The game feels way to swingy playing Chaos Wastes solo (Legend+) and the bots are simply infuriating.
A couple of points:
- The bot behavior is okay (if frustrating) for Campaign but in Chaos Wastes Things Happen that they are just to stupid to handle.
- The fact that they keep focussing monsters is the most egregious part, since a) Chaos Wastes has a lot more monsters and b) the accompanying enemies are way more dangerous. I’ve had so many wipes because my bots were targeting a monster while ignoring e.g. ~10 plague monks that kept hitting them in the back. Shoutout to the BotImprovementCombatReturns mod, where the bots’ behavior doesn’t encourage new players to do the exact opposite of what they should do in such a situation.
- Pathing is noticably worse in the Chaos Wastes maps and bots get stuck regularly leading to dead bots and players.
- The pilgrim’s coins buff helps but it is not enough and it limits build variety.
- Making the bots scale with the hosts weapon levels makes the game very feast or famine and dependent on upgrade shrines.
- Going for cheesy builds that use Ranald’s Mighty Gamble - a very fun boon is completely useless since the bots do not benefit from the insane crit chance and just have the negative of low a low power level.
- The way bots work in Chaos Wastes is unintuitive and obscure.
- If their progression was more in line with a randomized player progression they would work much more like a naive player might expect and scale better into the later maps.
My suggestions:
- Make bot scaling mimic how a player would scale in CW:
- Decrease the pilgrim’s coins bonus for players to a negligible amount for the number of bots in the lobby.
- Instead make bots gain a random boon whenever the host picks up a boon.
- Optional: Scale weapon power by some other metric than what the host currently has.
- Reduce the attack surface for bots to do something run-endingly stupid:
- Improve bot behavior - especially target priority - either natively or by (re)approving the BotImprovementsCombat(Returns) mod.
- Introduce tighter safeguards for bot pickup commands, e.g. if a bot is unable to path to an item he was ordered to pick up for 30+ seconds, the item simply teleports into the bots inventory. This is also a problem in Campaign but it happens far more frequently in CW.
- Shorten the teleport leash distance for bots to give the player more agency in rescuing them in case they get stuck somewhere in the level geometry.
- (Alternatively improve level geometry, but I think the two suggestions above are far quicker to implement and would help in Campaign as well)
- Scratch all that and at least revert to the old behavior where bots just use their campaign loadouts (least interesting solution but probably easiest to implement).
The Chaos Wastes are such an interesting game mode with a very high replay value and I really want to enjoy it but right now I just have to stop playing because it makes me want to pull my hair out.
I really enjoy playing the game solo in my own tempo and I know I may be in the minority by not enjoying quick play mode. However these changes would also help quick play lobbies be more consistent in case a player drops for whatever reason or in case the lobby fills up slowly.
I really hope something can be done about the way bots functions because I’m convinced that this will greatly improve the game’s longevity and how enjoyable it is to play. Please Fatshark, I so love your game but the changes with bots in the last few years have just made it worse for me!