How can we make bots more useful?

The question in the title explains what I am looking for: how do we make bots useful again?

Now, there are many ways to make bots a useful unit again, because at this time, they are very underused when compared to vehicle and air units. The only way it seems to make them useful, is to increase their damage. While that could work, it could also make vehicles a useless unit. We need to find a middle ground.

I have been thinking about this for quite some time, as I really enjoy bots, and when the update came out that made all non-combat buildings health increase by 3 times, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

How about we give bots an anti-building buff? Dox, Grenadiers, Booms, Slammers, Bluehawks and Gil-Es all have a 10x damage multiplier against buildings. Now, this may seem overpowered, but they are still extremely weak to units. One hit from a unit and they are done for, but with the damage vs buildings multiplier, they can be incorporated into armies for much more efficiency.

While this still seems overpowered, I will do some math, to show how much this would actually affect early game.

A dox has a DPS of 20, and a grenadier has a DPS of 80, but only have 40 and 80 health respectively. We all know that a single tank can take them out with ease. They can take out fabrication bots, but that is pretty much it for units.

The basic unit tank has a DPS of 42, weak against the now extremely tough buildings, having a single tank take around 23 seconds to take out a metal extractor, which is at 1000 health. This is pitiful, that an unprotected building would take that long to destroy by a tank raider. But its still better than a dox raider.

If we give bots a 10x damage multiplier against buildings, early bot raiding would be the prime, as a dox could kill a metal extractor in 5 seconds at 200 DPS. A grenadier could kill it in less than 2 seconds with 800 DPS against buildings.

The reason that this isn't overpowered is that while they do that insane amount of damage, they only do it to buildings, meaning that a single tank can still take them out with ease, and a commander can defend his base against them. Why doesn't this keep them at being useless? If you have a mixed army, you destroy everything in your path.

This solution could not only make bots much more useful, but also keep tanks just as useful, if not more useful, allowing more mix in armies, and having one tech tree not be a waste of time. Tell me what you think in the comments, thank you!

Nonononononononno onononono

No rock paper scissors. Tank beats bots beat buildings beat tanks is bad.

The way to make them useful is to make them useful in unit vs unit encounters, but for different reasons than tanks. Front load the damage of tanks into the alpha and make bots the clear winners in sustained DPS.

I don't get the rock papers worry people have.

As long as we don't have a armor system in this projectile physics game, then it'll be alright.

I dunnot about grenadiers, I don't use them much. But Dox need a range boost and we need the Stinger back.

The Doxes are so useless in encounters against vehicles and towers because their range is so slow and health is so low. They get vaporized before they can fire off a shot.

RPS means that there is no WYSIWYG and the game is hopelessly inaccessible to nubs. Does it look like bots should be better at smashing turrets than tanks? Does it look like an army of tanks should be able to beat a much larger army of bots? Would a nub think that bots should be better at smashing turrets than tanks?

I support RPS only if 3 conditions are met.

1. It is on a per unit rather than per unit type basis. If units in a factory cannot counter units in another factory, then that won't be viable as a 1st FAC. That's bad.
2. It is easy to tell that it's a counter to a unit. Descriptions make it clear that they counter x and are countered by y. If a nub can't tell that his massive army of dox are going to be demolished by the other guy's ants, then that's bad.
3. It makes sense. If a shotgun bot can counter slow tanks, that's good. If a cheap scout can do the same, then that's bad.

I liked the earlier thought of bots are like infantry coupled with the idea that bots primary job is for raiding and high mobility.

I really want some way to protect against air with them, even if it is less effective than the stinger was. I don't mind having one of the unit types being worse at something than the others, but having no protection at all seems a bit much.

Stuart, I think you are confusing WYSIWYG and RPS. They don't mean the same thing at all.

You can have a very effective, very balanced, and very enjoyable RPS using fire rates, overkill damage, and other balancing factors without violating any WYSIWYG elements.

Using armor types, damage multipliers, and other "hidden" values violates WYSIWYG. Many games use these types of values to create the RPS triangle, but don't confuse the triangle for the method used to make it.

Bombers > Tanks > AA Turrets > Bombers is a RPS triangle without any hidden values and it works well. RPS is one of the essential elements of nearly every strategy game at some level. For every unit there needs to be a counter of some kind. It can be a soft counter or a hard counter, but binary relationships are always bad ( X > Y with no third value), and the way to keep it from being binary is to make an RPS so that there is always an alternate solution to your enemies tactic.

uber has said they will not add them back.

Did we ever verify that as being a statement of fact, or as a possible troll comment because of how text comments don't convey sarcasm?

And in either case, a reasoning as to why it would be permanent, such as a force of combined arms?

We did get a confirmation from Uber about the Stinger removal being a permanent change.

