Six minutes in: "My sheep perished when my folk sought to use it as food. No wonder thou wert victorious. I shalt abdicate"

A video I didn't know I wanted until now

_Enemy scout passes by AI's base_ Help! The enemy is in my town!

*THEM DEVS CAN'T MAKE AN AI SMARTER THAN LA HIRE*

We need an updated version of this video for the definitive version. Please make it happen😃

Fun fact about Promi: He may be the only human in existence ever to have read the rule book for the Age of Mythology board game. Unfortunately we got "board" and stopped playing by the time he finished understanding it...

When I was 8 I learned building a wall around my settlement (especially on forest maps) with an opening and towers behind the walls made the AI attack from that gap 100% of the time.

all i wanted to know is why the AI has an obsession with hoarding its army around a building and doing nothing the entire match XD

@spirit of the law This is by and far the most interesting video you have posted! And I’m not just throwing out that term lightly. I really mean that! I think it’s safe to say we ALL have played somewhere between 50 and 50,000 hours against the AI and ALL wonder how he thinks and works. This video had us go from a view through a keyhole to a view through a big window. Thanks a lot!

this is miles better quality content, you have improved a lot. i'd never guessed you would find the actual dev... this is pornography

How you consistently produce this volume of great content limited to a single game never ceases to amaze me.

The Hardest AI's monk rush with its micro haunts me to this day. Each of them will target an individual unit thus not only ruining my raid but also making me retreat to my base with the haunted tension that I'll be seeing my Mangudais again soon...

I like the AI but wish it didn't have bullshit archer/anti mangonel micro. No human can individually micro 40 archers and it causes players to shy away from mangonels or infantry.

This exclusive footage will show you what the ai says to its villagers: WOOD PLEASE FOOD PLEASE GOLD PLEASE WOLOLO WOLOLO

For people who don't know, if you look at the code (click the git hub link in the description) it tells you all the hidden in game commands you can ask/tell the AI: "100 - Forbids the AI to resign." "231-238 - Chat 230+[enemy player number] to make the AI target this enemy for 10 minutes." "250 - Chats information about the current strategy."

Promi and SotL, such a good combo to explain stuff. What I like about the Custom Campaigns is how neat and good ideas are people coming for their AIs. Some are even specifically set to counter you and use counter attacks, which I am always intrigued to see.

What I hate about the AI is that they never be useful when they are the ally in the campaign. They cannot even protect themselves and ask you for resource

Interesting episode. Can you do another one with TheMax? He is a top aoe player and created the barbarian AI the strongest AI available. It would be interesting to see how he made his AI so strong.

I wish you had asked why the AI hates walls so much?

Whenever I have an ally AI, it always works like that: IF (No market is built) THEN Build a market IF (There's space around the market) THEN Build anything around the market. THEN Clutter armies around the market. Yay for trading with the AI!. Why does the AI build in such a messy way? It's always a clutter of buildings with small spaces between them like it wants to build a maze.

You make it sound like HD has a better AI than the original but this is somewhat misleading, and hides a very important part of AoE2 history. Promi AI existed years before HD came out. The reason why it is playing so well compared to the original AI is because: 1) original AoE2 devs didn't have all the knowledge about the game that we have now: boar luring, build orders, tournament settings etc. 2) this AI, and many others, were made and improved during years by the community. Modders, Userpatch devs and volunteers who did all the work for free. I wanted to bring that out, because it would be quite ungrateful that years of work from dedicated AI modders get absolutely no mention when they are the ones who made this possible. Just as for the Forgotten content, the community did the work, not HD devs. And they did it for free, years before HD was a thing. (To be clear, I know you didn't do it intentionally and most viewers probably don't care about that anyway, but it's still nice to know the full story !) Take a look at aok.heavengames.com/blacksmith/lister.php?category=ai and look at the number of modded AIs available for the disk version as well as their date, it is quite impressive. Since 1999, there have been 2 new AIs per month and 80% of them were made before HD, including Promi and Archon's ones but also some famous ons like Barbarian, which completely crushes HD AI.

