So for the last while bots have been pretty meh at best with nobody really using them for anything, then this latest patch comes out and makes dox basically do everything while the rest of the bots continue to be unused My idea to fix this is to first undo the changes of the dox. Well now we're right back where we started. Now, make all bots invisible to radar I mean bots are already small enough that spotting them on radar should be pretty hard, and doing it means making bots better at what they're made for: raiding, instead of just having one that's good at everything
If you look at a scale picture, the doxes are pretty big actually, but i kinda like them being invisible, but not cause of size but maybe stealth material.
Wait you mean dox being cheap fast anti ground anti naval anti air units with scout viewrange isn't balanced?
Making bots viable? You really think it's that easy? Bots, as they are, are simply conflicting with vehicles. Both are ground based units with the very same movement patterns. There are only a few options how to make them "viable", but most of them have a downside too: Splitting roles between bots and vehicles, problem is that you suddenly need both in parallel Make them essentially a copy of the tanks roles, problem is that they are now indifferent Try differencing them based on unit speed, problem is that this also affects unit roles, e.g. even vehicle scouts requiring high speed! Besides, fast, small and fragile units mean you are going straight to micro-hell. Try to change pathing behavior, as it was partly done by allowing bots to walk under water. Last one is actually a rather intelligent approach to the problem. But it has unique drawbacks of its own, mostly lacking features in the current game: There are no such terrain features like hills and slopes Hills and slopes have no effect on unit movement at all, especially not on acceleration, as you would expect! Map generator isn't smart about generating planets. It just places obstacles in random locations based on a noise generator, but it does not(!) attempt to place them in any meaningful way which would be a necessary precondition to encourage players to use ATV units in the first place. In order for ATV units to become viable, the map generation code would actually need to create shortcuts (and explicit detours for non-ATV units!). As well as also being smarter about placing rivers, oceans and inland seas because naval just don't work either with the current height distribution system.
What's the problem with that though? If you don't need them then what's the point of having them? Before they were just weaker tanks that were slightly faster and cheaper Now most of them are still that, except the dox, which like I said is cheap and does basically everything. It doesn't do it well but when you don't NEED to make any unit other than the Dox then it doesn't matter because you'll have a ton of them all doing everything not very well, which together they do it just fine. They do all of this while running all over the map kiting all the other units and destroying any outward sections of bases, slowing forcing the enemy into a small ball near where they landed at which point the Dox player has a huge eco advantage and can just make some infernos to finish the game By making all bots just as "meh" as they were before, but giving them invisibility to radar, they suddenly become incredibly good at raiding, since you can't see them until you SEE them, not on the radar. So bots can still go out and harass the section of bases just far enough from the main force that the tanks wouldn't get there in time before they lose structures instead of just seeing them on radar and moving forces over to intercept. Dox will be the main force, grenadiers can shoot over walls to take out turrets and anything else behind the walls, meaning they can quicly raid even hardened defensive lines at the cost of no anti-air without blowing their cover. the engineer bots won't show up on radar so they will be a little harder to snipe, etc. Because the Dox will no longer be good at everything, you would also be able to counter them with bombers, since to defend the Dox from bombers you would need air cover, which would show up on radar, or spinners, which would show up on radar. You could still do aerial sweeps before sending your Dox and grenadiers in to clear the general airspace beforehand, and otherwise use tactics more complex and interesting than "this is a Dox, Dox do everything. They don't do it well but who cares when all you need to do is build Dox. The other bots are all terrible, just build dox" As far as your point, letting them walk underwater isn't a problem, they can keep that in honestly. Being able to shoot underwater at naval units that can't shoot back, shoot at aircraft and still outkite everything on the ground while outspotting it and being incredibly cheap is the problem.
And that also makes Dox the only working Dox-counter. How? First, Dox becomes even more micro-intensive, you need to pamper these retarded units permanently. And second, when the Dox squad is permanently microed, and is only hidden to radar, avoiding vision by all cost has top priority. So you are going to use radar yourself to dodge enemy scouts. And the only way to counter that, is by using units as scouts which are invisible to radar, too. No, hands off hard stealth systems, these systems cause really weird implications - and require hard counters of their own. Which in return just means having another mandatory building, just like the deep space radar. There are systems to make stealth work properly, but these are not compatible with the PA engine.
Players could just have some scout cars patrolling around the outside of the base or some planes doing aerial patrols. It's not hard to spot them. Once you send out other units to clear out the scouts and planes THEN you send the bots in to harass around from an unlikely angle. Really just sending some bombers and a fighter escort around every once in a while has a high probability of spotting the dox and taking them out, no counter doxing required, which itself would be much more micro intensive to do. Spotting without radars isn't that hard, and in the early game that bots dox currently dominate, having radars all over the place in really far up positions to spot the scouts in your enemy's backfield just so you could avoid them is extremely unlikely and pretty wasteful, especially since you'd be doing all this for a unit that can quickly get spotted and taken out by air units unless it gives up its stealth advantage. The stealth itself isn't that big of a buff, it just adds to the fact that bots were meant to be raiders, not just entirely outclassed by tanks except this one unit (guess which one) that can do everything and thereby is easier to just spam that one unit than spam a bunch of different units that are individually better at one thing than that unit but weaker in other areas
Not really, mered didn't build as much eco as he could have (I think he had like two fabbers and the commander for a good chunk of the game while basically having total map control) If he had just a few more fabbers and moved his commander to make a new base farther back after he figured out where max was and that he was spamming tanks, he wouldn't have to worry about max rushing tanks straight to his base since he would have a ton of time while the tanks were moving to harass max's base and the tanks themselves and he would have even more dox than he did because he would have had much more eco. I can see why he didn't expand too much since he was probably expecting to fight against dox spam, and doxes are extremely good at punishing you for trying to expand. Also, this was a complete tanks vs dox match on a moon. The strength of dox isn't against rippers or bolos or whatever they get renamed to every patch, it's their ability to be almost as good as rippers head to head (not really "head to head", more in flanking around the tanks and talking out all expansions until they outnumber the tanks enough to win) while also being amphibious and being anti naval and anti air. Put those same comps (ripper spam vs dox spam) against each other but also give both players a planet with water and some naval units and bombers, and dox instantly become much better than rippers because the can also counter naval units and bombers while walking through oceans, which rippers can't
That might be the case, in the tanks vs bots battle, I believe that the balance displayed in this video was very very nice.
