I hope its nothing severe. Best wishes for a fast recovery - get well soon
Probably a lot of players and me of course too are really excited for new AI updates. We really need an official AI that plays at a very high level on extreme difficulty in the Definitive Edition. I already really enjoy playing against your AI since it is the strongest one which can play all civs at the moment. I am also really glad that there is this unofficial barbarian AI to train against - this is a reliable training/testing partner for your AI. Thanks to TheMax for making such a great AI and I heard on voobly it is stronger even!
This time I want to share some observations from Player vs AI play.
The last days I have been trying to defeat 2 Extreme AIs at the same time but so far I have only been able to do so a few times with Slow speed setting (I am not one of the super fast players with crazy reaction speed) and a few reloads during the game when things went too bad. My goal is to beat 2 Extreme AI more and more reliable without loads and at casual and then normal speed but that is still a way to go.
If you can prevent or stop their trading in 1v2 you have a chance to win. If not and they get unlimited gold from trade its over very soon in lategame. You just can't defend from unlimited treb/siege ram/massive unit pushes from 2 different angles. And your AI knows how to push with trebs - it dives forward with the army to make it really hard for you to reach these trebs - even using bombarb cannons to counter the trebs is difficult that way which is great play from the AI. An Improvement here for the AI would be if it keeps some halbs close to the Trebs to make it even more difficult to take down the trebs.
Also early scout rushing is not so easy against your AI. You can get 3-4 kills maybe but the spears soon are everywhere chasing you around. If you divide your scouts into more than one group you might be able to distract the spears a bit but the AI already defends well here. The villagers running away causes idle but in this case also makes it harder to get fast kills and allows the spears to catch up fast.
You mainly get these few kills because the AI doesn't prepare for the scout rush. If you change that according to scout intel early feudal it will be hard to get value out of a scout rush which is good for Extreme difficulty - it should be as hard as possible.
If you prepare spears and place them in resource locations you could think about making sure that the defending spearmen never go too far away from the ressource location so that you can't lure them away too far. Splitting up the spearmen is viable in this case because spearmen are such a hard counter to scouts (be careful against sicilian scouts which take out spears 1v1 and in castle age pikes with light cav). That would also allow the AI to fight the scouts with vills + the spears and not have to retreat all vills from a resource location and cause lots of idle time when some enemy scouts show up.
For the future I could imagine that you could do advanced tactics like baiting the enemy into a strong defense with Towers or Castles where you can replenish fast and once you win that engagement you push forward and use the momentum you won from that engagement. Of course there has to be reasoning behind it. If you have a huge power spike it is worth using it but you also might loose the army if that power spike was not large enough and you fight under enemy TC/Tower/Castles.
Like TheViper says - never take a fight that you can't win. Even only slightly higher power on one side can lead to a snowball. But if you can't run away fight to the death to cause as much damage as possible.
Also making production buildings on other sides of the enemy base if that is possible in later stages of the game and flood from there too could be a really strong move.
And if you want to go to the extreme put the low HP vills around the TC instead of far outside at wood lines (only on extreme difficulty please). That will increase the challenge even more to get vill kills.
The one thing that will be hard to defend from in the early game for the AI is archer and archer/skirm rushes. You can't split your army or it will be easily defeated (snowball) so you have to react to these and follow them and keep your units together - but don't follow too far out because they might lure you away from the base to attack from another side.
Atm TheViper and other Pros can beat 3 of your AI because of very early feudal uptimes + archers only with godly micro. They dodge non-ballistics shots (and sometimes even ballistics) and that way destroy the enemy army which snowballs them to a win.
That might also be one of the advanced things for the future to get the Extreme DE AI to high elo levels. Start dodging more shots to make it harder to outmicro and split the own skirm/archers group in 2 commanded groups in a way that they don't all shoot at the same time to make dodging all shots from pro players a lot harder.
If they dodge the first shots they will probably eat the shots from the 2nd group and take at least some losses. You could make more than 2 groups but that could be unfair AI advantage and at a certain point impossible to win against.
Then you could even make the AI adapt to the enemy. If his units don't take damage from the first volley they probably dodge shots so start dodging shots too and make commanded groups for staggered shooting.
