Advice Needed: Beating Hard AI (Console) as a New Player
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I apologize if someone has already posted about this. As a long-time reader and second-time writer, I am seeking help from any available idle villagers.
As a child, I used to play AoE2 all the time and recently rediscovered it on Xbox. I have been playing with a friend, and while we were able to beat the moderate difficulty after several attempts, we are now stuck on hard difficulty. We have managed to win a few games on team islands by building large navies to defend against attacks. However, we struggle to win on any land maps.
Do you have any general tips that could assist us?
I feel like there’s a huge jump from moderate to hard Ai. My friends and I got stomped in a 3v2 against hard AI
I am in the same league and can beat hard ai like 85% success rate.
When I failed I think that it’s mostly about macro and economy problems instead of actual match up or advanced tactics. Don’t die to boar, establish some basic defense in feudal. After castle age I try to practice 3TC booming and work my eco until having 100+ vils.
With solid eco I can spam my main offensive unit and overrun the AI.
Its going to be tough as nails man. It took me so long to make the jump to beating hard 100% on pc. You could tower rush them for the quick dopamine hit of a victory or you can go the traditional way. 20 pop scouts with a cav civ on arabia is a super good build to work on for quick wins. I’ve only played the console version a couple of times and mostly ignore the presets because they kinda screwed me up worse than just manually doing everything so take with a grain of salt on how it transfers
6 vills on to sheep
3 vills to chop wood at a lumber camp
1 to bring in boar
1 more to sheep
4 to berries
2 more to sheep/boar under tc
2 more to wood
loom (or not. against ai you can eventually safely skip it
age up.
once food is gone send villagers to stragglers untill you have enough wood to make farms with them
get that barracks down on the timer to feudal and use 2 vills to make that stable once you age up so you can pump out 4-6 scouts quicker. Against AI your gonna want to do some damage as early as possible because its late game is op. Its gonna take some games to build the internal metronome you need to flip between getting damage in and producing vills. playing more hours and watching more youtube is going to be the best solution
I’m with you man. Playing on console is no joke. On PC I can beat extreme AI any time of the day but when I started a game vs moderate on console for the first time I had to sweat.
Best general tips I can give you is keep making units and try to get as good value with the units as possible (by having them upgraded, keeping them alive, etc). In general, it is also usually easier to win vs. the AI earlier on rather than later on.
As others said (and you witnessed first hand lol) there’s a gap between moderate and hard, here is what I wrote a while ago in a post edit right after beating it on land map for the first time, I still can’t beat it reliably so take it with a grain, but it’s the pov of a fellow noob so hope this helps:
Sorry for not writing this earlier, I was about a few times but I was kept busy by trying to beat that damn ‘hard’ AI DE fair and square lol, ok in 2v2… late imp… while planning a fast castle… and getting there way after the AI (like clicking up when they upped, but on par with my bot ally, don’t know if it’s a good thing lol), but that’s a win and a big improvement from getting smashed early castle or laaaaaate feudal lol (If you wanna know, the legend is true: I used 3 hot keys -> cycle idle vills + all TC + keep producing villagers all the time, like yes really all the time, all.the.damn.time, look upper left corner, you DON’T see little villager faces? BZZZZZT!! Wrong!! you’re dead, it’s all.the.effin.time until like Imp. and you got so much vills you bump the pop cap, that’s good! (well I guess not lol but you get the idea), wall the direct path toward enemy using the third house onward, sometimes if you got wood (and you do because remember you keep creating vills ALL-TH… ok ok! but still…) place a few more houses than needed just to wall up the sides and with every new building being part of a wall, close little remaining space with palissades, the AI will follow the most direct open path so you can ‘choose’ where it will attack you (I guess a human might try to break a isolated palissade intstead, I would know if I could get near a human player’s base lol but I can’t for now I get killed before putting my head out xD) so try placing a tower or two there if you’re slow like me with vills working at the base, then try to scout to know what will come at you and create units accordingly, I didn’t cause I was busy af lol and got away with it by going all pikemen (and knights after as planned initially) cause I didn’t see anything coming after a few archers/skirms that my tower and a few spears slaughtered so I guessed correctly that knights where coming at me. (precision: before I wasn’t creating villagers continuously, so I was even more late and that very same ‘knight rush’ seemed to be coming ‘earlier’ in my development, ie: still in FA, with virtually no units) But Ho boy! this time I was prepared, walled up, small entry protected by a tower and villagers garrisoned right away, a swarm of pikemen (ok more like a few but well enough lol) blocking the entry and that was a reversed carnage mwahahaha, then I kept creating vills, built 2 TC, rally point on close woodline, pull some to farms, keep an eye on ressource, a big change for me: DON’T FLOAT RESSOURCES, at that point I had not much available time cause I had to help the ally and trying to build an army and keep the cavalry with wing like things (i’ll have to check that one lol) from free roaming my base and killing my vills (but then again you have so much it’s kinda ok if a few eat it just the time for the knights to come and get them), so wood piled up while gold was lacking, quiclky grab a group of villagers without counting or thinking much and assigned to gold, on TC rally point on gold then back to repelling the invaders, growing the ranks siege for castles and TC and go make it pay for all this unecessary violence and frustration they brought upon aoe2 noobs like me! I’m slow (like irl too lol, can’t hep it, HAVE to work smart), I made tons of errors (holes in the walls appearing everywhere and not closing them, didn’t bother with navy and got a mill and farms erased from the map by theirs, waiting like eternity instead of harassing them with an already good number of units, first attack that wiped their army but left me with little numbers -> I kept attacking a castle with what was left instead of retreating when I had no more rams, kept focus on attacking this castle instead of keeping pumping units outs so I couldn’t keep the momentum, I can’t seem to scout to get intel for the life of me, and certainly many more I can’t even imagine for now…) So you can DEFINITELY do it! Remember: create vills at any given time, this ONE SIMPLE TRICK ‘HARD AI DE’ DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW made the differnece for me between dying in feudal and steam rolling them in late imp.)
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