I think the AI just got better...

Somehow I felt that the AI jut got smarter in EF. This applies to non-Soviet units, such as Wehr and PE as well.

For e.g. the Wehr AI spams less of the same units, and are capable of building combined units more often now. And PE has built a bergertiger for the first time, lol! Seldom see them do that previously.

As for Soviets, was it the T-34 tank or sth... took out my base defenses first before rushing troops in...well done. And arty the Mg42s to unsuppress their troops.

Improvement for the AI i suppose...

Developers created an advanced AI with the mod - it definitely is awesome.

However is the advanced AI only in EF? What I noticed was if you quit EF and launch the normal COH (w/o EF), then the AI seems to return to its normal self.

Does the advanced AI only take effect when playing in EF?

Yeah only in EF

I totally agree with you all, the AI is truly a challenge. The three games I have played (not enough by today's standards) and have been thoroughly beaten back to my base each time.

Being beaten back to my base, I don't mean by spammed units but combined arms, like the first post said, and flanking maneuvers of volks and mobile units. It looks grand when my outposts of a few units and one vehicle are suddenly overwhelmed by a tank and two units of volks or grenadiers.

I certainly applaud the AI coder on their handy work. 

Yes, that's true.

WE have knocked me down completely yesterday - variety of units, stukas, artillery, the way of movement... It will be a challenge :-D

I hope (and truly believe it), that the USSR AI is same, or even better! :-]

The Soviet AI is really tough too, I was playing as Panzer Elite and got completely smashed by them. Not that thats particularly unusual for PE  :P

Aye, whoever did the new AI really did a great job, skirmish is a whole new game now haha

What difficulty are you guys using?  Hard or Expert?  Expert has always been almost impossible to beat in the Opposing Fronts.

Normal because I'm awful at CoH  ;D

I played three skirmishes yesterday on Normal and was getting absolutely destroyed playing the Soviets.

AI needs a nerf :(

Seriously, I hardly ever play online matches in CoH so not being able to play against a suitable AI really sucks.

Try CPU Easy then. We have given AI a big difficulty boost.

Just dont try and play against Soviets with PE, being my long suffering favorite faction I've yet to find a way to win in 1v1. Marders seem to hold them off for a while, but by then its usually too late.

Any ideas guys?

John wrote:
I played three skirmishes yesterday on Normal and was getting absolutely destroyed playing the Soviets.

AI needs a nerf :(

Seriously, I hardly ever play online matches in CoH so not being able to play against a suitable AI really sucks.

Don't agree at least in the one skirmish I have played so far.  I played a 1v1 vs. Normal Russian.  I was Wehr.  Map was the Snow map.  For the first half of the game, I was getting killed.  I tried to hold the 16 fuel in the center but no chance.  I was pushed all the way back into my base and had essentially no map control.  At this point I was about to give up.  However, the AI essentially totally fell apart at this point.  Instead of coming in and finishing me off, all the AI did was build Katushya rocket trucks and try to shell my base.  The AI built like 20 of these.  I was able to destroy them all, call in a Tiger, and slowly regain the entire map back.  The AI got stuck.  Instead of building some T-34's and IS-2's and wiping me, it didnt.  Not sure if this happened to anyone else.

The exact same thing happened to me more or less, but in a 2v2, seems like if the AI chooses the propaganda doctrine all it wants to build are lots of Katyushas and T-34's.

ya i noticed this too. i can no longer easily defeat a expert comp. i have to play normal ones now :p

yesterday me and my friend played vire river against rus and US,US quit quick because he had to go,we thought,this will be 'fast' now...but in the end,russ almost did nothing,had like 10kpoints,but ai alone(with very little russ assistance) defeated us he had like 50k in the end...we were like,wtf,beaten by a ai? KT lasted like whole 15 seconds from coming in game,never saw one killed so fast...:P

I completely redid the AI for all factions - it's still not perfect but it should be much "smarter" than the vanilla AI.

I saw one poster mentioned spamming some units in the Prop doctrine - there is still a bit of a bug where once the AI starts building an off map call in unit, it LOVES to keep building it.

Yeah I remember vanilla AI used to do it with the Calliope if armour got chosen, now the russians do it with Katyushas. Any upcomign fix for this, or is just one of those annoying things that cant really be helped?

Great work on the AI by the way, I like Skirmish even more now haha  :)

The only way to fix it is to hard cap it - now sure how the team feels about that.  But even if capped at a reasonable number, it will often build them until it reaches that #

I think the "certain-type-of-unit" spamming is a characteristic nature of the COH AI way before EF, sometimes this tactic can be equally effective, for e.g. hetzer spam.

Yup but of course if tuned down a little, it would be better.

Dear Developer, does the AI still receive a health boost at higher levels of difficulty?

No - I took out the health boost

sweeten2213 wrote:
No - I took out the health boost

Ah, that's nice to hear that.  :) kudos on the AI by the way, it's now a challenge to play skirmish and I enjoy it more now (when my buddies are not free to play a 1v1 with me  :D)... really redefines the way skirmish is played now.

No kidding! Suddenly I'm fighting for my life on a 1v1 against a Normal. First few times I got smashed. All of a sudden armored vehicles are popping up out of nowhere very, very fast. I was used to the CPU trying to Puma-rush so it was a truly dreadful surprise when Stugs and Panzer-IVs rush my infantry.

After that I got an "inspired" idea, the dreaded Ingenery rush (insert artillery barrage of balance complaints here). On Angoville, Ingeneries charge, build an outpost, tech straight to T2, surround enemy base, get PTRD complement (unnecessary in hindsight) while rushing to tech to T3. I actually won with 3 T-34/76s.