It has quite amazing AI for its kind of game. RTS in general have dumb AI because its just complex... and AOE is even harder to make an AI for. By giving the AI some tricks like the good micro it already puts it above its competitors. Speaking of unique AI's... Company of Heroes 2 AI is also somewhat unique in its genre as it has full functionality that it actually takes humans as possible teammates and works around them. In most other RTS games the AI will simply ignore you when its teamed up with you as if you werent there. In COH 2 on other hand.... For those unfamiliar with Company of Heroes, its a RTS serie set in WW2, more tactical and about map control than something like a Command and Conquer. - Relocates its troops when its needed, it wont try to go the same path as your troops unless its through a choke point. So you go to the left, AI to the right. - Amasses troops when it detects that you are trying to make a breakthrough through defence. In maps where there are some choke points death traps. The AI will station its troops outside around your own troops and they are idle till you commence an attack. Then they will join in. - It actively repairs your structures and tanks and it actually expects you to repair theirs too. If a tank is beated to shit it will start reversing towards your closest repair capable units and it will stop once you start repairing it. This thing is so human and so smart for a computer and i dont think such thing is present in any other RTS game. Unlike other games where AI will try to rush the tank to its death or across the whole map. If your tank is getting beaten to shit it will start repairing it even in middle of combat. - On normal and easy, AI actually has map vision like the player, not like in other games where it sees everything. This means if your units spot enemy blobs it will start shelling them with its artillery. So if you would have an invisible spotter (lets say a sniper with restricted fire) and simply sneak in to the enemy fortress, watch how the howitzers will pummel the area till there is nothing left. - AI builds chokepoints or reinforces yours with things like machinegun nests. - AI utilizes what you make, if you make an reinforcement outpost, the AI will retreat their infantry to them to reinforce to full number (instead of like retreating to their base). If its a hospital, its the same. It will make a full use of it. If it has a halftrack it will move it to your wounded troops so YOU can reinforce and it will seek YOUR halftracks with its infantry so they can reinforce to full strength. Too bad that although these behaviours are really amazing, the normal AI (the last AI that doesnt cheat) is weak against a human...

Such an interesting topic, love it! And a german developer, as I hear (greetings from Germany) :D

Oh god the script for the IA is available online ? I didn't knew that ! Thanks you Spirit and Promi !!!!

Best video so far! Really insightful into the back-end process of the game, on an extremely important aspect no less!

Great video by the way. I enjoy your clear explanations. When I play against the ResonanceBot AI, on slow mode, using the F3 'pause' button regularly (I am a new player who can't multitask very well), I find that the AI doesn't fight against my strategy -- which is what strategy is all about -- instead the AI is rules-focused with, as you point out, it's 'if-then' logic using conditions and such. So it is only a matter of time until a human player can learn how the AI 'thinks' and beat it. What would be REALLY COOL is if an AI can be developed which really 'thinks', that is, it learns from its mistakes, and it guesses about what will happen in the future (will my town center be attacked? will villagers be raided? with what? when? etc) and then actively take steps to guard against it. My sense is that, in time, this will happen, and yes, it will only be a matter of time until a thinking and advanced AI can beat any possible human or combination of humans.

I have a question, whyy your alie IA is more stupid than your enemy IA?

Hey Spirit, about the AI theme, do you have any experience with the Barbarian AI? Is a well know new AI coded by The Max, a famous Finnish player, and in the hardest level is comparable to a 1700-1800 Voobly rated player. The Viper took 3 tries to win a 2v1 in that setting.

Here's my question. When the hell are they gonna make AIs build walls again.

So cool that you got in contact with one of the actual creators. I've come to believe that there are no AOE2 without a Spirit of the law

Easily one of the most interesting and also informative videos I've found the fact that you posted up pseudo code for me to look at rather than pointlessly talk about the theory like so many other videos was especially helpful, I had no idea for example the AOE2 AI actually compared distances when placing buildings. In hindsight it's obvious but it just shows you how many factors you need to take into account when developing AI generally to make it convincing.

Damn, Spirit, you are the man! To find a dev and come up with so many right questions is quite a task and you performed beautifully!

One of your best videos in my opinion, Spirit. Informative, concise but not rushed, and the enthusiasm from both of you shines through. This is why I'm subscribed. Thank you.

Really interesting and next level to invite developer of the game

I'm amazed at how hard work went into a game this old, it seems like a true labor of love. My dad and his friends would probably be amazed that the game they used to play on LAN parties is still going!

This is really interesting. I've created a (very basic) Starcraft AI, and it's interesting seeing how the approach compares between different games. A lot of if-then statements seems to be something in common.

it's a good ai. But it simply cannot deal with half of the maps in the mappool at all. especially water maps, Islands, TeamIslands, start on a small island, expand to the bigger one. It. Just. Dies.

