What abilities should Bots have?

Szlat wrote:

Is it worth modifying some abilities specifically for bots?

How about increased range for their healing, damage and invincibility spheres? And I do like the medic weapon idea.

Szlat wrote:

Likewise, if bots are monster masters it would be useful to stop them spawning pupae - perhaps always spawn the best monster that they have points for - regardless of adrenaline and which summoning artifact they used? Or should bot medics not be allowed to spawn pets?

Likewise engineers could be changed so that bot engineers only summon sentinels, not turrets/vehicles/blocks. Which could spawn fully healed for bots, since they haven't got the intelligence to heal them. Or even just allow them defense sentinels?

dom60 wrote:

( BUT a BOT is a BOT and not much can be hoped for )

If a player summons a large monster and it goes somewhere inconvenient, say blocking a turret, at least the owner can kill it. With bots we're stuck. Pupae don't cause that problem.

Another issue with engineer bot constructions is that even if one somehow built something in a useful location, it would disappear as soon as another player joins. Sucky if you're depending on a turret or sentinel. On the other hand vehicles spawned by engineers might not be so bad since they can at least be moved if they're in the way. Still they'd be lethal to newbies without vehicle eject.

So I thought I'd better put some logging in to see what artifacts bots are currently spending their adrenaline on.

It turns out that bots are checking quite frequently if they have an artifact they can use. Perhaps each artifact once a second? So once they get an electromagnet, the adrenaline gets up to about 10, and the electromagnet activates, and there goes their adrenaline.
So, I disabled the electromagnet. This bot I was monitoring (a WM) also had a rod and a triple, and so once its adrenaline got to 30, it would randomly activate one of them. Which is fine.
However, any artifact that required 100 adrenaline wouldn't have a chance.

I play a lot on instant action RPG with the bots(don't ask me why, sometimes I like to be "alone"). I do have to say that the medic and engineer bots have to be improved.

As said in an earlier post- more healing from bots would be good and if it is hard to change the behavior of bots to shoot at friendly teammates, more spam of the healing sphere and blast perhaps would be nice.

As per engineers, I agree that only sentinels should be summoned. I haven't seen it yet but if bots know how to get in and out of a turret, then maybe turrets too. Bots have done useless things with buildings and vehicles would just be in the way.

I think all bots, regardless of the class, should have either regen or vampirism since they are more likely to die than real players would. I have played with godlike bots and they still decide to go into the crossfires with low health where in a real player's situation, would look for a medic.

Artifact usage would be helpful too. IMO, bots dont really have a need for the electro-magnet artifact. I've seen some use it and get stuck on the ground itself and others not know what to do on a wall. I just have the artifact removed from the artifacts dropped list because I wouldn't want bots wasting their adrenaline.

I kind of agree with the idea that bots should be all WMs, especially since WMs are almost entirely a passive skill class - Bots don't have to understand how to use their abilities to play well.

If we really wanted to keep AM and Medic bots they really need some more attention on how they use their abilities, and perhaps some extra perks for doing so as well, or some extra abilities.

For example, something like the Healing Sphere could have a logic path like so -

Code:

if (Bot.Controller.Adrenaline > X)
 {
    if (Level.CurrentTime > LastCheckedTime + 10)
   {
       PlayersNeedingHealing = CheckHPofNearbyAlliedPlayers();
       if (PlayersNeedingHealing == 0)
          return 0;
       if (PlayersNeedingHealing == 1 && (Frand() > 0.5 || Level.PlayerCount < 4 || Level.Game.WaveNum >= 10))
       {
           Activate();
       }
       if (PlayersNeedingHealing >= 2 || Bot.Health < Bot.HealthMax / 2)
      {
          Activate(); 
      }
   }
 }

As far as giving the bots a larger Sphere radius, I don't really agree - The sphere is ridiculously large as it is. I would much rather give the bots a discount on how much adren it takes to sustain the sphere, so that they can run it more often / longer, which should give players more chance to utilize them to compensate for the fact that the bots are dumb about using them.

It might even be worthwhile to do something like,

Code:

function BotConsider()
 {
    if (ConditionUnderWhichBotWillUseArtifact)
      BotNotifyActivate();
 }
 
 function BotNotifyActivate()
 {
    Bot.SendChatMessage("I'm going to activate"@ItemName"at"@Bot.CurrentVolume.Name)
    Sleep(2.0)
    Activate();
 }

For team-based abilities and functions, as in theory this would at least keep players a little bit clued in as to what bots are going to do.

I don't think bots understand the Healing Blast either, so I would either adjust the blast skill they get so the blast is centered on the bot's location or simply remove the blast from bots so they can focus on the sphere.

I would also give the bots a direct heal artifact - Restores 100HP to a single player within X radius who has the lowest HP. A nominal cost such as 5 adren might be appropriate, but I would not make it too expensive since the idea is more to give them an artifact that can have some smart usage behavior built in in lieu of trying to get them to shoot their own teammates with their weapons.

The AM class might be too challenging for bots to ever really have much hope of emulating, but at least some small things could be done for it.

For example, I would discourage their spammy use of artifacts - Activating rod or triple every time you get 30 adrenaline is a bit silly. I would encourage them to use artifacts only if Adrenaline > AdrenMax/2, though exceptions would occur (Primarily, if Health < 25%, then activate the globe!).