Embarrassing as this sounds i actually gave up in a Berlin battle versing 4 ai's on normal just couldn't manage it. Such a good ai boost and its good.

I did my first steps in EF yesterday and was surprised how hard to beat a normal cpu is.
I won only one game with russians and that was because I was able to get an ISU-152.

I do also agree that the AI is way better in EF.

Yesterday I was trying to beat two WE AI's (expert) playing with USSR... We didn't make it  ::)

But today we will try again! ;D

Nothing will stop the Red Tide! 8)

sweeten2213 wrote:
No - I took out the health boost

Hi Devs, since the health levels are the same for all difficulty, what then are the major AI differences between each level of difficulty?

Like for e.g. I think the MP rate in hard or expert is quite fast. Any other differences which separates the AI from say expert than easy?

Or if anybody else can notice/spot the differences, do share with us?

The only AI "boost" from difficulty level to difficulty level is the multiplier for resources.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe Easy is 1.0 (meaning the same as a human), normal 1.1 or 1.2, hard a little higher and expert a little higher than that.

So say if it were 1.5 and their income would be 300 mp (using even numbers), they would get 450 mp per minute instead of 300 mp.

Though some accuse the AI of "cheating" due to this (which I understand the point, but vanilla AI does the same with resource bonuses AND health bonuses), the reality is the AI no matter how "smart" you make it needs extra resources to make more "human like" decisions. 

Whereas you, the human, know to make a purchase/use an ability at the precise moment you have enough, the AI tends to want a little more than enough and always has some in reserve.  So, in reality, it doesn't fully use the bonuses it gets and never will.

While not being new to COH, I read posts for strategies but I get tripped up by the terms used such as "micro" "vet" etc. Is there somewhere I can get a glossary so that a dimwit like me can actually understand the vocabulary? Some of the terms seem to be unpublished and known only to the hard core players, so I need help.

I give props to the improved AI, however it's not fair at all if you are doing anything above a 2 vs 2 and a player drops. On a large map with no choke points, it is impossible to outcap a computer controlled soviet player. Since they need no tech tree, with advanced income, tanks become available WAY to fast. Skirmishes are fun, and if you lose, no biggie, however when it's a player that drops and the advanced AI takes over with resource bonuses, it's ridiculous.

I dont understand this. I played as Wehr with an expert wher and 2 hard PE's agabist 4 hard soviets, and for the majority of the game they were putting up a great fight and almost pushed me into my base. But then, all of a sudden they just STOPPED. they didnt build ANYTHING. no more su85's, nothing. We then procedded to take over the whole map with the AI's huge blob of crap that they  assemble wherever you click the "defend here" button. WHy did thye just stop all of a sudden?

There's a problem with them... they like to spam doctrine units sometimes and noting else. With Propaganda it's Katyushas, with Urban it's Partisans and with Breakthrough its Mechanics, although Breakthrough isn't half as bad as the other two.

BurroDiablo wrote:
There's a problem with them... they like to spam doctrine units sometimes and noting else. With Propaganda it's Katyushas, with Urban it's Partisans and with Breakthrough its Mechanics, although Breakthrough isn't half as bad as the other two.

YES. I noticed this. They would just spam katysuka after katyshuka and nothing else. they had like 10 of em at once altogehter and i just kept blowing em up lol.

After many skirmishs, i think you should decrease the hard AI income bonus a bit (not too much) because hard sound like expert now ! The difficulty boost is nice but there is a too big difference between normal and hard ! Normal is easy and hard is nearly impossible (at least, for me). Hard must be "hard but not impossible. Impossible is reserved to "expert" difficulty :p
So i'm probably a bad player, that's true, but now i have a question. Who is able to win against a hard AI here ? i'm sure that only a few can !

Yea...

I am also curious about who or how many can defeat hard AI.

I really want to see some replays with this.

Yea, when they reach that stage where they
just spam Katyushas/Partisans, it's game over for the comp.

Can something be done to fix this?

I hate kamikaze Katyuchas, it makes no sense.
About as much sense as charging the enemy's base
with a thousand un-deployed mortar teams???

Agreed, on a map like Vire, Scheldt, or Lyon it's easy, cause you can use choke points and MAKE him go a certain way. It's not possible to survive those opening rushes on a large scale map such as Duclair, Rails and Metal, or anything else with open fields.

I was playing on Berlin on that match I mentioned above. If it was Kursk I probably would have Lost.

PSIHOPAT wrote:
Yea...

I am also curious about who or how many can defeat hard AI.

I really want to see some replays with this.

Hi PSIHOPAT, I did manage to win an expert PE AI 1v1 on Langres with me as US. It was extremely stressful but not impossible; there is really no room for mistakes. But for winning against expert Soviet AI, so far no luck yet, but I'll continue to try.

You can provide us replay ?

Make an archive and show us.

We  can have fun watching that glorious battle.

"Fivestargeneral" > Could you see some differences between hard and expert ?

PSIHOPAT wrote:
You can provide us replay ?

Make an archive and show us.

We  can have fun watching that glorious battle.

Hi PSIHOPAT, how do you attach a replay here? I can't find any attachment button. Kindly guide me. Thanks.

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dbkblk wrote:
"Fivestargeneral" > Could you see some differences between hard and expert ?

Hi dbkblk, actually I am also not sure, that's why I asked the devs earlier in this thread. For one noticeable difference, I have to say it is the amount of units the AI builds. I believe in expert, the MP resource regeneration rate is definitely faster than hard, and this causes the AI to produce more units (since they have more MP than you), and in a short period of time, manages to overwhelm your numbers, so the game becomes more challenging. Something like in the Napoleanic era where mass armies wins.

Unless you can stop their "population growth", it's gg very soon.

Last edited February 8, 2010 at 1:10 AM by Fivestargeneral