How can we make bots more useful?

Well, the problem with your limitation is that the total amount of possibilities is lower. When it is possible to play solo vehicle (with massive spam) or solo bots (with little raiding groups), you will have a third playstyle which mixes both. In fact you will have a variety, some more leaning to vehicles, some to bots. That is hard to balance and I don't say Uber should do it till the end of the week. I just feel the last iteration was a step back. When you invalidate the solo options, you just have less play styles. By the way, right now you can ignore bots, you can't ignore vehicles or air. That is a problem in my opinion. It should be a decision to ignore bots (because of your playstyle, because of the playstyle of your opponent, etc...), not a necessity.

Hmm, i tried some new strats and i have to say bots aren't as brokenly bad as i previously tought. I still think they are too weak and not commonly used therefor. Reason i changed my mind is because i managed to win a game with bots, altough im still not convinced that its viable against good players that go air or vehicles.

Well, after a certain point most changes limit or change the possible play styles, by simple fact that it takes time for people to come up with new ones.

I agree that ignoring bots shouldn't be a necessity, no more then it is to using tanks should be a requirement.

Seems like this all ignores the fact that whichever factory you go first is going to be the one you end up harassing with, which in any even slightly competitive situation has a huge impact on the final outcome. People don't choose to not use bots to spite you, they choose to not use them because they are not worth the payoff in metal compared to an all vehicle strategy. You go bots, and you either get crushed by a bomber rush or stomped by ants.

With the way you guys have decided to do balance (Which is completely fine, just different!) Then it'd be nice to see a bit of a buff to the dox, I know it's not meant to be the main combat unit, but it takes quite a while for even a group to take out a metal extractor (Because of the tripling of health to all non combat structures) any chance of a damage buff, or a slight health buff to help it survive against turrets/do some damage?

Yeah. The Dox doesn't even fulfill its role well at all.

Its vision is so low it often dies before it sees the threat. Its range is so low that even if you know there's a threat, it dies before it gets a shot off. It's damage is so low and the health of everything is so high, that it takes way too long to do any successful raiding. Defenses arrive before any real damage can be done.

I really don't like the 3x health of factories and economy structures. It means that raiding is pretty ineffective with T1 units. Reinforcements often arrive before serious damage is done and attacks require way too much babysitting.

The best way to defend a big ungarded area is to use bombers, and bots are easily defeated by bombers. Then the best way to harass ungarded area is to use tank + AA tank.
If you don't want to bring back AA bot, i think that giving to the bot the ability of avoiding bombs and artilery shots worth to be investigated.

I thought we were speaking about ungarded area ?

You can think it's unguarded, but if you don't have radar coverage or scouts, then you don't know if it's really guarded or not. And since this is supposed to be a raiding unit, then radar and scouts aren't always possible.

Also, the Dox shouldn't be confined to only raiding things that are unguarded. That means it's pretty solidly useless to lots of players.

I am all for the Dox being weak and ideal for raiding. But if it is so weak that it's worthless when going after even a single laser defense tower, then the Dox is completely worthless.

Personally I don't think bots need a heightened damage/destruction potential - they are good at what they can do which is more strategical (high-skill demand) play style - mostly harass and tactical combat. I think the better someone becomes at this game the more use they will get out of their T2 assault bots, snipers, combat fabbers and walking bombs etc.

How they should heighten the use of the bot tech line is the increase the amount of ultility bots available - bots with varying functions that help your tank army on the front line. Because if you just get bots with better damage potential you're not getting anything more or less different to what you get with tanks.

A basic fabber builds a factory at 100HP/s.
A dox deals 20DPS.

Protip: This is hilarious.

OK, so, here are my "Make Bots Good" suggestions with caveats made to appeal to compromise with Uber's vision as well.


T1 BOT CHANGES

• Leave the AA bot out, other suggestions will settle that issue.
• Make all bot units "stealth" from radar. Enables their role as mobile raiders.
• Keep Dox range short so they can only attack within the enemies LoS.
• Dramatically reduce the health, DPS, and cost of the Dox. Allow them to build 5 to 1 over Ants and easily overwhelm tanks with numbers, but they will be crazy vulnerable to AoE.
• Increase the splash of the Grenadier, reduce the damage. It becomes an effective Anti-Dox-Bot but can no longer replace the Dox in combat against other units/structures. Reduce the price until it is still situationaly effective vs defenses behind walls.

T1 VEHICLE CHANGES

• Reduce the accuracy of anti-tank weapons (Ants mostly) so that they are likely to miss individual Dox.
• Raise the health and damage of the Ant, but reduce it's fire rate. Better burst damage, higher overall DPS and more survivable against towers, but overall worse against Dox.
• Dramatically reduce the damage of the Inferno, keep its range short and speed low. Add a small AoE to the fire. The AoE and high rate of fire will keep it very effective vs Dox in a standup fight, but it's speed and range will allow Dox to retreat when the Inferno arrives. Ants will replace it as a base breaker unit.

T1 AIR CHANGES

• Double the AoE of the Bumble Bee, but reduce it's damage by half. This will make it very effective vs the uber frail Dox, but will make it less effective against tanks, defenses, and near worthless for Com Snipe.

