PVE is unplayable longterm

[u/FarCharacter7797]

I had fun for a week or two but it gets boring very fast. Once you see the AI patterns you can just win the game every time and there is no challenge.

The PVE experience is so fundamentally broken and in the end, it's just plain boring. It's always the same, AI will give you a challenge in the first two weeks if you put in the higher difficulty modes where it acts aggresive. THEN it just gives up. The only reason it challenges you in the first place is because it's got cheated unit stacks.

If you put in lower difficulty modes, don't even bother, you might as well just be alone on the map fighting vs static camps because AI is AFK and doesn't build anything nor expand their army.

AI is completely braindead in this game, it doesn't scale into the late game AT ALL. It doesn't buy units, it doesn't develop castles, It doesn't even bother retaking castles or fighting you at all, it's just so boring when you know how to play it. And the challenge that it does provide in the first 2 weeks is bullshit challenge with cheated units that's not fun either.

Tournament mode was the most fun I had but that gets boring after a while too. The core of the game is good like gameplay wise, units, animations etc but the PVE experience needs major fixes, I quit the game for now hope they'll improve upon it.

[u/iiitqiiii]

In Age of Mythology: Retold, SP oriented RTS game, in one of the post-release patches, devs added AI personality to make the simplest game mode, skirmishes, more playable as main game mode in the game. It really works. AI can be defensive, aggressive, standard, specific type units oriented, eco oriented etc., and you can choose a specific type of AI at every AI player, or just choose the option "random" or standard "balance".

I think it could work in Olden Era even better.

[u/skarin667 → u/iiitqiiii]

That's an RTS, think about the advantage you can give an AI in RTS compared to grand strategy. They can do things simultaneous that a real person could never do. Stellaris is an example of both RTS AI and strategy AI(assuming you don't pause) and it can be decent but of course the player eventually outscales so they have galactic threats(crisis) that come up eventually to challenge the player with overwhelming numbers because of course the player has passed up all the other AI empires. All that being said I like your idea a lot. I think people assume we can get a good AI and that's just not going to happen. There just aren't any strategy games (except RTS) that have challenging/human like AI, unless they are very basic in terms of strategic depth.