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The Hard AI loves mass archers and skirmishers, you could try to build a defensive tower in your base.
Feel free to send a replay file, so people can give more detailed feedback. :)
This is where you get comfortable with making an army earlier on in the game so you can fight him off and counter attack. It also really helps to consider the placement of your woodline, mines and other things, to keep them away from the direction of the enemy(like the back of your base). Placing your houses, barracks, blacksmith, etc as if they were walls will do wonders in keeping the AI out. Especially if they're placed in a way that forces him to walk through your town center to harass anything.
Easiest way is to just make a group of archers early. Its Hard difficulty so there's lots of room for error and stuff, so before you hit Feudal(Even if you're just aging up), get a barracks built so right when you unlock everything, you can make two archery ranges, then put like 6 villagers on gold and make archers from there.
A little bit of micro and his army is cooked, you could probably kill him after too, or at least when you get to castle and send a ram or two his way.
On hard you need some early defences. On closed maps you can easily wall yourself in and put a couple of towers up. That will suffice until you can get a castle, some archers for garrison and some pikes to fend off enemy cavalry and rams. Later you'll want to fully garrison all your defences and have a strong force to sortie against siege weapons. Don't rely on one wall layer, two or three layers with a gap between works well.
On open maps you might want to make some spears and skirmishers while you advance to castle age (assuming you're fairly quick getting there). The initial attack of scouts could also be knights or archers. Some towers near your town centre can be very valuable here, too.
There are basically two ways to win on hard. You can win really fast by constantly bothering the enemy economy. Go after their gold and stone. Never mind if you lose some trash units, you want to keep their villagers off those resources while you gather your own.
Or you can win slowly by outlasting their resources but this only works 1-on-1. Wall yourself in behind strong defences, grab as many relics as early as possible so they can't get any more gold. Then just wait until they run out of gold and can't field a decent army.
Either way, you then bring your superior army and stomp all over their town.
But this is nothing: wait for Hardest (AI makes 125-135 villagers) and you will see Hard is a joke compared to it.
- In Feudal Age, expect one of the two: either scouts rushing your villagers (especially if you have some outlying mining/lumber camps, avoid that or defend them), or archer spam. Even one watch tower can work wonders against the latter, but always have some troops ready in Feudal Age.
- It might try rushing with some knights in Castle Age. Can be a problem if you're completely unprepared, but even a bunch of spearmen will wreck them.
- Once you put up a castle on its attack path (it will ALWAYS attack in a straight line and is too stupid to do anything else unlike in AoE1 or 3), you are pretty much invulnerable until at least 5-10 minutes into Imperial Age, where it will start attacking with siege weapons. Once you can comfortably defend against that, you basically won - it will never surprise you with anything anymore, and it will just keep throwing random units at your defences, always from the same direction.
Unfortunately, the AI is bad and dumb, it just becomes more annoying, robotic and painfully unrealistic on higher levels. Hardest AI is even worse and even winning against it was as enjoyable and satisfying as chasing three flies around the room for once hour, it's just a unit-spamming robot and calling it artificial "intelligence" is a joke.
Also, note: because of the AI's lazy design, population limit is a second difficulty setting. Try lowering it to 150 or even more if you get overwhelmed, the AI is just hardwired to have a certain percentage of villagers, and unlike a human, it "manages" 50 or 150 villagers in exactly the same way - so the higher the population limit, the more advantage it has because they put zero effort into making it scale realistically and with a higher population limit it will just churn through insane amounts of resources and units with zero delay or handicap of any kind.
I've been saying that for something like a year, but I think the devs still haven't figured out that this has been a thing in RTS since at least 2001ish. They are too busy finding new ways how to make the game more about espurts and reworking Arabia.
Or it's because there's only so much you can do on the Genie engine which sounds more plausible.
OP I would second the above advice. Once you complete those, you'll understand exactly what went wrong and how the AI is in fact simpler to defeat than you initially thought.
Sort of, but that also tries to teach a very specific, narrow approach to the game (and the AI is also designed with that in mind and nothing else, which is why it's so easy to outsmart if you go out of that box).
Imo it's much better to recommend going through the one-sword campaigns first, you'll learn a lot more in a more enjoyable way and will have to go out of the box to try different civs and playstyles.
Does Stronghold use Genie?
Spoiler: No, it doesn't.
The campaign AI uses dedicated scripts so that it can function in each scenario the way it does. These custom scripts for example cause the AI to resign when you destroy certain buildings such as the Market and the Monastery in the Eastern Roman Camp in the 1st Attila mission.
These scripts can be also found in the game files but I'm unsure of their exact location.
I'm dropping this link for the 2nd time I think - here you've got all the information and documentation to make your own AoE 2 AI - sure, it's more complicated than making an AI for Stronghold, but digging into it could solve your problems: https://airef.github.io/