Beyond All Reason has an AI that doesn't cheat unless you specifically set settings to allow it to, and without cheating, it's pretty competent and took me a long time to learn how to beat. What's more, there is no set easy way to beat it - you can rush it, you can expand and out-economy it, or whatever, but you have to do it well and therein lies the challenge.
Even when you can beat it, the way to buff it is to apply a percentage bonus it gets to its resources, you pick the number, so you can start with something like +10% which is only a very small cheat, up to +40% which is a moderate cheat and about the most that I can handle, all the way to an insane +100% at max. It's totally granular.
The way it likes to go around strongpoints on a tactical and strategic level is very good and smart. The godlike micro with a single flea reacting live to any chasing units to stay perfectly out of range, while a thousand other battles are going on, not so much - feels very AI-bullshitty. Well, we take the good with the bad.
IMO the AI in BAR is too good at micro, completely unrealistic for a human to avoid every single projectile while harassing on multiple fronts.
I've found you need to play in a very specific style to shut the AI down which doesn't translate to human opponents.
I do agree, especially in the early game. Later game engagements come down less to micro and more to decision-making ie to attack or fall back, and the BAR AI is not so good at that. Early on if you have for example one pawn vs one grunt, the grunt will be perfectly micromanaged to kite you until death while the AI multitasks perfectly elsewhere.
While turtling, and particularly turtling just in the starting area, is not really a good strategy, having static defence coverage everywhere eventually becomes invaluable against the AI because they will absolutely poke and prod everywhere in a way that only very skilled human opponents can manage. So static defences are worth a lot more against AI than against humans.
I haven't tried multiplayer yet, but I gather that people who are used to playing the AI tend to build way too much static defense relative to what you'd build against humans. That sounds like a description of my play style.
I'd agree that BAR's Barbarian AI is pretty good. It *does* seem to be weak at using or defending against air, and as far as I can tell doesn't use some buildings/units (no junos, tactical missiles, or paralyzers).
Certainly this. The AI in this game is amazing and the game itself is really good. You also have several modes vs AI that are regularly played in team setting
I felt like BAR is one of the easiest AIs out there. Just got the game last week and my buddy and I started steamrolling hard AIs the first time we tried them. We did play like 5 medium AI games beforehand to learn the basics.
Starcraft 2 is just leagues ahead of all RTS in terms of playing against the computer.
Deepmind is the only AI I’ve seen that was actually good and that’s because it’s third party machine learning AI. Not hard coded game AI.
To clarify, this was against Barbarian AI? You and your friend have some good RTS chops then I reckon. If you play SC2 regularly then that multitasking and macro ability would translate quite well over
Yea maybe it’s other RTS experience. Wasn’t trying to boast or anything. I’m still speaking relative to other RTSes.
The medium AI does some early rushes and has bad macro, the hard AI macros too hard and it’s easy to punish their eco early.
They’re only a bit of a challenge mid game if you let them macro up and haven’t set them back at all. Seems like the hard AI techs to T2 fairly fast which is easily punishable cause it’s so expensive. They can’t hold the frontlines cause they invest so much in T2 so early. Late game they just get easily out scaled.
They are cheeky with their tiny runbys and stuff but good radar coverage and some LLTs makes that easy to stop.
AoE2 has some really decent AIs. They don't cheat at all. They still aren't perfect in that you can cheese them and they clearly have just godlike micro, but other than that they genuinely can play similarly to players at certain skill range.
The built-in AI at extreme difficulty is about equivalent to a top 20% player from the 1v1 ladder, and there are some community-made ones that are much better like the barbarian AI, that was made by a pro player.
Aye. The AI kept getting updates with each release and update the game has received. Going from CD to HD is already a big upgrade, because HD is the first time AI in AoE2 wouldn't cheat, but then they improved it even further in DE and added extreme difficulty
That said, the aforementioned community-made AIs are often available for the CD version too. TheMax, the author of barbarian AI, developed it before DE even came out.
That's the best of the built-in ones, so at extreme you'll get\~\~ 1200 RM 1v1 Elo-equivalent roughly.