However, Uber deleted the thread claiming it was too hostile, so I can't link to it directly. But here's a screen cap.

But no explanation once again.

Mike

I really have no idea what Uber is thinking in terms of balance...thank god for mods

Extrapolating from this comment from Meta, it's so there's more unit diversity.

But like I said after, you can have unit diversity by giving them different firing patterns, rather than removing it entirely.

Agreed. Some of their balance moves seem really really weird.

Give the bots more health, or you could up the production speed since their health is so small.
I'm playing as a bot commander on Galactic War and the bots are really under powered. Especially since they don't have any air defense bots. Could we get some air defense bots? A

Wow, that is..........very short sighted IMO.

Mike

Supposedly not....but you know, im actually kinda ok with that............as long as bots are a good addition to tanks.

Just played a vanilla match, all there was tank and inferno spam....tried using bots cause I forgot they were useless thanks to a lot of RCBM gameplay....Why can't uber just adopt that into vanilla balance and be done with balance forever. I mean really....

The Realm Balance Mod certainly is shaping up to be awesome...

Even if Uber doesn't adopt it completely, at least they could pull some ideas.

I love how much diversity the RBM has. It has a generic "does everything, but only kinda well" unit for all roles. But then it has specialized units that do only certain things real well.

My favorite part about the RBM is how T2 units are specialized, rather than the way over powered upgrades. I strongly dislike how powerful T2 units are in Vanilla. They simply invalidate basic units.

Who got the idea to further slow down community feedback by deleting threads that are trying to help with balance with the fake excuse of ''Hostility''? Yes we need a name, i hate to say it but we do. Sir, this is mister politeness speaking. Im saying that thread was just negative feedback, you are deliberately making it ''hostile'' yourself in order to easily get rid of negative feedback. Its already bad enough your not paying any attention at all to community feedback on balance(except 3 or 4 players, in secrecy), while being immensely greedy on help with bugreports, you shouldn't start on censoring whats left of it. Therefor we have to know as community who is the person having such incredibly bad intentions for this game (or is it all of you?), the person who got this idea in his head is the real ''hostile'' person for gutting whats left of the already almost absent (but desperately needed) feedback process entirely in order for the balance to fail eventually.
At first, im asking why? The thread is not hostile if you clear out all the racist, sexist, discriminating and offensive posts out of it right, wich weren't really there and wich you even got moderators for to do it for you, but yeah you don't delete the entire thread unless you truly want to censor the topic. That see trough wrap of censoring opinions isnt going to get this game any better or do you want to argue that it is? Because i still see a livestreamed tournament where in FFA, 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 etc nobody was making any dox, nobody made a grenadier and nobody used combat fabricators AFTER deleting that topic. Care to explain that? Thats not what the community expects after a lot of weird balancepatches we got to play with and then we finally got a real balance pass and balance is nowhere to be found. The problem is real and was already visible the 1th game played (as usual), trying to hide it from the forums will eventually only make it come back at your face, but harder. So to the guy thats responsible for that particular idea we should have a non-hostile and very-polite chat about the very un-polite and also damaging censoring of (un-polite?)community feedback and gamebalance because i believe it is both going in the wrong direction and therefor want to offer my help. Then before i jump over to what i think about stingers, dox etc... I want to know if this person that killed that topic deliberately is the same person that killed the Vanguard? In that case i ask why again.

Now about bots.

The units coming out of it:

worker 200, dox 90, grenadier 120, combat fabricator 720, boom 45. First of all, they all will be easily crushed by bombers AND tanks. (maybe the boom can dodge shots if micro'd)

Worker is not helpfull, because you cannot be sure that he lives trough the buildprocess and for risking 200 earlygame metal i would expect the botworker to be actually good, because the botlab is so bad to make it more risk vs reward but it isn't
Dox can scout and kill an engineer or 2, they usually don't do anything else then this they can shoot ground targets that are absolutely undefended
Grenadiers die very fast and the damage they do doesn't compensate because they cannot be long in combat if you don't have inferno's or walls in front of them.
Combat fabricator in a testmatch against UBER AI i build 1 early to see how it worked this patch. It lost me the game because 720 metal for nothing is fatal early on. Meta advises to use it to reclaim dead commanders with. To me this means this is no 1v1 unit at all. Also, by the time you invested 600+720 to start reclaiming, your enemy has bombers or tanks.
Boom this unit sometimes works, i think its the only viable choice altough i think it might still be underpowered because of air and vehicles.

T2 bots im not even starting on because they are not used at all.

"Look Ma, I'm on TV an Imgur post."

Anyway, yeah, they gave a silly reason to remove aa bots, if you want to "diversify the unit list" actually diversify it, taking out a fully modeled, rigged, and coded unit is just a waste in my opinion.