Rejoining Player Experiencing Difficulties
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I used to play Age of Empires II when it first released and found it to be quite challenging but not overly difficult.
Recently, I bought the enhanced version on Steam during a sale and I’m having more trouble playing the campaigns.
The AI seems to be constantly harassing me with one or two units, shooting at my fishing boats, attacking my towers, and so on.
It’s quite distracting and if I make any mistakes it’s easy to get stuck in an endless loop of replacing lost units, rebuilding walls, and restocking resources.
I’m currently playing on the normal difficulty and watching YouTube tutorials for tips hasn’t been very helpful.
Is there any advice you can give an old player, other than setting the difficulty to easy?
It’s ok to play in easy.
It’s ok to pick a different campaign if you get stuck.
It’s also ok to play some skirmish matches.
But to answer your question specifically, each level has different approaches to win.
Walling against the ai can be very effective.
I would also suggest getting a lot of strong units like knights or cav archers.
Rather than pikes or skirms.
Sometimes a level I couldn’t win felt very easy a week or two later.
Sometimes months later.
some levels are very easy and others very hard.
Weird, I remember game being harder back in the day when we had like 75-100 pop limit and halberds were this cool new unit only in Conquerors.
Now I find campaigns to be easier with all the quality of life things added.
Also, no longer being a kid helps.
Anyway, usually in campaigns it is enough to make a castle because AI tends to attack the closest building first.
Gather a sufficiently large army behind it and then attack when ready, preferably with siege ready, especially Joan’s campaign because who ever thought it is *fun* to repeatedly destroy castles with rams in castle age is cruel.
Oh and never enough villagers, establish a big economy and then you don’t need to worry anymore about losses, they’ll inevitably get replaced anyway.
Have 100 villagers if needed, delete them when you need space for more units, you don’t need those lumberjacks anyway.
Also be sure to look at the hints and scouting for the mission because very important information will be listed there.
Hints will be mission specific stuff and scouting will tell you most of the time exactly which units to expect which makes it very easy to prepare a counter.
Campaign AI does not adapt to your tactics, it strictly follows its orders of making specific units and sending them to suicidal attacks in waves (only exception I remember is in Italian campaign).
Oh and regarding units, don’t slowly research every upgrade 1 by 1 and make 1 of each unit or whatever.
Pick a gold unit and pick a trash unit (goldless) and upgrade them asap.
With Franks for example spam knights as your main unit and skirmishers to deal with spearmen, optional throwing axemen if you have gold.
In castle age locked missions you need rams, in imperial age trebs are your friends or bombard cannons if you have them.
Learn your civ and exploit the bonuses you are given.
Franks have castle discount, use it.
If you want more specific help, ask.
If you’re playing campaign or custom games against AI in general, building castles will solve most of the problems.
Also, when you’re trying to wall yourself, leave an open entry (a choke point).
AI will go for that entry, and you only need to focus your defense at that choke point.
The last scenario of Joan of Arc is particularly tricky, but in other scenarios you just need castles and knights to defend yourself.
Some other missions have designs that fit nowadays gameplay mechanics, and a lot of them are quite fun.
Difficulties aren’t a huge deal in most cases, and Joan of Arc is really a rather easier one.
Trust me…
Le Loi can be brutal.
Also to add, most levels take me between 40 in game minutes to 1h 50 in game time
It’s better to have a strong ball of units rather than to stream them in individually
Static defense, ranged units, and defensive stance are your friends.
That low unit count trickle just bounces off a castle.
That said, yes, the campaign ai is better than it was while the World Trade Center was still there.
At your stage, play the tutorials til you’re consistently top grades.
That’s the best training.
They’re called the art of war tutorials.
You might think your early game is fine, but if you’re struggling at that level, guarantee there’s loads of idle time and issues.
Once you improve at that, play the Cicero interactive build order mod to practice.
Not so you follow it religiously just to see how much idle time you really have and so you train a basic grasp of how to do different builds (and therefore how to adjust later).
The campaign AI is very different to the non-campaign AI.
They are programmed to do specific things at specific times and often to do this no matter what you do, they don’t adapt like non-campaign AI.
Work out what that is and you’re laughing.
Also one general thing to know about the AI is that they can get very easily distracted by a few units.
You can use this to your advantage, by running the AI to an area that doesn’t have any tactical importance to you.
Other than that, continue watching YouTube videos, there are many great ones out there.
Make sure you know what unit counters what and also build orders are an absolute must.
A first easy step is learning how to fast castle.
However, this is less relevant for the campaign specifically, as many of the scenarios start you out very differently to how you would in a normal game.
Looking at this subreddit can make you feel like you suck at the game, and in all honesty you probably kinda do (I do as well), but once you start getting the hang of a few things it will feel just like it did when we used to play back in the day.
Keep at it, the new version of the game is really rewarding (more so than the old version) once you start learning and growing.
Don’t play the Joan of Arc campaign?
If you brought the DLCs, totally play those campaigns instead.
They won’t be easier (a lot of them are harder), but they are much higher quality.
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