't bother playing against AI on lower difficulties.

I just played a 2vs2 co-op vs. AI, and I stomped them both no problem with minimal aid from my ally. Most of the time, my allies just AFK or leave and I win 1vs2.

[MaxPayne]

It has been well balanced the last couple of weeks.