The AI's best and worst civilizations (updated) 

Just gonna throw out there that I would watch the 1 hour breakdown of every civ's performance!

Interesting that the AI has been taught how to house wall and yet still doesn't like to wall using, ya know, walls.

Thanks to that unsung hero! May his fields never deplete and his villagers never get stuck while mining!

I wouldn't even mind if SOTL makes hour long videos. I just love to listen even tho I don't play the game anymore.

Despite playing for hundreds of hours I still find the extreme AI very challenging, we play 2v2 with my friend vs the AIs and we can "usually" win in super late imperial after a brutal war

This comment is a reflection that I will love this video, even though I haven't watched it yet, and supporting the algorithm.

i just want to thank the Lady/Gentleman who took the insane effort of fighting all the civs. big round of applause for you.

I just want to be able to set the difficulty of each AI separately. Would be fun to have a couple of "difficult" CD AI's alongside moderate modern AI's to play against

point of note, in my personal games, the AI gets very distracted when attacking enemy buildings, which could have also played into byzantines favor

That was pretty cool! Would love to see a video of you playing against the weakest and strongest AI respectively once and seeing if you can confirm their strength difference :D

So nice how you switched the "number 1 theme" after declaring the actual winner. That one is really the Frank's theme at this point.

Warms my heart to see AI Byzantines do well. Steady on AI. Steady On.

00:24 - "(set-goal strategy krush)" xD

In my time fighting the AIs, I always found Aztecs and Chinese to be the scariest. Chu Ko Nus who stand outside of formations are tough to counter with Onagers, and Aztecs can have a relentless and early rush, which is nearly an automatic win against a player without a clean strategy.

dear algorithm, people are commenting and liking this video.

Where is my medieval music intro? 11 great video spirit, as always!

You know, oddly enough watching AI vs. AI battles is the thing I'm most interested in doing if I decide to pick up the game again.

you should do a video on "easiest" vs "hardest" civs for various elo groups. Micro, build order, unique units and bonuses, etc, makes some civs feel wayyy harder than others

Always enjoy your analysis. Keep posting, and I'll keep watching!

I know it's already been said, but i would definitely watch a 1 hour breakdown of the A.I.'s performance with each civ - including the ones already covered. It could be longer - idc. I'd even watch all the matches - you could make a series with it. That'd be cool.

You have a very friendly voice. I always look forward to your videos. Thank you for being such a great person!

As usual, you're fantastic! Could you do a video on adding a single tech to each civ to make them OP?

I literally just love listening to you talk. And your videos analyzing ai games are my favorites!!! Please do it haha

This database for the AI is really cool, it would be really nice if they made it an open project and people could volunteer to run AI games under the given rules and then send the game replays to them, this way we could have an even larger pool of results and expand the data to other gamemodes as well (regicide, water maps, etc).

Man, this really takes me back to the days of AoE2 2013, when I'd just pit a bunch of AIs I wrote against one another and watch them dance. I should really write some AIs for AoE2 DE one of these days so I can relive the thrill of watching bots fight each other for my amusement

Vikings have an advantage though. Since they're placed at the bottom of the alphabetical order, all the other civs are already tired when they get to fight them. The test should have accounted for this obvious bias.

Props to the madlad that ran these games

Impressive, I wonder if something similar could be done by some kind of regular player survey, as for instance friend of mine recently noted that Persian AI on extreme gave him much harder time than some other civs.

me watching this as a player who never advances beyond Moderate difficulty: hrm yes, the tactics here are made out of tactics

i would love to see a 1 hour video of AI behavior, cheers

It would be interesting to see stats on players vs. AI too. I guess the variance would be huge, but there is probably some statistically significant common winners.

Teutons number -one- two! But wow, what a beast this person is, doing all that work.

Interesting fact: Under different game conditions, such as I always play regicide that starts you with extra resources and vils, the Khmer AI always advances immediately. They often stomp other comps with early Feudal aggression, and in my experience are the best AI civ with super efficient farms and access to the best battle elephants. On regicide the Viking AI is also quite powerful, and I've died to very strong champion pushes that come much earlier than you would expect, like 30min as opposed to most other AI civs just reaching imp around then. I always play 4-6FFA, and the civs I see always dying first (either by me or an AI) are the Burmese, Britons, Celts, and surprisingly the Lithuanians. I guess for the Lithuanians I'm always pretty good at snatching relics, and the AI is as well, so their major bonus never comes into play and the extra food gets washed out under regicide.

An hour long civ breakdown would be great. Think of all the elephant facts we could get!

