I can’t count now the amount of time I died in Cataclysm due to a bot lagging behind/chasing some special and pulling a Chaos Patrol. Literally about 50% of the time I die is because of a bot being careless with patrols. It would be really great if bots could just be invisible to patrols (unless a player aggroed them) because their AI is obviously not fine-tuned to avoid them very well.
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Some tips to play around this issue while ur waiting on a fix is sacrificing your bot by either running back if the bots runs forward and aggro’s the patrol, or keep running. If you are far away the Patrol will just continue down their path and not aggro you. If you play a career with invis it’s even easier. If the bot pulls a patrol while it passes you however then gg, unless invis.
I’m playing Cata duo and know the struggle. Patrols really are a death sentence most of the when you (or the bot) pull them.
While not a real solution, the mod “Bot improvements” has the option to make them stay closer to you. Don’t get me wrong, bots are still stupid as hell (I guess a good AI is just hard to program), but at least they’ll pull a few less patrols.
Other then that, as soon as you just think you hear a patrol, back off as much as you possibly can, as the further you are away the more likely the bots are to follow or teleport back to you. Knowing where a patrol can spawn and where it’ll move (and therefore where you can hide) are essential on Cata anyway.
Also consider if it’s worth for you to switch up bots like Ironbreaker, Merc or WHC, as one unlucky shouting ultimate pulls them from a much farther distance as they normally would. (Especially with the increased range on IB.)
If nothing helps, go for a (“bad word”) ton of armor dmg and always keep bombs for patrols instead of using them on bosses.
It’s actually easy to program good ai. It’s more difficult to program ai that isn’t op.
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I’m already using Bot Improvements with that option on. I still auto-lose 50% of my Cataclysm games because the of the bots. Really just made me stop playing the game to be honest.
Thanks for the tips @anon75893681. However, I’ve already tried some of them to no avail.
That only applies to AI’s ability to do things like aiming with perfect near-instant accuracy, which the bots already pretty much do. This makes them OP in some types of games like FPS with accurate ranged weapons, but for games like RTS it’s immensely complex to get them to compete with top human players without basically cheating.
Vermintide bots are somewhere inbetween because you typically can’t shoot yourself out of a tight situation here. Too many enemies. Too many variables. The correct course of action and positioning is a function that’s very hard to solve without melting your CPU and you’d pretty much have to train an AI using immense hours of machine learning to get one that can deal with high level play without cheating.
I don’t think vermintide is that complex and it would be easy to make good bots. Stay close to you, use ult revive if possible, dodge hook rats with perfect timing, push assassins out of the sky, if there is a patrol the priority is staying with the player no matter what, dodge dancing every boss as it’s not random so pretty easy i would say to code. I honestly don’t see how it would be hard to make a perfect bot. In pvp games, sure because every situation is random and way more complex then vermintide. If there was a bot only team then, yes, but there is always one player, so they can just follow him, they don’t need to make positioning decisions for themselves, except when standing in gas.
Those perfect behaviours only work in a “vacuum”.
On Cataclysm and sometimes even Legend (Bots are mostly fine below that anyway), there are often so many varied enemies that positioning is not a matter of just moving somewhere, because most of the time you CAN’T. Positioning is a question of trying to get to a spot that has the least risk of you ending up in an inescapable situation (a mass of enemies that you can’t move through and outpaces your stamina regeneration), which depends a lot on your experience with each area in a map and demands completely different behaviour depending on each character’s build, let alone class.
It’s a lot more complex than you think.
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Yes that’s what i’m saying. If you had a team of only bots it would be difficult. But you only need to make bots follow the player. If i know a horde is coming, i could go into an area that has a high chance of me surviving, ofcourse if i run into a little corner and aggro a patrol then it’s my fault. The bots don’t have to lead me, i have to lead the bots. So the only positioning thats would be usefull in a perfect bot scenario, would be that they move a little bit when standing in gas, for stormers they can just follow the player.