I simply cannot allow such a critical important topic to be buried.
(although tonight was the first time I’d managed that on legend solo with three bots)
You are happy. Personally, I will no longer take risks with solo Legend in CW until the necessary changes are made: stopping the chasing/hiding by bots and added manual control over the using of healing items.
Seeing the bots wasted precious healing supplies and potions in a horrendous manner - is simply Pain.
“Come here Wutelgi, let me patch that up!”
Kerillian on full temp HP “…”
It is infuriating, especially if you can literally see the cairn and there are no enemies around and the bots decide to go waste all the healing over nothing.
The change from 50% to 40% threshold for using healing items wasn’t enough imo, especially not on difficulties where healing is more scarce and should be saved almost exclusivly for clearing wounds.
That said I think one of the biggest barriers for Chaos Wastes citadel with bots is their inability to traverse the zone without jumping off ledges at least once, sometimes on mass, like Walt Disney himself is behind the camera trying to instigate their death like he did with lemmings.
I can firmly say that all these shamanic actions with pitiful percentages will never help. There is only one way out: manual control of healing, as in the mod to V1. I tried V1 with some mods (so far only the very minimum) thanks to the reviews in this thread - and I can say - it’s amazing! After the convenience that the mod gives, returning to the chaotic and uncontrolled behavior of bots is very unpleasant.
It should be like this: press buttons to heal player and/or other bots + the setting prohibiting them from being healed without a command.
Special command of the Social Wheel “Heal me!” would also be very useful, which would force the bots to heal a living player / give a healing potion - urgently and instantly - regardless of the presence of enemies, even monsters, nearby.
Yeah, I’m not touching Chaos Wastes with bots again. They break down in there completely, and losing a match to random blood tornadoes like 45 minutes in is just not something I have the time for.
Basically blocking out a major part of content for me.
I agree with many of the problems people point out, but I’m surprised that these three common behaviors aren’t mentioned. A friend and I duo constantly, and see:
Bots purposefully move into your LOS. This is especially egregious with the beam staff - you hit a special, start building charges, and the bot moves into your LOS, just in front of you, STARING at you. They just saved the special, and taunted you at the same time.
You are in melee with bots alongside. You push and jump back, either to switch to range, or to check the ledge/whatever behind you…and the bots all jump with you. You haven’t move a significant distance, why did they stop fighting???
In duos, both bots go with one person, they refuse to split up. PLEASE, program them to split in duos.
Note that for #1, it’s all ranged weapons. It’s just worse on the beam staff then the others.
-Jeff
Ive stopped trying. If they’re in my LOS I just shoot them now. If they’re dead at least they won’t block my shots.
It seems like they have some kind of formation around you they like, but they constantly swap spots in this formation which basically makes your FOV a busy navigation intersection. And sometimes that formation is a straight line between you and the enemy.
Just happened - my friend gets hooked and is being pulled away; I get my gun out to fire…and the two bots move directly to the line between us right in front of me, then start walking on that line to melee the hookrat. I tried firing through them, but they absorbed too much of the damage to be effective, and then I had to protect myself.
There’s something programmatic going on - they aren’t moving in a line, they first intersect your LOS, then move. It’s really dumb to watch.
Same with movement in general - it’s like they have to go through their whole decision loop every time you shift a few yards. At some point, they should simply get into combat and ignore your trivial moves back and forth.
I love this game, and respect the effort it takes to program bots (I sure couldn’t do it), but some of these behaviors are so counter-intuitive it becomes not only painful, but hurtful to the party.
So interestingly it would seem the bot improvement - combat mod was very recently updated and now has additional features that address a lot of the issues in this thread.
Unfortunately it seems to have also suddenly become unsanctioned without even an “applied” label. So that’s ummmm, extremely bittersweet to say the least. Really hope it gets resanctioned soon because the new additions look super good.
Seriously, @Ghoth1ckov1tch check out the new description on the mod page and tell me that doesn’t sound like a much much better time with bots.
Checked out the new features, and those certainly would be enough for me to put this thread to rest for good. Ironically enough, it is now unsanctioned…
I’d still urge FS to just integrate the improvements to base game. It serves no one that content that makes the game playable has to be downloaded separately because developers don’t want to spend the coin and effort to maintain it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people like grim are a rare gift, not a commodity.
Oh for frick’s sake…
Fatshark, please get on that. We need it.
There is now a post in the mod’s comments:
It’s very reassuring that they’ve made the post and seem to be willing to work towards getting it sanctioned again.