You could at least encourage somewhat smarter behavior in certain cases by giving the bots strong preferences to using the rod on lower level waves, or using the triple on titan waves. Presumably the actual wave number values could be configurable for other servers...

I would probably give AM bots a 1 use artifact to generate an energy weapon as well, and encourage the bots to use their artifacts if Bot.Weapon == class'EnhancedEnergy' as this is a pretty common behavior for AMs.

Engineer bots seem almost like a lost cause. For engineers to even be remotely successful you have to understand your environment, which bots do not at all. You might be able to hack something reasonable together by detecting areas where clusters of players are, or where human engineers have already set up defenses and giving them a strong preference for those locations. Locations with health powerups nearby might also be good for bots, as would flag, domination points, or assault objectives if talking about non-Invasion gametypes.

In general the best idea may be to make sure they use their shield blast smartly and perhaps give them an artifact like I suggested for Medics that will either add shield to a player or restore health to a vehicle/sentinel.

Wail wrote:

Engineer bots seem almost like a lost cause. For engineers to even be remotely successful you have to understand your environment, which bots do not at all. You might be able to hack something reasonable together by detecting areas where clusters of players are, or where human engineers have already set up defenses and giving them a strong preference for those locations. Locations with health powerups nearby might also be good for bots, as would flag, domination points, or assault objectives if talking about non-Invasion gametypes.

this might be too much, but bots can follow orders right? so why not make a command to "suggest" the bot to place a sentinel...

So the current changes I am looking at are:

classes:
AM chance 7,Medic chance 5,Eng chance 1, WM chance 10 to swing things in favour of WM bots

Abilities:
subclass - bots don't buy
shield healing and loaded healing bot preference increased, so they can get the blasts
Awareness, medic awareness and engineer awareness disabled for bots
Denial has a much reduced chance
Regen, shield regen and vampire now have a much higher chance for bots to buy.

Artifacts:
Medic Maker - will not activate if the weapon is currently a medic weapon
Healing Blast - will now sometimes activate if the bots health is less than 150
Lightning beam - will fire, but only if it will hit something
Lightning bolt - chance reduced slightly
Rod - slight tweaks on when to switch on and off
Max Modifier - will only active if it is a RPGWeapon, and modifier less than max
Plus One - will only activate if the current weapon is maxed
Double Magic Modifier - checks if weapon worth doubling
Triple - slight tweaks on when to switch on and off
MWM - changed so will not change maxed weapons, and chance reduced
FreezeBomb - chance reduced
SphereHealing - increased chance and switches on/off better
SphereInvulnerability - chance increased
SphereDamage - chance increased
ShieldBlast - enabled for bots
MonsterSummon - bots will try to summon better monsters than pupae
Engineer bots can only summon sentinels, and these will spawn fully healed
ElectroMagnet - set so bots don't use, otherwise they waste all their adrenaline on it
Megablast - reduced chance for bots
Poison blast - reduced chance of it firing.
Repulsion - disabled. Much too dangerous having bots throwing titans around
Remote Max/Damage/Inv - disabled as the chances of the bots using intelligently is remote
Kill pets/turrets/sentinels etc - disabled
Also some bug fixes to allow artifacts to be switched off better when no longer required.

The big change comes from disabling the electromagnet, which the bots used to waste a lot of adrenaline on.
I also want to disable flight and teleport for bots, as again they waste a lot of adrenaline for little purpose. However, that will require subclassing the artifacts, so I haven't got around to it yet.

These changes are not yet submitted, but are a work in progress - if everyone concurs.

count with my vote

That is great- sounds much better than it would be without having done anything for bots.

looks god to me............but what do I know!?!

maybe the bots should consider SphereInvulnerability only if health is less than 20 and adren is >= 100
otherwise use teleport.

are you suggesting the use of and . if .or. command lines??? that reminds me of my high school computer math class that i wrote programs in basic!

greg11 wrote:

maybe the bots should consider SphereInvulnerability only if health is less than 20 and adren is >= 100
otherwise use teleport.

At the moment, the SphereInvulnerability requires at least 72 adrenaline to switch it on (4 secs worth). Rather than introduce an arbitrary value of 100, I left it as the 72 value.
The other checks currently performed are that the bot has an enemy and can see it (no point activating betwen waves), that no other artifacts are running, and that the bot isn't already invulnerable. And of course the random check to keep things variable.

I haven't put a tie in on the bots health. To be honest, I think that is better on the globe rather than the sphere - because any bot with a sphere has a globe, and the globe requires less adrenaline to start. The globe kicks in when the bot health drops below 70.

I am not sure about allowing teleport at all for bots. Agreed there are times when it could be useful, as with the flight one, but typically bots just waste lots of adrenaline on it. I particularly thought it may be worth switching on the teleport if the bot was falling - just in case in was about to hit lava or fall off the map. But I think it will do more harm than good - teleporting the bot at all sorts of weird times.

But I am thinking about bots helping players. If the bot has an enemy, then people around the bot might also be under attack, so use the sphere to help others - especially players.

Szlat wrote:

To be honest, I think that is better on the globe rather than the sphere - because any bot with a sphere has a globe, and the globe requires less adrenaline to start. The globe kicks in when the bot health drops below 70.

My mistake, i was confusing sphere with globe...I am not a high enough AM to know much about the spheres yet.