But this dynamic adaptation of micro would make it harder to measure how good you are if the AI plays better against better players than against not so good players. Maybe just add this staggered shooting and dodging to Extreme and only one of the 2 to Hardest.
If Pros can't abuse micro in the very early game they will have a really hard time and probably not be able to handle 3 AIs at the same time any more and will probably have to go for 1v2
Another thing that prevents the AI to win against good players is the lost momentum because it seems statisfied to attack some buildings when there is so much potential to deal lasting damage to a players economy by just diving into the base and harassing and idling them.
Here is a good example of a great game by a player doing 1v2 against your Extreme AI. You can see that it is already hard to beat the AIs and from this game you can learn a lot for AI improvements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kd1ec_H2O0
At around 14 minutes you can see the AI breaks a wooden gate and has a free way into the economy but since it doesn't immediately see villagers it seems to be satisfied to stay there and shoot at a mill when it could do damage to the economy.
This behaviour is one of the main things next to wasting units to Towers/TC/Castles that holds the AI back a lot.
At around 14:25 or so the archers move in but shoot at a lumbercamp instead of denoying a TC to go up. AI should never shoot at buildings with archers unless maybe as saracens or in rare lategame situations or if they want to create a gap in a wall- but for that priorize wall --> house --> other buildings - never resource drop offs.
The moment the TC goes up they retreat to outside the enemy base and chase a single knight for no reason - he is faster so he gets away anyways. Not sure if there is an easy way to change this behaviour since it might be the same code as for moving to a unit to engage.
What they could have done: move into the base and when villagers are pulled back into a TC place archers just outside of the TC range to idle the farms (be careful for Lithuanian TC +range tech). If possible place the archers near the side where the other archers move to so they are as close to each other as possible to reunite faster if needed. Send a 2nd group around in the base and deny villagers from taking wood and gold and maybe get some vill kills. But keep the pikes close to the archers in case that the enemy brings army like the knights actually harassing the AI teammate.
But the way the AI actually handled it it was not even a threat for the player when the tons of archers were outside shooting a lumber camp and he could continue harassing the teammate and had time to mass knights to clean up the army out there.
Moving in there could have won the game in the long run - releasing the pressure from the teammate and idling the enemy. In a 1v2 game you can't idle your vills or your 2 enemies will get ahead.
At 15:48 2 archers see a knight and shoot him - following into the TC range which causes the full army to retreat because the one archer got shot at. Also room for improvement.
At 16:30 another massively wasted opportunity. 8 Knights push out against 20 crossbows + 6 skirms + 2 pike. The archers are not stacked and keep shooting at the tc while the other archers not too far away are getting killed. Also no move backward shoot move shoot micro from the archers also no focus firing down 1 knight after another.
At 16:41 already half the army runs away from the knights dealing zero damage for a while to the knights. 2 Knights at 60% HP and 2 other at around 80-90% - all others still full. Soon 2 more knights join the fight and later even more.
At 16:50 it finally fights back - seems to focus fire a bit but switches target too often. If it did the move shoot move shoot micro focus fire it would have been far stronger. At least it kills a few knights and fights back now.
If a Pro had played this engagement probably all 8 knights would be dead and a part of the army would probably still be there.
The AI has to first stay stacked - move stop micro and focus fire knights - only if the overkill is more than like 50% for a single shot volley it might start thinking about how to fire.
Then it has to take a decision. Is the way home short enough that it can save units and is that saving of units worth it. If not just fight to the death and kill as many enemy units as possible instead of offering free kills. Otherwise it will play into the snowball for the enemy.
That was again a wall of text but I think these observations can help in the long run to make the AI better and eliminate weaknesses.
You should really watch the game - great play by SteelYr and the AI did not bad with room for improvement
I am really looking forward to these changes! Just make sure to place these improvements carefully into the diverse difficulties from easy to extreme so that newer players don't get overwhelmed. Extreme in my opinion should not hold back and use every bit of advanced tactics like pros do but it should not use absolutely unfair 2.000 apm AI crazyness when microing units - which none of the AI has done so far.
Again best wishes for a good and fast recovery!