Many of these features should be default bot behaviour, the fact most players would have to suffer this negative behaviour from bots by design before thinking to look at mods really shouldn’t be the default state.
But, I’m really looking forward to this getting sanctioned again, even if it just means pings are turned off again for a while, we’ve gone this long without them.
Grimalackt, great work.
That’s fabulous news. Can’t wait to try it out when it gets fixed up and sanctioned.
Grim to the rescue once more!
@Kitten Our bot woes may be decreased significantly soon.
The description looks and sounds very, very encouraging. Naturally, I have to experience this, no options.
The main thing is to be sanctioned as soon as possible and not affect the stability of the game.
I played around with it on modded realm for a few Cata CW attempts, and stability is fine with ping elites disabled.
It’s an improvement for sure, especially with regard to their special behaviour.
They do still die to rat ogres and just generally eat hits for no real reason.
e.g. surrounded by 50 enemies, they take no damage and behave well.
yet 2 fanatics casually walking up to them and suddenly they’re on a wound.
It feels like there is an issue with them effectivly “going out of combat behaviour” that only turns on under specific circumstances.
Also in those Cata CW attempts, GK Kruber died at least once on every single map. Zealot wasn’t much better.
On the subject of monsters though, I’m not sure if they have been given more attack speed, are out of synch or what but the bots are certainly worse with them. I was never flawless myself but I’m also having a harder time locking them in place by just dodging back and forth, not sure if more skilled players have noticed anything or if I’m just worse too.
Monsters are definitely faster now. Bosses too, especially the final boss on Skittergate is insane.
At the same time, bots are definitely worse at interacting with monsters and bosses than before. Bots are missing too many “scatter” attacks from monsters.
As I said in the other topic - now I with no doubt sacrifice all the potions, bombs and ammo that I collected earlier - for killing monster as quickly as possible. If it is possible to push a monster into the abyss, it must be done, even if the Loot Dice is lost.
Conversely to bots wasting healing, I find on Cata if they’re carrying a medpack and have next to no THP + are wounded they often won’t heal themselves, even if no enemy is anywhere nearby, so the moment enemies do turn up they get killed instantly. Even if I stop moving to give them time to heal, they don’t. This happens a lot, but only with medpacks.
It is weird considering other times like the wastes when I roll NB and end up healing myself to clear a wound + get full THP they then decide to heal me immediately after I do that, not before.
I’d love a behaviour/ ‘bot stance’ keybind or some way to alter these behaviours manually.
Good to know. And it might still work if you subscribe to it + enable it and hit auto-disable unsanctioned mods on the official realm, that worked when UI Tweaks and Loadouts accidentally got unsanctioned by FS.
But yeah, I’d rather they implemented some QoL into the base game, it took them almost a whole month to approve the post-Chaos Wastes update to the Loadout mod. Bots at the very least should have the improvements be baseline, I’d love if Bot loadouts became a basegame feature too - the Loadout mod spares so much annoyance by being able to set them to have a persistent loadout that ignores any changes you make to your own.
My impression of this inconsistency is that it comes from their lack of awareness of enemies that are not aggro’d onto them specifically. If you or another bot have aggro and that enemy’s attack is pulled towards another bot they seem to fairly reliably fail to block the attack. It’s a bit of an issue but I’d say it’s very minor compared to their other flaws.
Really good to hear they’re better around specials. With just that and better revive priority (also listed as a mod feature) they ought to be enormously less frustrating to play around. Add in to that the other mod option to make them not priority target monsters and refuse to move from wherever they engage them I can imagine them being mostly fine. Those are really their most frustrating behaviours by far. Everything else is icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.
Eeeeevery time i try to line up any kind of shot against ambient enemies or anyone from afar when bots aren’t engaged all of a sudden the back of someone’s head is in front of my screen.
Totally agree with the duos split, I play with my roommate and when trying to explore areas we sometimes split up and it’d make it so much better if you could assign a bot to follow you with the wheel
As I always said, only manual control of bots healing items will help me personally, as for example in the mod for V1. Without this important change, I just don’t want to play Chaos Wastes on Legend, where everything is insane.
That’s right, because anything can happen after the next patch. Any mod can stop working or cause a crash.
Developers promised to transfer useful mod functions to the base game, I can’t forget about that.
fatshark should have made the bots only heal when they have downed once, or if the player orders them to heal. would prevent bots from using up all the healing when they dont really need it. bots should aslo not heal the player unless the player have downed once or order a bot to heal you.