Bots will run a mile to find specials

Sometimes a run will go entirely down the toilet if you don’t murder a certain special as soon as you see him. For some reason or another bots love to chase gunners, gasrats, and flame scaven. They sometimes will do it with Blightstormers and Life Leeches too but seemingly less often for me. It’s pretty common for a run to be wiped because some gunner who isn’t doing anything where he is positioned causing the bots to tunnel vision and chase him without any care for what they aggro. I’ve seen them run straight into patrols to kill a gasrat. I’ve seen them tunnel vision at the gunner through a wall with their ranged weapons out while a horde devours them. You can turn around and suddenly realize you’re completely alone with your bots a mile away dealing with some special that isn’t a threat.
And inversely they can’t seem to notice hookrats until they’ve grabbed someone. In which case they chase you with their ranged weapons out until they catch up and switch to melee. 9 times out of 10 this is the case. Dunno why they can’t help me shoot a Packrat that is pinged and running at us as the only enemy in view but they will go to the other end of the map to kill almost any other special that just spawned despite hordes/bosses/patrols.
If this is working as intended then you need to change this up somehow.

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Their inability to dodge patrols, packrats, assassins, gas AoE, and blight storms is also excruciating. Success with bots feels completely luck dependent unless you’re speed running.

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Yes the bots seem to lack the ability to use more ranged attacks. They seem almost to scared to use them. This a huge problem especially on higher difficulty than veteran cause then they hardly ever use it. And especially against bosses. Even when far away from a boss they will never use ranged… And the chaos spawn where u need to keep a distance they seem to wanna run close to him all the time. Can be really game breaking. They should use more ranged attacks. Against specials. Swarms and bosses. And I think friendly should be removed for bots at least when playing higher difficulty than veteran. Cause then they almost never use range.

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I agree wholeheartedly. If a Chaos spawn happens they just feed it over and over. Unless you’re equipped with decent amounts of bombs and/or a character with a stagger special ability that recharges quickly you almost never can kill a Chaos spawn with bots.
On the other hand the bots seem to have a particularly amazing ability to dodge dance Rogres. Maybe I’m just a little bit bad at it but I can’t keep that boss stationary like they seem to be able to do. They just lock him down by dodging back and walking forward fearlessly over and over.
FlameScaven can be occasionally tricky to fight with bots as well. But this I’ve noticed is completely due to luck/location when the boss spawns. The problem with the Bots and FlameScaven is that they give the boss the best positioning possible and run at him repeatedly until dead. If you get that boss in a tunnel-ish area and your bots see him they will run to engage him 100% of the time. Even if you backtrack to a wide open area they won’t come with you or back off the boss. Only hope is to take aggro and position him yourself or blast him down with ranged/melee before he inevitably fries your bots.

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Yes the bots seem to lack the ability to use more ranged attacks. They seem almost to scared to use them.

Yes and what’s worse is that when they do use their ranged, they can put it to complete waste. Try the Any Character mod on for example and use only Mercenary/Foot Knights as the characters you and the bots play, now give them a Handgun and watch them waste several shots into a horde. If you want an example where you can make them utilize ranged effectively, play Empire in Flames and make sure nothing is bothering your bots as you approach the two pre-spawned Chaos Warriors. By keeping distance and away from block/melee range, the bots will start unloading on them - but it won’t happen immediately.

Hell, you gotta love when they run off to kill a Sorcerer or Gas Rat and somehow always hit it - whereas trying to hit a freshly spawned one (within 3 seconds) either misses or doesn’t happen. I don’t want bots to be VT1 QOL-crazy with ranged where they can mow down ambients that are an inch away from you as you are on the move IF you choose to enable the options that make their ranged behavior insane, but I purpose bots stop doing 3 things to avoid friendly fire and wipes/unnecessary heavy damage:

  1. If there’s a horde or heavy resistance (Chaos Warriors, Maulers, Stormvermin, Boss) then do not chase Gas Rats or Sorcerers if they’re either too far away or if the aforementioned horde/resistance is actively fighting the bots. This will prevent teamsplitting which makes revives and defensive positions way less likely to succeed.

  2. Bots must stop attempting to form an “I” formation infront of the player(s) and stay behind. Far too many times I’ve had them coreographically move infront of me because I simply pressed W. I never had this issue in VT1 even remotely.

  3. You should be able to make bots, through a command or positioning/distance change, to stop getting stuck fighting enemies such as Trolls or Stormfiends in really bad spots. (Athel Yenlui, second Grimoire in the corridor next to the first two interactable buttons for example) Sometimes it is possible to teleport bots by moving away but it won’t always work.

Additionally, if bots are more prone to follow a player but remain as a rearguard, this means speedrunning players will have a tougher time to pull them around if they choose to skip alerted/nearby ambients and ping them towards items (VT1 was painful in that bots could take their time to navigate towards an item.)
The tradeoff can be debated as bad or good towards whatever design philosophy Fatshark has, but I think bots will be less likely to walk into patrols as you start backpedaling from their proximity, or maybe even avoid gas globes better if you can do a 180 degree turn - and I also think that making bots favor teleporting towards a lone teammate who is disabled like in VT1 (Black Powder with overconfident elves, anyone?) it could also be way less frustrating to have bots with you.

I acknowledge some people will see the suggestions as “making it easier” or “that I should consider playing with people instead” but I will say right out that I have no interest in that kind of debate. Everybody loved the QOL bots, nobody said it made VT1 too easy - and those who found it that just waddled over to Deathwish or put handicaps on themselves.

Here’s a fun a game. Spot the AI that killed the Gunner in the field of wheat!

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Reality.exe has encountered a problem. Love when bots have to climb ladders. (Too bad this isn’t a gif of them just going up and down like they were doing.)

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