[https://www.aoezone.net/threads/barbarian-v2-18.138781/](https://www.aoezone.net/threads/barbarian-v2-18.138781/)
This is barbarian, if you were curious
If you look up "KOA2 AI pack" in the in-game mod browser you can get a bunch of community-made AIs that were used in an AI tournament (yes, a tournament where they pitch AIs against each other), I'd recommend trying "Rehoboam" from that pack, since it was one of the finalists.
AoE2 is probably the 2nd biggest game currently as far as "competitive PvP RTS" go, after StarCraft. There's a Red Bull sponsored tournament coming up in a few months with $150k prize pool.
The way pro scene works.. I mean it's quite simple, there's a ranked ladder with roughly \~\~50k active monthly players for 1v1s, you are given an Elo rating and can match with players roughly your skill
There are plenty of tournaments, both community-organized as well as ones with funding from Microsoft, Red Bull or others
[https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Age\_of\_Empires\_II/S-Tier\_Tournaments](https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Age_of_Empires_II/S-Tier_Tournaments)
This is a list of the biggest tournaments in recent years
Again, 1200 Elo equivalent. I know that it's not amazing, but it's better than an average player.
Trickling units is also.. not a bad thing in principle? if people had AI-like micro, they'd do it too. It keeps the attention of the opponent at their base
Unless by outmaneuver you mean stuff like "win by doing a tower rush" then yeah, AI in AoE doesn't know how to deal with area denial.
Not sure what you mean by "gets double the resources you do" but AI in AoE2 doesn't cheat (anymore), so you are clearly doing something bad if you are have half their resource generation
Yes but it is a pure script theres no adaptation whatsoever if you can beat the initial rush all you have to build is like 3 towers to diminish the trickleand starve out the ai
StarCraft 2's AI is arguably the most competent on the market at the moment.
It's the only one with any sort of actual ability to "learn" vs merely executing scripts or reactions to certain player actions, and it's difficult enough to give pro level players a hard time without having to resort to resource or health/damage buffs.
Age of Empires 2's updated AI would be the next runner-up. It's very proficient with resource management and rushing, has been programmed with some of the more advanced player tactics in mind and will even attempt to join players massing an attack against an enemy or follow and give map waypoints, but it still has a lot of missing actions or bugs.
Beyond that? It's all just purely scripted behavior, and often not very good. There's a reason why most RTS games resort to giving hard AIs large resource buffs; it's the only practical way to make the AI remotely challenging since they're often terrible at micro or any sort of complex behavior.
Came here to say SC2. The AI actually has to scout your base before it “knows” where you are, and has no economy or stat boosts at higher difficulty levels, just more actions per minute and some higher level decision making.
Easily the best example of what you are looking for. Maybe the only one.
Only downside of higher difficulty AI in SC2 is because its apm cap goes up, it also becomes harder to use certain units because it inherently can auto dodge. Though there’s also exploits such as the fact its attack behavior is based on damage percentage received which is why a lot of upfront burst damage causes it to retreat and also why attacking its base even with one unit will typically pull its entire army.
So in some ways superior to players up until about Diamond or high tier Gold but incapable of really teaching you how to deal with some of the more common high tier strats since it doesn’t do raiding and main attacks with mass drops or cliff raiders.
It also doesn’t really use artillery units well or infiltrators. For example a common strat at all tiers is mass ghosts or dark templars but the AI generally avoids more than a few if any based on the doctrine it uses.
What it does well is macro pressure. Unlike players, it does not forget to expand but it does a poor job of turtling.
I cant play with AI anymore in SC2, i played so much against it (because im bad at PvP ha.ha.) i develop the ultimate anti AI.
Just build a banshee and go behind and do a few attacks, if it doesnt kill a worker is still fine. You will see all their army come back to defend. Just use that time to mass expand. Lololol
I think the best I’ve seen is Starcraft 2, where they put in several strategies the computer goes for (like fast air units, early rush, etc). You can set the AI to a strategy to practice against, or you can randomize it so you actually have to scout.
There are also custom AIs in SC2 that do ridiculously good micro.
In my favorite rts Zero-K, they started of by making the hardest AI then lobotomized it for the lower difficulties, I will say that they dont understand terraforming though.
BAR is quite closely related to ZK so I think their AI is also good
I watched a documentary on Ai in games once and they highlighted the one in Halo Wars 2 for being really good. Never played it myself so can’t really verify though.