If this is AI vs AI, I wonder if some dirty hacks can be utilized. If you use cheat engine to overclock the game to the speed just below CPU exploding, tweak the graphic processing unit to not show any battlefield at all to further speed up, and launch several instances of AoE on several different PCs. I think with sufficient dedication it is possible to launch all 5000 required games in a reasonable timeframe to get enough data points

really hope that all of the recent advances in neural nets and AI in relation to gaming, ie AlphaStar, will eventually become quite commonplace in RTS games. At least, in some very foundational sense that leads to competent AI capable of improving in real time and thus becoming a fresh opp every time one plays

Gotta love how YT hides comments from other people until the video is finished. Suprisingly only for some people? Seems like the AIs tend to do better the more they're set towards long game as they have trouble with early agression and constant pressure... and then viking AI comes out on top as the one that specializes in exactly that?:D So, if you're trying to get better at countering rushes, you should play against viking AI?

Video idea: "Are Teuton Scouts Really That Bad?" (Similar to your video on the Turkish trash units.)

I love how the AI goes through the effort of walling there base with houses, but never builds with actual walls.

This work requires a team man For sure dev team always watch your videos

before i see your assessment i just wanna say that on extreme death match the civ that gets ballista elephants is a damn nightmare to fight against I usually run like a 10 minute "truce" period to give them time to build up and not immediately annihilate each other, but that snowball is too big usually

SOTL here always asking the questions nobody else thought of

Awesome vid as usual! Bue for years I have been wondering what the name of the piano bg music was. I've heard it in some other videos as well but google was no help here 😅

Well now I just want an hour or more long breakdown even more.

This makes sense. I was trying to learn vs AI against vikings XD

Does it include a fabled "default/all techs" civ?;) What would happen if you "resign" different civ upon AI? Will its behavior change? P.S.: I can't recall if resigned assets remain their original civ or are adjusted to remaining players, sorry.

Good video

I don't know if it still works that way since I didn't play for a bit while, but in general AI civs that make Monks have a big advantage over those who doesn't on 1-1 because they get the relics. It may not be the entire reason for Byzantines, Teutons, and Slavs to be over 60% but I think it plays a significant role.

To sum up: the more passive the bonus and less micro heavy the army, the better the AI does.

AI with mesoamerican civs are pretty scary, especially Aztecs. Other AIs will sling them in team games, so that early EEW wave is particularly horrifying.

Please make the hour long video going in depth about all the civs

Whoever did that research had done an outstanding job. Really interesting even to me as bloody amateur.

nice vid

Before DE, the HD AI was beastly with Aztecs because of superior monk micro.

Hey Spirit, Do you know If you're going to make an updated "All AoE2 civ grades" Video?

I must say that I was expecting the Chinese and the Mongols to be the top civs. Chinese are a jack of all trades with a good eco which is ideal for an AI and Mongols have faster facilitate earlier progress to next ages. I've great respect towards that guy who actually watched the AI games. That must be really something if even SOTL doesn't want to do it. By the way I would watch that hour long video analysing AI's gameplay.

You know? An ai tournament sounds funny I'll try that one of these days

Vikings makes a lot of sense. The AI is extremely dangerous when allowed to boom. With free wheelbarrow and hand cart, AI would be able to get a huge economy and overwhelm the enemy

We should have some AI's competing on the ladder incognito

I remember in Warcract 3, human and undead was the hardest races to fight against A.I

Bruh we're watching a vid about comparative AI performance against itself in AOE2, a 1 hour video where you break down each one is perfectly valid and I would have absolutely watched it, lol

As 870 elo player tried to play extreme AI against 10 different civs. I held well against most of them but against Mongols I came very near to defeating them but they somehow reboomed and turned the game around.

Yes, but have any of these ever beat the pro strategy known as putting a castle behind a wall with cavalry nearby to take out any trebuchet? Or have I unknowingly been playing an older ai?

A thing that could be done to test ai this way is disabling human interfaces. So, the game processing would run waaay faster, which would make the observation waaay faster

Cool! Now do all 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 combinations! 🤭

The subtitle generator says "Chocolate throwers" and not "Chakram throwers". I find that a rather pleasing idea.

Interestingly enough I find meso civs absolutely dominate when it's AI vs. AI. In fact, yet to find a non-meso AI combo that can defeat a mayan + inca AI team.

Thanks to the dude who created all the data.

Does this test go past multiple patches that involve AI, or was it all done under one consistent AI? If the former, how many patches? Figured that would be an important disclaimer to know.

The worst is that you'd need to do the 3k hours Ai vs Ai and then do the same matchups player VS player to check for differences and eliminate civ advantages

I wonder if it would be possible for players to program their own AI's and let them duke it out without any human input.

