Allow bots to kill specials with ranged weapons

Please, please, please, Fatshark; I know you won’t listen to me, but it allows bots to kill specials with their ranged weapons (not just mele or F-abilities). It is annoying to play hard and in a moment a special catches you and you automatically lose the game because the bots do not shoot this special, just try to get to him to kill in mele, and you die in the process, like the bots.

It’s your fault, I don’t know if it’s in the program’s code, but bots can’t kill these specials in range (F abilities don’t count)

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most of the times my bots wants to walk into melee range to shoot their guns at specials. its hilarious to watch lmao!

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They do kill specials with ranged weapons. Quite a lot in fact. The quirks of the bot AI can stop them from doing it under certain circumstances though.

I haven’t seen the code, but from watching the bots, they are task-oriented with a priority based task queue. For example, if they are attacking, they are not blocking, dodging, or anything else. Only 1 task at a time, and they only swap when the prior task is completed. Blocking seems to have the highest priority of all tasks, and will cause them to be “block locked” until they die if they are surrounded.

What happens with specials is that specials get put on their target list, but if they are always surrounded so the never get off of the “melee combat” task. Thus they charge the the special without using their ranged weapon, and won’t stop charging it until they or it are dead.

This means playing with bots requires some particular strategies. 1, give them the highest attack speed weapons you can. Faster Attacks = Faster Task Switching. (1h Sword For Kruber, Dagger or 1hs for Sienna, Dagger+Sword or 1h Sword for Kerillian, Dual Hammers for Bardin) Set up your Merc Kruber bot for Paced Strikes sharing as well. It makes a massive difference, try it. 2, you should always be covering their behinds and preventing them from being surrounded, or they will get block locked.

Do those two things and you should find that bots start sniping specials very reliably.

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If only they would go for disablers the same way they tunnel the Gas Rats.

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The problem is the range to use range weapons. They use their range weapons in mele, like a shotgun (less than 2m), I proved it in diferents situatios, and it pass always, especially with the Lifeleech.

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Bots usually equip their ranger weapons, when the PLAYER has it equipped.

They rarely swith to it on their own, thus making shooting specials quite hard.
This is also why they keep shooting ambient trash when the player progresses with ranged weapons out, to snipe ambient elites or is waiting for specials to start spawning before the next wave.

Also they are prohibited to do friendly fire, that’s why Sienna is especially a useless bot with most staffs. Just try giving her a conflag staff and see her trying to draw the circle and stop when anyone wanders into it.

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I do not agree with you bro. I have the bots well prepared (with the equipment and skills ready); I remind you that bots are the last version you used of that character (class, objects and skills included). They have various types of ranged weapons; fast and snaiper. Sienna as a bot is usually one of the most killed at a distance at the end of the game (much more than the rest), cleaning a lot.

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An example that I have seen dozens of times:
I’m walking down a hallway with no enemies until a Lifeleech appears behind us (+/- 4m) and catches me. The bots, with ammo, decide to go along with the Lifeleech to hit him in mele or shoot him at close range (face to face).

Can someone explain to me why they decided to act like that, instead of shooting him quickly from where they were? Pls Fatshark, I cant understand this. Looks like if this was purposely programmed.

@Fatshark_Hedge @FatsharkJulia @Fatshark_GDPR

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An example I have seen dozens of times:
I am walking through a battlefield crushing enemies left and right. I hear the sound of a gutter-runner spawning, and then I hear a loud “bang” and a gutter-runner goes across the kill-feed. Looks like Bardin shot it in the head with a shotgun from 1100 meters out.

Bots are bots and, frankly, they’re going to be inconsistent in a game like Vermintide due to the games stupendous number of mechanics. The fact that the bots actually work at all blows my mind. IDK, man, this topic isn’t really one that has a great answer due to the raw number of mechanics the bots have to pay attention to. It comes out one of two ways; the bot ends up sorta dull because they’re being reigned in by the complexity of the system they play on or they end up like the L4D bots… deadly snipers that never miss, can’t friendly fire, have absolute omniscience, and can’t fight a tank to save their life.

@Palesz sometimes your screen will “jerk” to the side when bots are shooting; this is one of their bullets travelling through your head. It’s not that they are “prohibited from friendly-firing”, rather that they cause 0 friendly-fire damage. The bots ignore FF entirely.

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Yeah. We don’t spend a great deal of time with bot AI, our main focus is coop over anything else. That said we do pass ideas for improvements on.

Any dev can make a bot that shreds enemies, no worries. It’s harder getting them in to the ideal ‘less than ideal but not harrowingly bad’ state honestly. And with the volume of scenarios that can arise, which can be terrain/map/spawn composition/other dependant, makes it even harder to ensure a less than ideal but not harrowingly bad’ state for bots.