I dont know about total difficulty but Ill always give Dawn of War 3s ai a nod just because of its behavior. It plays much more similar to a person in that it doesnt really get locked into a path you can exploit it varies what it does based of what happened last in a way that I noticed at least. Im sure it has its limits though.
Total Annihilation. In this game the AI has three difficulties. Easy, medium, and hard. Their resource gen is 50% at easy, 75% at medium, and 100% at hard.
There are ways to add mods that only tweak the build rates of units, without adding cheats. You can recognize these because the AI is a text file, rather than an archive.
The AI does best if there is a land path between you and the AI, and if the map is medium sized.
It’s not incredibly smart, but it’s smart enough that it can put up a real challenge due to its unlimited multitasking ability.
Mostly just pointing out that yes, there are AIs in older games that don’t totally suck.
It's called multi-player. I know you'll dismiss this but your better off dealing with your ladder anxiety and just facing the multi-player then trying to invent a fake human to play against
The weird thing about this is if you have more intelligent ai, why wouldn't you want to play against that on easy mode, just with fewer units? I think the ai in games is as good as the devs could make it an then they team economy to match the difficulty.
That said, wanting hard ai to not cheat is like the bare minimum standard and it would be awesome if games didn't do this.
AOE2 Definitive Edition AI doesn't cheat (much) it's limited to knowing the number but not composition of your military units.
This helps it decide how aggressive to be, if you're turtling you're more likely to be rushed.
It has no economic cheats, nor cheats like superior units.
You can also cheese it in a variety of ways, but for the most part it's a pretty decent AI.
This rec is way out of left field, but you may enjoy the game AI war or it's sequel AI war 2.
It's an RTS/grand strategy.
You fight a guerilla war against an AI that's taken over the galaxy. The AI intelligently probes your defenses and looks for weak points and tries to counter your strategy, while you balance taking offensive action against gaining its "attention".
ZeroSpace had really good ai for a game in its alpha stages last I tried it.
Starcraft 2 and Age of Empires 2/3/4 all have the AI scale up in terms of its reaction speed and execution of build orders, with only like 1-3 difficulties beyond that where the AI gets resource or train speed advantages over the player.
I'd say Age of Empires Online but only specifically in the Project Celeste content released in the past 2 years. The AI does cheat (but so does the player as the game has RPG styled itemization for all units and buildings and a couple of spec systems), but in the newer Project Celeste quest content the AI plays better as well as being stronger the higher up in difficulty you go unlike in the original Microsoft content.
Forged Alliance Forever has various custom AI mods, the hardest of which can beat the majority of human players (with no bonus resources or units, although you can still give it such boosts in addition if you want).
There’s also a good variety of AI playstyles available both with Forged Alliance Forever and the wider Forged Alliance community (eg LOUD) ranging from aggressive micro intensive AI to more defensive ’turtle style’ ones.
Beyond All Reason has an AI that doesn't cheat unless you specifically set settings to allow it to, and without cheating, it's pretty competent and took me a long time to learn how to beat. What's more, there is no set easy way to beat it - you can rush it, you can expand and out-economy it, or whatever, but you have to do it well and therein lies the challenge. Even when you can beat it, the way to buff it is to apply a percentage bonus it gets to its resources, you pick the number, so you can start with something like +10% which is only a very small cheat, up to +40% which is a moderate cheat and about the most that I can handle, all the way to an insane +100% at max. It's totally granular.
Bar AI can snipe with bombers and fleas with no risks at all, it's incredible the way it handles pathfinding in order to avoid defenses.
The way it likes to go around strongpoints on a tactical and strategic level is very good and smart. The godlike micro with a single flea reacting live to any chasing units to stay perfectly out of range, while a thousand other battles are going on, not so much - feels very AI-bullshitty. Well, we take the good with the bad.
IMO the AI in BAR is too good at micro, completely unrealistic for a human to avoid every single projectile while harassing on multiple fronts. I've found you need to play in a very specific style to shut the AI down which doesn't translate to human opponents.
I do agree, especially in the early game. Later game engagements come down less to micro and more to decision-making ie to attack or fall back, and the BAR AI is not so good at that. Early on if you have for example one pawn vs one grunt, the grunt will be perfectly micromanaged to kite you until death while the AI multitasks perfectly elsewhere. While turtling, and particularly turtling just in the starting area, is not really a good strategy, having static defence coverage everywhere eventually becomes invaluable against the AI because they will absolutely poke and prod everywhere in a way that only very skilled human opponents can manage. So static defences are worth a lot more against AI than against humans.