Great video SotL. Very informative.

I have a newfound respect for the original AOE2 team back then, and the Forgotten Team for the heavy scripting done with such simple conditions such as only using "ifs", and people like TheMax who is not only a top player but also has time to program such a competent AI like Barbarian by himself. Thanks SOTL!

I actually had a go at making an ai (with prior no experience) over christmas I'm both pleased and embarrassed that it plays better than I do. It was fun to do and didn't take all that long to get started so I'd recommend it!

That interview is actually... Cool. Just as always. Thanks to both!

pls make a video about barbarian AI

Someone in the Total War franchise needs to hire this guy they've never had an AI that could think its way out of a paper bag

I have been watching you videos for a year and a half love your videos

What the AI still never does is: -Transporting villagers by transport ships (which makes it impossible to play migration maps against AI). -builds fish traps nor use existing ones like in scenario editor or campaign. Builds palisade walls or palisade gates. Builds outpost. Playing tower rush. Just what i remember atm.

18:38 There already is an AI for DOTA 2 that consistenly beats any pro player 1v1 midlane and that players today use to train. It still needs improvement because DOTA is not played 1v1 and the AI only knows one or a few champions in a mirror matchup, but it's still impressive. If today there were as much interest in AoE2 as it is in DOTA 2 there would totally be an AI beating top human players consistenly in AOE2 at some point.

Quality content as always! Thx so much Spirit ❤️! Much love from Chile

I thought you were going to talk about both AIs (old and new), still really liked the video. I've started playing AoE:TC again and now that i can observe things more clearly than when i was younger it's impressive how cheaty the AI is in that game and the weird decisions that it makes: -It will most of the times target the player with the highest score, so if you let your score be low enough you can basically just stall until they run out of resources while attacking eachother -When it decides to attack you it targets your trebuchets or cannons as the highest priority, it knows where they are even if it has no line of sight, so you can lure the armies to a location you desire just by placing a trebuchet there -It knows where every single resource is, no matter if it has never explored that area -It knows where your villagers are, if you run out of resources in your base and have to send villagers far away to gather resources they will always get attacked at some point or another -It is so reactive to damage that even has problems with things attacking it through walls, sometimes they don't register that they have to attack the wall blocking it from the enemy (and they never retreat, except with villagers). One time i walled a tower next to a relic i palisaded and all the melee military that it send that way just got stuck in the walls trying to attack the tower while the tower kept shooting them and it would always send monks to try to get the relic and wouldn't retreat when it couldn't reach it and the tower was attacking them. -I know i should have said this sooner but yeah...it knows where everything is basically -At one point of a game that has lasted too long almost all villagers stop working even if they have wood and food still available and do not continue attacking or they do it at way bigger intervals of time -The build spacing is so badly made that they build all their buildings ,apart from houses and farms, in random places that are incredibly away from their base (this was noticeable even as a kid) -No matter if the enemy that it intends to attack needs to be reached by going through enemy territory, it will do it and lose all army if necessary....or just have it stuck forever because it is being blocked from all sides by other enemy's walls And the list goes on and on

This was really interesting! Thank you. :)

Please make more of these technical videos. They are awesome.

This is a fucking brilliant interview. Great work all around

This video has everything I like!! AI and AoE please do a follow up if there’s more info out there about this topic

IF I am about to get wrek THEN Deploy the cars

Thank you both so much!

Great interview! Would love to see more!

I haven't played AoE in 9 years, but I love your videos!

This is a great video. So so interesting and questions I haven’t even considered

Great idea thanks for making this SotL! More like this please!!!

I love your analysis and voice so much. You are great 😁

When will patch 5.9 released? Make the karambit great again.

2:46 the guitar intro automatically plays in my head

Very interesting video, so glad you made it!

Wonderful topic with great questions, it gets me interested in building my own ai one day.

Very insightful video thanks!

Can you do a video about tree hp?

This guy says that the AI doesn't one what units you produce, without scouting them... but I swear on DE it does know. It counters what I build without even knowing or seeing lol

I find the AI of AoE2 HD the best I've ever seen in any Strategy games, even including 4x's and the like. Anyone disagrees? (Genuinely curious) Super interesting video btw, great interview!

Excellent questions!