Just FYI there’s no one on the end of that handle :slight_smile:

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You should though…The bots only need slight improvements like not walking off cliffs because of a gunner or flamerat and using range to kill specials instead of trying to melee them.

More players are turning away from coop everyday because PUGS are a shitshow and only get worse over time.

I play in a couple of the private discords that the game has and they insist on keeping bad players out which im very thankful for…

If they’re not online do you know what i do? I play with bots. Im not wasting my time with PUGS because the majority of them are bad and its usually the case that 3 of them all need carrying…

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So… You play with bots because they’re better than players? And that’s your argument for buffing bots? Because else you can’t play unless your elite buddies are there?

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I think that’s a pretty heavy-handed conclusion. Your response of playing with bots is totally fine, but all public players being bad is a pretty harsh overstatement.

Pugging Legend has led me to meet a lot of people recently. If I’m playing with my friends, I top the charts most of the time. But, as it seems, I’m the big fish in a little pond… I’d say that 70% of my public Legend games are with people 3x better than I am and the rest go over pretty smoothly.

Lastly, @TmanDW is technically correct in his rhetorical question. A staple of Vermintide is that we all need to work together… but even the worst of players isn’t really that bad. Dying repeatedly is fine; I play Handmaiden so that I can help players who tend to be overly aggressive. I play Zealot when I see a team that needs some umf to get through levels.

In either case, I still agree with Hedge. There’s a lot of merit to not wanting the bots to be “100% functional players” because, then, lobbies will actually kick players in favor of having bots. I think patching the bots up to be more functional than they already are (perfect monster mechanics, for instance) might dissuade people from playing with each other more than it helps the experiences of players who don’t like playing with other people.

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Of course the game is intended for co-op xD, but we’ve all been in games that either no human player joined, or we played privately to try things out. And in those games where you have controlled the problems, it is very irritating to lose for stupid things like this.

Anyway, I appreciate @Fatshark_Hedge for his work and if this detail can be revised, I will appreciate it even more.

Once the flame is over, … VERSUS, when ??? xD

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So you don’t care if they’re buffed or not? Then why weigh in on the thread?

Name calling like that is against community guidelines. Shape up and be polite if you want this discussion to continue in a civil way.

@salvatoreoptimo I totally get where you’re coming from and I’d appreciate a little down-tweak to the rate at which they leap off of cliffs and their revive decisions, but I wouldn’t change much else about the bots. Plus, there’s other things that are higher priority (IMO).

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Nice backseat modding…hahaha.

I didnt insult anyone directly or even indirectly here so it isnt “against community guidelines”

Not even going to give you a serious response a 4 month ignore will do.

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We are talking here about blatantly stupid behavior and that’s very far away from shredding everything.
There are certain cases that bots simply have to handle better than they currently do, when they actively sabotage the gameplay instead of being just dumb.
The case of intentionally changing to melee weapon, running after specials to melee them is one of this.
Then the case of ignoring AoE damage and just standing in it to die is another.
Also they dodge-dance the ratogre that shames 80% of pug players, while they are unable to do anything about a spawn grab.
If this is regarded as buffing bots, then it’s no wonder this game is going down the drain and probably deserves it too…

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It’s derogatory slang, i bet that was neither called for nor is it accepted.

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I think we’re all in agreement to making them “sensible” but the line both Hedge and I are trying to draw is that, given the complexity of the mechanics and decisions in the game, it is very hard to tailor certain behaviors.

A bot doesn’t have as much situational awareness as we do; hyper sensitivity and accuracy against certain enemies is a slippery slope to making them gods in battle (again, Left 4 Dead is a great example). This is not to say that we can’t try to fix the “walking off of cliffs” issue, but rather that tweaking their ranged combat isn’t really as important as tweaking some of their other features, or even as important as other improvements to the game.

Edit: @Palesz, I’m surprised you’ve seen bots just sit inside of AoE damage. I’ve never seen them do that; as a matter of fact, they’re better at avoiding it than most players (but they can’t see the globe coming in the first place; it hits, and then they have to adapt because they’re bots and they can’t see the airborne globe like we can).

@HappyPepeTheFrog no backseating about it; I’m trying to help uphold my community guidelines because I firmly believe the community benefits from them… I prefer front-seating. You called TmanDW a snowflake; what else is that statement supposed to be understood as? Enlighten me in PMs if you’d like to. :slight_smile:

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Don’t bother responding to him. Should have known better than to try discuss with him in the first place myself.

EDIT:
And on topic: I agree bots could use a tweak. They’re quite competent at not dying in most fights, but sometimes they kamikaze in spectacularily stupid ways or ignore specials that walk right past them. Their behaviour can be accounted for, for the biggest part, but sometimes they indeed do something spectacularily stupid and mess up the run.

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