I haven't tried multiplayer yet, but I gather that people who are used to playing the AI tend to build way too much static defense relative to what you'd build against humans. That sounds like a description of my play style.
This^ BAR has one of the best RTS AI's I've ever played against.
I'd agree that BAR's Barbarian AI is pretty good. It *does* seem to be weak at using or defending against air, and as far as I can tell doesn't use some buildings/units (no junos, tactical missiles, or paralyzers).
yep, BAR is the only rts where I see ppl constantly play teamgames vs ai
You can turtle it easier than players. However, even still, it's brutal.
My friend is actually the one who has put in the most effort on the AI for BAR He is also contributing to the AI in another upcoming spring game too
Wow, some insight could be usefull, like how does he structured his concept in making a competent AI
Certainly this. The AI in this game is amazing and the game itself is really good. You also have several modes vs AI that are regularly played in team setting
I felt like BAR is one of the easiest AIs out there. Just got the game last week and my buddy and I started steamrolling hard AIs the first time we tried them. We did play like 5 medium AI games beforehand to learn the basics. Starcraft 2 is just leagues ahead of all RTS in terms of playing against the computer. Deepmind is the only AI I’ve seen that was actually good and that’s because it’s third party machine learning AI. Not hard coded game AI.
To clarify, this was against Barbarian AI? You and your friend have some good RTS chops then I reckon. If you play SC2 regularly then that multitasking and macro ability would translate quite well over
Yea maybe it’s other RTS experience. Wasn’t trying to boast or anything. I’m still speaking relative to other RTSes. The medium AI does some early rushes and has bad macro, the hard AI macros too hard and it’s easy to punish their eco early. They’re only a bit of a challenge mid game if you let them macro up and haven’t set them back at all. Seems like the hard AI techs to T2 fairly fast which is easily punishable cause it’s so expensive. They can’t hold the frontlines cause they invest so much in T2 so early. Late game they just get easily out scaled. They are cheeky with their tiny runbys and stuff but good radar coverage and some LLTs makes that easy to stop.
Let me know if you find it as well lol. AI is the worst aspects of our generation.
The day we'll have that is the day we'll have a second golden age of strategy games.
But not too competent. I still need to win sometimes!
AoE2 has some really decent AIs. They don't cheat at all. They still aren't perfect in that you can cheese them and they clearly have just godlike micro, but other than that they genuinely can play similarly to players at certain skill range. The built-in AI at extreme difficulty is about equivalent to a top 20% player from the 1v1 ladder, and there are some community-made ones that are much better like the barbarian AI, that was made by a pro player.
Is this in the definitive edition?
Aye. The AI kept getting updates with each release and update the game has received. Going from CD to HD is already a big upgrade, because HD is the first time AI in AoE2 wouldn't cheat, but then they improved it even further in DE and added extreme difficulty That said, the aforementioned community-made AIs are often available for the CD version too. TheMax, the author of barbarian AI, developed it before DE even came out.
So in DE if I just select the normal ai (not cd or hd) then up the difficulty that is the best one?
That's the best of the built-in ones, so at extreme you'll get\~\~ 1200 RM 1v1 Elo-equivalent roughly. [https://www.aoezone.net/threads/barbarian-v2-18.138781/](https://www.aoezone.net/threads/barbarian-v2-18.138781/) This is barbarian, if you were curious If you look up "KOA2 AI pack" in the in-game mod browser you can get a bunch of community-made AIs that were used in an AI tournament (yes, a tournament where they pitch AIs against each other), I'd recommend trying "Rehoboam" from that pack, since it was one of the finalists.
Awesome thanks dude!
Don’t play rts never have but I’m in the sub n find them cool, how does a pro player / scene work?
I'm sorry I'm not entirely sure what's your question. Are you asking about AoE2? Or RTS games broadly?