Definitely good enough to beat me on easiest difficulty Edit: this comment is just a joke. I know that nobody can be THAT terrible at the game.

This may be off topic but oh well. I started playing this game again after i discovered you on youtube and i couldnt believe what this game has become and how big of a fan base it has got over the years. People are playing this game nowadays in ways I could not imagine back when I played it as a kid. It's a timeless game, the graphics as well and I want to like it but for me the biggest killer of this game is that you're not really enjoying it or at least thats the way I see it. We're all rushing to do this do that sometimes feudal or castle flies right beside you and you haven't even engaged with your units. I would have loved this game if it was a bit slower, one of the things I would have loved is to play in one age only like a game option. I think all this math and how to and why are nice and fun to know it's just, it's killing all the magic a game should have It's like missing the point.

Really nice interview and video

17:58 so a way to beat it would be to cheat f.ex. attack it with a group of 5 knights, it will start spamming pikes, then you bring out ur true army which is ton of archers and decimate them? then keep using this psychological warfrare (make it believe ur army is composed of certain units while its actually not)

I've been craving an intro for a while now, Spirit. Don't mae me have to go back to older videos man...

Cool video! Interesting to see how the AI is programmed.

best video you did so far

Hi Spirit, I would love to see you do a video on monk conversion times. The pros use monks a lot to great effect in early castle age, so it would be great to see some numbers on them!

The best thing to do against AI is to wall. They rarely make trebuchets, and I've never seen them use a siege tower. Mangonels don't last long enough if you target them with towers. Their best move is to rush with rams, but they're easy enough to deal with too. I've beaten moderate with mainly towers and walls before.

I actually found an interesting bug/suboptimal behavior with this Hardest AI. If you confine it to a small but food-rich and wood-rich Island that any human player would have no difficulty with, it very likely will get stuck there defenseless, believe it doesn't have space to build a mill or a dock, and end with draining all the Island's resources until its villagers are just idling in dark age forever. I.E. Building in a tight space or using transport ships to found economic colonies is a completely out of context problem for the HD AI. So that 10 distance between drop sites can actually kill the AI.

very interesting video, especially since it highlights the changes in ai development. Though i get that AOE2 is your specialty i would have been interested in a little bit more of a zoomed out view as well, so if you could get promi to do a follow up that would be very interesting. I mention this specifically because he refers to the ai from shooter games, which have evolved from all matters of clunkiness, to smart, but non-existant. Plus after your question about developing ai that could beat any human player he mentions machine learning which is what google and Blizzard are using with their ai that is learning starcraft 2. Using the proper channels i don't see why the same could not be developed in any other RTS. I would also really like to know if the standard AOE2 ai differs from the ai's of aoe1 and 3 in a fundamental way, or not.

Now I want a video of spirit vrs the barbarian

SO COOL!!! i've never seen a video with the one who developed the game. Awesome! btw it is true - the jump to moderate is huge! i can barely keep up with the AI. i am casual player and never engage in multiplayer fights. so, the AI games are my jam. i am deeply demoralized how they manage to destroy me with such ease :D

I would like to know how Ai sorts different units in formations. It always looks really good organised when marching different unit types.

This seems to be an AoE channel, but I would really like to see a video like this dissecting the AI behaviors in Command and Conquer 3, I've noticed a few strange behaviors from the Brutal AI but I don't have the know-how to dig around in its brain myself.

personal thanks to promi, me and my family play vs hard AIs on black forest. We have had COUNTLESS hours of fun :)

Fantastic video. You should interview the creator of Barbarian AI next 😊

I'm often sure that AIs have complacently different personality in ways that don't directly relate to there civ or positioning. EG. a few are capable of deleting buildings that are in there way most will not even when they are complacently preventing trade, and occasionally you get one who's villagers react violently to attempted tower rushes where as most just let it happen.

