How can we make bots more useful?

It is, and then ofcourse its gonna be happy bashing on people who, like you, also tought it was a waste to see 25% of the factory's and everything they produce become useless crap while they have been waiting for months, maybe even a year for this balance pass, and therefor obviously get a little frustrated because it is so incredibly obvious that this doesn't work.

Which units simply invalidate the basic units now?

And...
CONFIRMED: The AA Bot is removed. Permanently.

Bots and Vehicles should be used in unison. We do not want an all-bot or all-vehicle strategy to be the be-all-end-all to win.

An interesting decision.

Do you plan to improve and diversify the bots to an even greater extend then we have currently? In place of having bot equivalents to tanks?

Possibly. That's still unknown, mostly because instead of exploring the options the bots have, you guys, one of our big sources of feedback, have written them off and refuse to use them. So it's difficult to gather data from them. Especially when some of the move vocal balance people haven't even played the latest balance.

Bots enhance your fighting force of vehicles and vice-versa. Maybe trying mixed groups is worth some experiments.

Well the current balance for some of the units like the dox makes their integration a little....challenging.

But I do agree that the AA bot issue is a little overblown.

The grenadier bot is a good unit, quick to build and support tanks rather well.

But the dox is a little, underpowered, and can't fulfil many roles at the moment, so it's more a numbers thing then a actual use thing.

The boom is interesting, although people are always adverse to suicidal units.

And the combat fabber just needs a few bot buddy's to get people using the bot factory again.


Overall in my opinion, bots need to cover the vehicles weak spots, but they don't have many.

Doxes are for harassment and keeping unguarded expansion at bay. That's their intent. They aren't a main fighting force. That's how we differentiated them from tanks. If you make them as good as tanks, then there's no unit diversity, which is something the forum-goers haven't wanted for a long time, right?

So, other than the dox, seems like they are all useful in your opinions.

In mine, yes.

Although the main barrier to the raiding dox is building hp, which slows raids down to a crawl.

Most T2 units invalidate basic units. Vanguard is an easy example. I've seen 1 Vanguard take out an army of 100 or so Ants and Infernos. Shellers are also an easy example. They're better and cheaper than Pelters. A group of Shellers can demolish entire armies with ease.

I completely agree with and support that design principle.

However, currently vehicles are the only valid starting units since bots lack AA. I don't like having the game pigeonhole us into going vehicles first. I used to love going bots first due to their raiding capabilities.

Also, bots are way underpowered and borderline useless. The dox is so stink weak. If it encounters any resistance, they get obliterated and are a waste of metal. If their range was increased back to 80, then that could be enough to bring them back to being useful. That being said, I understand balance is a moving target, I just think y'all went too weak with bots this time 'round.

I actually have tried the latest balance pass quite extensively. I don't like where bots are currently, nor am I a fan of the new Hornet.

Hornets are moving catapults. The only way to counter them is with Hummingbirds. Ground AA structures can't reach them, and Spinners can't catch up to them. So if the guy with the Hornets is in any way smart and puts a ton of production power into Hummingbirds and keeps the hummingbirds out front, then there's nothing that can stop incoming Hornets. It's essentially a moving Catapult creep, and we all know what everyone thinks about Catapult creeps.

And Combat Fabbers aren't overly useful with how quickly units die. I really think all units need a 1.5 to 2 times health increase. It works really really well in the RBM, and I'm pretty sure the Statera balance mod does it as well.

Don't manipulate our words and put words in our mouth. That's just insulting.

We all support unit diversity and having the dox as a raiding unit. But the Dox is so weak, that 1 or 2 laser defense towers make Doxes not worth the metal investment due to the losses and quantity required to destroy the laser defense towers. Might as well make Ants instead.

Buddy chill, it's cool.

Where is the advantage of high speed bots when you want us to use them together with vehicles? The problem is that vehicle first and all-vehicle (with air) is viable, all-bot (with air) is not. Even if I mix, I just have some different units riding along with my vehicles. Aventail and inferno is enough, why should I add something to this formula? Bots need to be mixed with vehicles, vehicles don't need to have bots with them. And bots first doesn't work because of bomber snipes, that is a real issue.

Some experiences with bots:
- Dox:
Raiding is not effective. They don't do enough damage to mex. It is super hard to kill T1 tanks with dox, so defending is easy. And because of low vision you just run into the tanks or the commander. The speed doesn't help. They don't work against infernos too. The range is so short that when I tried to kill some idle infernos, just one false step made the infernos move and my bots were in danger. I wasted time, the other player didn't have to care. What do I do with vehicles? Well 2 aventails placed into a mex field can make a huge difference. And it is nice and easy, no micro, good vision and they get rid of the mex. The choice is clear. Against infernos, the aventail is superior too.
- Bots mixed into an army.
Well it works but I didn't see an advantage against an inferno and aventail only army so far. If you have some infernos and aventails and antiair you are already fine.
- Bomb bots:
One opponent used them and they were dangerous because my fabbers had AA vehicles with them but could easily die to bomb bots. The problem is that they have this low vision and often run into mex. 2 Aventails sent with the fabber will totally kill the bomb bots, a single barrel laser tower does this job too. But they have their place, they are annoying.