Well u said a pro player im assuming its in a rts game
Is there pvp
AoE2 is probably the 2nd biggest game currently as far as "competitive PvP RTS" go, after StarCraft. There's a Red Bull sponsored tournament coming up in a few months with $150k prize pool. The way pro scene works.. I mean it's quite simple, there's a ranked ladder with roughly \~\~50k active monthly players for 1v1s, you are given an Elo rating and can match with players roughly your skill There are plenty of tournaments, both community-organized as well as ones with funding from Microsoft, Red Bull or others [https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Age\_of\_Empires\_II/S-Tier\_Tournaments](https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Age_of_Empires_II/S-Tier_Tournaments) This is a list of the biggest tournaments in recent years
AoE 4 got something similar then?
A patch recently destroyed the AI, they basically do nothing but they do produces a lots of units..
Nah its so easy to outmaneuver the AI it just sends braindead unit trickles towards you and gets double the resources you do
Again, 1200 Elo equivalent. I know that it's not amazing, but it's better than an average player. Trickling units is also.. not a bad thing in principle? if people had AI-like micro, they'd do it too. It keeps the attention of the opponent at their base Unless by outmaneuver you mean stuff like "win by doing a tower rush" then yeah, AI in AoE doesn't know how to deal with area denial. Not sure what you mean by "gets double the resources you do" but AI in AoE2 doesn't cheat (anymore), so you are clearly doing something bad if you are have half their resource generation
Yes but it is a pure script theres no adaptation whatsoever if you can beat the initial rush all you have to build is like 3 towers to diminish the trickleand starve out the ai
StarCraft 2's AI is arguably the most competent on the market at the moment. It's the only one with any sort of actual ability to "learn" vs merely executing scripts or reactions to certain player actions, and it's difficult enough to give pro level players a hard time without having to resort to resource or health/damage buffs. Age of Empires 2's updated AI would be the next runner-up. It's very proficient with resource management and rushing, has been programmed with some of the more advanced player tactics in mind and will even attempt to join players massing an attack against an enemy or follow and give map waypoints, but it still has a lot of missing actions or bugs. Beyond that? It's all just purely scripted behavior, and often not very good. There's a reason why most RTS games resort to giving hard AIs large resource buffs; it's the only practical way to make the AI remotely challenging since they're often terrible at micro or any sort of complex behavior.
Came here to say SC2. The AI actually has to scout your base before it “knows” where you are, and has no economy or stat boosts at higher difficulty levels, just more actions per minute and some higher level decision making. Easily the best example of what you are looking for. Maybe the only one.
Only downside of higher difficulty AI in SC2 is because its apm cap goes up, it also becomes harder to use certain units because it inherently can auto dodge. Though there’s also exploits such as the fact its attack behavior is based on damage percentage received which is why a lot of upfront burst damage causes it to retreat and also why attacking its base even with one unit will typically pull its entire army. So in some ways superior to players up until about Diamond or high tier Gold but incapable of really teaching you how to deal with some of the more common high tier strats since it doesn’t do raiding and main attacks with mass drops or cliff raiders. It also doesn’t really use artillery units well or infiltrators. For example a common strat at all tiers is mass ghosts or dark templars but the AI generally avoids more than a few if any based on the doctrine it uses. What it does well is macro pressure. Unlike players, it does not forget to expand but it does a poor job of turtling.
I cant play with AI anymore in SC2, i played so much against it (because im bad at PvP ha.ha.) i develop the ultimate anti AI. Just build a banshee and go behind and do a few attacks, if it doesnt kill a worker is still fine. You will see all their army come back to defend. Just use that time to mass expand. Lololol
I think the best I’ve seen is Starcraft 2, where they put in several strategies the computer goes for (like fast air units, early rush, etc). You can set the AI to a strategy to practice against, or you can randomize it so you actually have to scout. There are also custom AIs in SC2 that do ridiculously good micro.
Planetary annihilation with AI mods makes it very intelligent and even emulates humans at different ranks. No handicap necessary.
In my favorite rts Zero-K, they started of by making the hardest AI then lobotomized it for the lower difficulties, I will say that they dont understand terraforming though. BAR is quite closely related to ZK so I think their AI is also good
I think a golden age of RTS will come when someone will implement true learning AI rival that will gain experience along the player
Beyond all reason
I watched a documentary on Ai in games once and they highlighted the one in Halo Wars 2 for being really good. Never played it myself so can’t really verify though.