Hey SOTL , can you make a video on the Sirak LOTR map. I feel like its an overlooked custom multiplayer map, with a whole community within the aoe community. would be nice to hear your thoughts

No intro song after "Let's check it out"

Good to know even AI change to the meta 11

AI always leave a lot of holes when they house wall, or at least do it in a very slowly and ineffectively that enemy can easily slip in before the wall offers meaningful protection. Such pre-emptive spending of wood and villager time are huge wastes, which is avoided by huns AI. I think this largely explains the good win rate of huns.

Interesting to see that Portuguese fell off a cliff i expected them to abuse Fetoria until i realized that was pushed to imperial age. Burgundian on the other hand with almost free food and gold makes a lot of sense why they are strong, but how do the Lithuanian AI fare given the starting extra food conditions?

makes me wanna try a Viking knight Rush

I found Saracens to be a very strong civ in team games because of their late game units. Strange how they're the second worst in 1v1s

I hope you can pass this on to Microsoft. The problem is, they are spending too much effort making the DE AI play like TheViper or whoever, and not enough making it do simple things that it should be doing. For example: - Doesn't garrison rams - Doesn't finish off targets (will start to attack, almost kill the target, but then move off and retreat) - Moves it's units around too much (once again, retreating when it's not necessary) - Doesn't use actual walls often (only when it has wondered or reliced, or anticipates doing so) - Still haven't seen it castle drop (drop a castle right in front of enemy town) - Doesn't migrate villagers on water maps These are just a few things I can think of for now. That being said it does do some things that are impressive, and that should be commended. However, it's the negatives that people tend to remember. I am hoping they keep working on this. I think the hardest one of these to overcome will be migrating villagers, because I've seen other AI's do the other things, whether it was AoC AI or an AI that I got off the Blacksmith over at HeavenGames. btw I'm the person who showed people how to make the AoE3 AI build walls, but I haven't messed around with AI's in a long time, so I'm not just some dumbass.

Im absolutely baffled the Dravidians are at the bottom of the list. Me and my friends play against hard AI (3vs2) and Dravidian AIs are an absolute menace thanks to just utterly spamming Urumi Swordsmen like there is no tomorrow, and they slaughter all kinds of stuff fairly consistently due to the first strike bonus and we had to bank entirely into counter units to make enough of a dent to win the game....after we got utterly backed into a corner for a full hour and barely defended at the cost of our sanity. At once point the spam got so bad that the AI spotted some fish traps in a river and put an absolute mob of 50+ of these guys on the riverbank opposite of my base to the point where they didnt even leave any gaps, and I brought 40+ Skirmishers with double projectiles, some towers and 2 trebs to bear on them (trebs didnt even miss anymore). The game LAGGED. I didnt even know this was possible given, yknow, its a 20+ year old game on modern hardware with not much more than polished sprites.

I recently played some games against the AI and i had the impression that the ai struggles a lot with infatnry spam in castle age and imperial age. Can anyone confirm that?`Goths seem to be a really valid option once you survive the early phase.

I wonder if the stats are similar for lower level AI's.

Just got back into the game when it came to Xbox and the Hard AI almost always gives me the work 😅 the Hard AI is definitely better than the average player online.

Oh no! This feels like Promi’s annual review. So he won’t stream again for another 6 months I guess!

Why are windmills blown at from the back?

Vikings! I knew it! They are my favorite team and I love them. Heja Sverige, Blue and yellow! When you got to #1 and bought up the French but saying they were not #1 after all, my first thought was YES, the Vikings! A great effective economy team for every situation I think: I love their Berserker late game and Naval superiority spam as well. The HORDE, resistence is FUTILE! Hand over your children, thralls!

What map were they tested on?

I was just wondering this today but why do you think the Greeks were never added to Age of Empires 2?

Looks like I'll be fighting a lot of Burmese

post the uncut version

I watched too many chess videos lately. Whenever Sotl says "Huns" I only understand: "Hans, Hans, Hans"

I'd watch an hour long video of SoTL analyzing AI lol

What is the AI's best and worst civilizations on teamgames?

1 hour video!!!

Omg... I'm an AI. Vikings and Teutons are my preferred civs...

you should use kraken meister to create the worse and most suitable custom civs for the AI

I actually got to 1400 elo for the first time by maining Vikings! Feels like you're playing with cheats because your villagers work faster until your enemy decides to get the upgrade, which means you then have more villagers.

Vikings best Civ AI Fatslob is an AI confirmed!

Is this true to hard and hardest AI as well?

i miss lickstoesatnight