Well I will try to mix in bots more but I doubt that it will work out that well.


Regarding your first question:
10-20 shellers with vision (radar) invalidate T1 armies. You just have a chance with a much better eco and huge swarms from all directions.

if you really want this, why we have bot and tank factory? land factory enough.
and first you can go land,air or naval.
keep the units delete the double factory(and the bot fab), now build bots just suck
but i fear this is not the best way ...

Well, with the proper labelling, we can make sure that players know what a factory type is for.

Like main: Naval, Tank

Support: Air, Orbital, Bot


But if I'm gonna be greedy, id also love more support, and more units in naval and tank

You and IGN are the only ones here that thinks Bots are ALL USEFULL. This posts why do you make it? We all see you and IGN are only about 10% of the people responding here, are you purposely trying to pour fuel on this fire? Why are you taking somuch effort to insult us?

Huh?

Its only my opinion, and frankly I kinda agree that the dox aren't actually very good at their role, either because of themselves or target building HP.

The grenadier is good support for normal tanks, in my opinion.

The boom....is just what it says on the tin.

The combat engineer is alright, good for supporting bases and tanks, in my opinion.

And with a actual mixed force, with a air factory, tank factory or even a few AA turrets isn't much of a bother for me, in my opinion.

Jesus, don't get so offended because I don't agree with you, I feel this way because quite frankly, I don't do MP.

Could we stand back from this statement ? why bots and tanks should be used in unison ? Why it is better than having two play style, both valid ?


Another point about bot specificity

From my point of view, the advantage of bots compare to tanks have always been the manoeuvrability. Then could it be possible that bots avoid shot automatically ? if we micro manage units it is possible to avoid some shots (especially artillery), so i proposed that the bots have an IA that do it automatically.
In this case they will continue to lose direct confrontation because to many shots cannot be avoided (due to the mass of unit/space availbilty and the splash damage), but will gain efficience in small harassment battle.

Another remark about the boom

The boom are really good against T2 vehicule, i have discover it recently.
The reason is obvious actually, T2 doesn't have a good rate of fire, they very overkill the booms. Then between two shots, there is enough time for the rest of the booms to join the mele and start they nasty job.

But there is completely useless for T1 spam because a mass of T1 tank has a a lot of shots, and the mass of boom never reach their goal.

Mind if I try a stab at it?

Its about having each of the types of unit contribution to the same conflict rather then having each unit level and type be completely separate and independent.

The problem I have found with other games, like ZeroK and SupCOm2 is that you can have a game devoted to a single type of units that can do everything, meaning that you can ignore the rest of your military in favour of massing up on one particular type.

That's not to say those games have it so wrong it's a sin or anything, what with me having over like 450 hours of SupCom2, so in that instance you might say that I am kinda bias.

But it's overall about getting players to use all of the levels, for all of their play styles then allowing any individual play style be able to do it all, like each play style has to have stuff it simply can't do rather then the usual, its simply weak at doing it.

Sure you can't solo bots, but really you should never have been able too, no single level should have all the answers, otherwise, why use anything else?

T1 bots are a joke to play with compared to T1 air/vehicle right now. I feel like its a wasted factory and that its only use in this balance is to simplify rally points for vehicle factories, so you can rally point all your vehicles factories using Ctrl-Z and keep the bot factory makes fabbers. Avoiding some micro is nice for later on when there is a lot going on but its hardly the best reason to choose bots!

Suggestions:
Dox - improve visibility a little bit, reduce metal cost
Grenadiers - improve AOE area to give them a chance against a deathball of t1 tanks

I m not saying that we should be able to mass up one ant or dox and both is equivalent and valid.

But my problem with the idea of tank and bot have to works at in unison:

1. There is no more tactical choice going tank or going bot, because the game is designed to make me buid both.
2. The way of using the units have been already thought, the metagame is forced by the design, instead of letting the players find the best way of using units. When i play the game i want to learn the units, i want to try combination, to be innovative, if the game is too stiff and forces me to play in a certain style... it loses its attractiveness.

I agree, as Id also like dox to work just as well with air, and for air to work well with tanks, and for tanks to not work that well on their own.

That would be perfect, where players are kinda mixing and matching combinations form factory types.

But id also like more factory types, like hover and sub.

As for the forced meta....I suppose that's a problem, but then again just at T1 or only at T2 don't we already get the same situation? Might just be me, but unit variety for each individual factory is kinda limited anyway, so there isn't much room for variation within a single factory.

At the very least, Id like to see the end result of what Uber wants for PA, it could be good/bad but it'll still be interesting.