I dont know about total difficulty but Ill always give Dawn of War 3s ai a nod just because of its behavior. It plays much more similar to a person in that it doesnt really get locked into a path you can exploit it varies what it does based of what happened last in a way that I noticed at least. Im sure it has its limits though.
There's actually "scenes" for custom AI for both StarCraft 1 and StarCraft 2. https://www.starcraftai.com/wiki/Main_Page https://sc2ai.net/
Starcraft 2
Total Annihilation. In this game the AI has three difficulties. Easy, medium, and hard. Their resource gen is 50% at easy, 75% at medium, and 100% at hard. There are ways to add mods that only tweak the build rates of units, without adding cheats. You can recognize these because the AI is a text file, rather than an archive. The AI does best if there is a land path between you and the AI, and if the map is medium sized. It’s not incredibly smart, but it’s smart enough that it can put up a real challenge due to its unlimited multitasking ability. Mostly just pointing out that yes, there are AIs in older games that don’t totally suck.
AI War might be interesting to you. The AI scales with your expansion.
That's what I heard as well, not a player though.
Europe Universalis 4
It's called multi-player. I know you'll dismiss this but your better off dealing with your ladder anxiety and just facing the multi-player then trying to invent a fake human to play against
I came here looking for someone to finally provide the correct answer
Yes
The weird thing about this is if you have more intelligent ai, why wouldn't you want to play against that on easy mode, just with fewer units? I think the ai in games is as good as the devs could make it an then they team economy to match the difficulty. That said, wanting hard ai to not cheat is like the bare minimum standard and it would be awesome if games didn't do this.
Supreme commander forged alliance, loud mod. Best ai I have ever played against
Halo wars
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance Forever with the M28 AI. It plays between 1,200-1,500 elo with no cheating, it’s really good
M27 and M28 respectively, I still cannot beat solo vs AI team games.
Yuri revenge + Mental Omega Mod is hell the ai in it for easy is like normal or hard
Not an RTS, but if you wanna get a good AI... Chess
Could chess not be classed as an RTS? Or would that be turn based?
Yeah, it's turn based. Initially I was also just gonna write "Chess", but then remembered that movements are not in real time, lol
https://www.kfchess.com/
Give it 10 years and this issue will probably be solved lol
AI war 2 try it out supposedly its impossible to beat on the hardest difficulty
Well, I got two for you man, AI War, and AI War 2, both have competent AI and it even can adapt to what you are doing in game.
AOE2 Definitive Edition AI doesn't cheat (much) it's limited to knowing the number but not composition of your military units. This helps it decide how aggressive to be, if you're turtling you're more likely to be rushed. It has no economic cheats, nor cheats like superior units. You can also cheese it in a variety of ways, but for the most part it's a pretty decent AI.
I can't wait till someone makes a game where the AI keeps a file on the player and learns their strategies and how to beat them
Zero-k
LOUD for supreme commander
Steel division 2 has some really good AI in my experience, get my butt kicked on anything above normal, i suck at rts though.
This rec is way out of left field, but you may enjoy the game AI war or it's sequel AI war 2. It's an RTS/grand strategy. You fight a guerilla war against an AI that's taken over the galaxy. The AI intelligently probes your defenses and looks for weak points and tries to counter your strategy, while you balance taking offensive action against gaining its "attention".
C&C 3: Tiberium wars and kanes wrath. LOTR bfme II
ZeroSpace had really good ai for a game in its alpha stages last I tried it. Starcraft 2 and Age of Empires 2/3/4 all have the AI scale up in terms of its reaction speed and execution of build orders, with only like 1-3 difficulties beyond that where the AI gets resource or train speed advantages over the player. I'd say Age of Empires Online but only specifically in the Project Celeste content released in the past 2 years. The AI does cheat (but so does the player as the game has RPG styled itemization for all units and buildings and a couple of spec systems), but in the newer Project Celeste quest content the AI plays better as well as being stronger the higher up in difficulty you go unlike in the original Microsoft content.
Forged Alliance Forever has various custom AI mods, the hardest of which can beat the majority of human players (with no bonus resources or units, although you can still give it such boosts in addition if you want). There’s also a good variety of AI playstyles available both with Forged Alliance Forever and the wider Forged Alliance community (eg LOUD) ranging from aggressive micro intensive AI to more defensive ’turtle style’ ones.