T1 DEFENSE CHANGES

• Reduce the Cost of the Pelter, quarter the damage, double the fire rate. The Pelter becomes a lethal Anti-Dox weapon and at a reduced price it is viable in the early game, however, because of all bots having stealth it would require an active patrol to keep LoS for max effectiveness.
• Laser towers should fire faster, but with less damage per shot. Similar overall DPS. The extra barrels on the improved towers should chain fire instead of link fire. This will improve their performance against Dox without reducing their Anti-Tank effectiveness.
• Improve Static AA so that it can be effective by itself.
• All T1 defenses should be cheaper and more effective to supplement the early game while players push for their second factory.

It is possible your starting factory is RPSed by your opponent's first factory (you chose bot, they chose air) but players would also have access to adequate early game defense to repel single factory rushes until they can get a second factory up and running.

In this balance design every factory has a strength and a weakness, and no factory is viable for long without a second factory to support it, however, any two factories would be viable. Players are not pigeon holed into any one factory but are rewarded with greater capabilities for building all factory types.


Bots would be better at raiding and retreating, and would even better at direct field combat against tanks, but would be very weak against fortified positions.

Tanks would be better at crushing bases and breaking towers with their high burst DPS and high health.

Air would remain the most mobile choice and would excel at repelling bot raids, but would lack the raw DPS of a land invasion.

Those are some very interesting changes. I'm very interested to try them out.

Not sure how I feel about all bots being stealthed...

If stealth is introduced, then we'll desperately need new structures that provide a huge direct line of sight to compensate. Obviously it'd use more energy and have less coverage than radar.

I don't think T1 defenses should have a reduction in cost though. We used to have balance like that and they were way OP. No one used T1 units. Everyone would build a ton of fabbers and spam out defensive structures everywhere. It was so unbalanced that I would have rather had group of 5 to 10 fabbers than 100 ants because the fabbers could spam out laser defense towers so fast that they could defeat any incoming T1 army with ease.

Why? You literally have hundreds of anything to provide vision of an entire planet within minutes of game start.

How are you supposed to raid with Dox if they are beaten by tanks, bombers, and static defenses? They even have low vision so it's harder to avoid threats they can't fight due to their low range and HP.

How does totally removing the ability for bots to shoot air encourage diversity? It just forces you to build other things. Sending Spinners with them is not the same thing, as their speeds are different.

Diversity is more than whether a unit can or can't shoot air.

I will be modding something similar to this eventually, but I don't want to start any major commitments until the game reaches a more stable state. I would hate to start over because Uber changed the format for unit blueprints, or because they settled on a final balance that's "better" than what I started working with as a base point.

I would like to see a targeting tower that has a *directional* LoS forward, but lacking any peripheral. Other than that I think a minor buff on scout LoS would be more than enough to compensate. I would like to see all scout units become much more valuable even in the late game and the way to do that is making their role unique.

The real goal is to make the early game still viable even if the enemy's first factory is the perfect counter to your own. Cheaper defenses would do that, but it doesn't have to be the only way...

The commander's base metal and energy production could be raised enough to support two fully functioning factories and cost of factories vs defenses could be balanced so that your starting storage can build 2 factories OR 1 factory and a cluster of defenses. If we don't want to reduce the cost of defenses this would mean that factories cost a lot more, but that's OK, they have 3X the health now, and their production speed can be buffed to match the new cost. Also, better factories reduces the effectiveness of fabber assisting, and that's generally a good thing.

As a community we rant endlessly about the importance of having as many opening moves as possible, I think this would go a long way toward that goal. Your opening move could be:

• Build any 2 complementing factories and start a combined arms attack. This start has a wide variety of mixed forces in the early game.
• Build 2 same-type factories and gamble on your enemy being unprepared for a hard hit of 1 unit type.
  
• Build 1 factory and bunker down with early defenses while you invest in economy. (only half your commanders economy is used if you only build 1 factory, the rest can support fabbers)
• Build 1 factory and gamble on being far enough away to rush T2. (I agree T2 needs rebalancing, but a rush start should be possible)

If we have an opening balance that favors building 1 factory and then spamming units then we've restricted ourselves to only 4 possible starts, because we have 4 opening factory types. Any opening that encourages building more than 1 structure before rushing your attack is better because it means you have opening options other than rushing your first combat unit.

Naval is left in an interesting position, and I wouldn't change it too much Instead of being part of the RPS, naval would be of situational value... it trumps the RPS at the expense of mobility. Naval can easily engage any other unit type, but only if that unit strays over the water or along the shore. Naval starts would be a decision between double naval, or naval and air. Double naval will be a stronger combat position, but naval air would be far more flexible if your enemy started on land.

Stealth is a special ability that should be given to units that explicitly need it. This could include bots, vehicles, boats and aircraft. The entire bot factory does not need stealth.

Sure, fair enough, but focusing on T1 I would argue that for Dox to become a raider of value they should have stealth. The Boom would also benefit greatly. The crux of my balance vision rests on redesigning the Dox into a unit of enough value that players desire them even with low health and no AA.

Outside of raiding bots I think only the land scout would benefit as much from stealth. It's not even an option on the table right now, but once it's a mechanic in game we could play around with stealthed aircraft and other units, but I don't think it's called for right now.

My post intentionally ignores T2 for now.

yes, it would. In fact the concept of stealthed unit cannon launching booms is SO effective one has to wonder why we would bother with any other unit. At all.