As someone who spent some time as an AI researcher, having those tens of thousands of lines of rules seems absolutely crazy. I'm not expecting you to use fancy neural networks like Deep Mind uses, but there must be existing methods you can apply that are much more maintainable than 30k lines of rules. Now I don't know what the limitations are when it comes to actually getting data out of the game and sending commands to the game, so that may be a huge road block. Either way, I'm really impressed that these AIs are nothing more than "a few" handwritten if/then/else statements. I didn't think you could get this far using this method. I still think that you're going to hit some fundamental wall where the complexity of these rules becomes unmanageable. At some point, you're going to need to model strategies at a higher level, and have some solver or model that will figure out the best (or just a good) way to execute on that higher level strategy. For instance, the resource gathering seems like a fairly simply optimization problem. For the build order part, a variant of STRIPS planning could be quite effective at determining what needs to be built in what order to reach a certain technology. It's obviously more difficult than I make it sound, but using some relatively basic techniques that have been known to be effective in both research and industry could seriously reduce the amount of work needed to build the AI.

one thing i never understood is this: AI rushes you a lot Suddenly stops Sits on its city doing nothing for the entire of the game you attack, destroy some of the TC I SURRENDER has happened to me a lot in different dificulties and its always like this, i either survive the rush and win or die by it

You should do a guide to AIs in DE version, specifically campaign AIs. It's hard to keep track of their surrender conditions and the outcomes. The basic conditions for them to surrender is destroy all their TCs, Castles as well as massacre all the villagers. Normally, that works and the buildings, military production buildings crumble, all but houses and some economic/dropsites buildings. Sometimes, the same thing above but I have to raze their military buildings to the ground. Other cases of campaign AI's surrender is to defeat all the garrison ( soldiers ). The most difficult would be retaking towns, in which I do not know if I should destroy both the TCs and the Castles or just one. It's hard to really keep track so I hope you do one for all the base-building missions.

Interesting video, thanks Spirit of the Law. I am a new player who only plays against the Resonancebot AI, and the only way I can win against it is if I use the F3 'pause' button regularly, when I can still examine positions and strengths and still make specific choices. Generally I find the job of multitasking to be overwhelming. How can a person focus on even a small military campaign when one is continually distracted with routine maintenance tasks such as re-seeding farms, choosing technologies, buying/selling food at the market, and so forth? Any AI can do this automatically; I can't. So this is one of my general problems with AOE2 HD and any real-time strategy game, in that a limitation for human players is having them micromanage so many things. One improvement to AOE2 HD that I would like to see would be the option of being able to buy a 'resource manager' unit -- a town manager for example -- so that a human would set a general priority (eg 30% food, 30% wood; 20% gold, 20% stone) and then the resource manager unit would task the villagers, keeping them safe while making sure they weren't idle. That way, the human could concentrate more on the strategy aspects of the game.

Regarding the last question about if it's possible to make an AI better than any human, take a look at the videos of the AlphaZero AI in Starcraft 2. Basically it just has micro and mechanics so perfect that it breaks the game, it trades favorably in almost any battle even when it's outnumbered or at a terrain disadvantage. I think the same would be possible in AOE2... The game is balanced around humans playing, but when you have a computer that can perfectly micro every unit on the map simultaneously that balance is no longer... balanced :D I guess cavalry archers in particular would be imba in that situation.

Scripted AI is such an archaic system. ML is what more games need. Amazing interview though. You did a very good job with the questions.

That's why I often like to see an Ai only battle and to rewatch my own against AI as well. I really have learned to make more troops early in the game when you go against moderate or above. Or sometimes you go lucky to not get attacked 😅

I wish there were a few extra difficulty settings between the existing ones, so that the increase in difficulty isn't as dramatic as it is now.

Man can we get an updated video for DE this is so interesting. I love it

Omg !! I think other games need an analysis of the AI in a similar way

The problem I have always had with AI is that it's often much more aggressive than me, but if it cano't break my base right away it will suffer from diminishing returns as I build up a larger and larger army. I used to "turtle" a lot in the past to soak up the initial blunt of attacks, now I try to rely less on that to get more in line with the. However, trying to break a very good turtle is a very effortful challenge and I never see any AI do this. It would be great to let the AI choose this strategy eventually, which you can counter early on by rushing if you don't want to wait and have to deal with their massive fort later on.

I used to beat the AI on moderate something like 95% of the time. Even with 200pop 7v1 (the game always became unplayable suddenly thanks to some weird stuttering. Has anyone else experienced that?) When I started playing HD, the moderate AI kicked my ass. Even with 2v2. I eventually got my strategy right (Thanks SotL), but still win about 60% of the time in a 4 player free for all. Other than all the rebalances and improvements, the game definitely feels like a whole other game. Which speaks volumes to how dedicated and attentive the devs are.

As a CSE student I am drooling over this

plz do another live com they are my favorite from you