Why are the bots faster than the lasers I'm firing at them? Is this a bug or are the bots supposed to be that fast? There easy as butter with rockets but dodge energy weapons with ease. You guys should think of slowing them down , or speeding up the weapons.

Which bots, and where?

Pretty much all of the Assaults are ridiculously difficult to nail with energy fire unless you've got a lot of skill and practice.

yea, they tend to dodge about a third of a milisecond after the shot leaves your ship. maybe a simple piece of randomization in the fire avoidance subroutine giving them a delay of between 0.1 and 1 seconds before they react to incoming fire.

for that matter thier distance keeping is kind of insanely perfect as well, they have a distance they like and you can never surprise them with a rush to get in close if you want to, the same reaction delay could do wonders there as well.

I usually strafe to the left, keeping the second assault on the right of the radar and fire in bursts. Every now and then you actually hit something, although this is too rare to be useful for a single-weapon ship, so grab a hornet or something.
Oh, and rails chew bots up like crazy, but are a bit low on ammo to use exclusively.

IMO, the problem is more the discrepancy between how incredibly easy they are to kill with rockets, compared with energy weapons. It is possible to kill them with energy weapons, but rockets are just so much easier there's no comparison. The thing is, I don't think they even try to dodge rockets at all, or maybe they are just dodging the *rocket*, and not the *prox trigger* of the rocket. I posted a suggestion about that a bit back: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/11047

Also I've heard that the new hive bots in Sedina are even better at dodging energy weapons, but I haven't had any experience on that myself.

Its mostly the Assault ones, Tycorps etc... against neut 3's

The "new" bots in Sedina are *exactly* like their old-hive counterparts with the same names. Actually the queen has been tweaked slightly (mostly to help it not run into the Leviathan).

But anyway, we totally agree with you. The bots need to be fun and interesting to fight against (and alongside) and to not show off the precision advantage they naturally have from being a part of the engine.

We can't code them to "see" projectiles coming at them the same way players do, as that would be an experiment in computer vision requiring far too much resources and coding effort. They have to react based on knowledge of where things are, but that is currently far too obvious.

The Hive, as it stands, is the first fruits of our new high-level AI code, which has far more potential than you can see yet. Its advantage lies in our ability to make high-level (read higher latency) behaviors complex beyond the point that they would be maintainable if written at a lower level. This code, however, cannot be responsible for low-level behavior like dodging, because it has to happen too fast and too often.

Andy is working on a cutting-edge system for implementing low-level behaviors. It is based on reinforcement learning, and it is our hope that the resulting behaviors will be far more unpredictable, various, and strategic. Given the added smarts of such a system, we can handicap the bots with stuff like increased reaction times or inexact measures of object's locations. We hope to make the tough bots hard to kill in the way a good player is hard to kill, rather than the cheap, frustrating way that they are currently hard to kill. And we hope to make them learn from you so that you'll never find a tactic that always works.

And, of course, there needs to be a smooth gradient of difficulty between the easy and hard, which there certainly isn't right now. You've heard it before, but it really is coming soon:)

Thanks for the prompt reply fellas .

Hitting a bot with a slower moving projectile... ie gauss or plasmadev is nigh impossible.

Being forced to use dumbfires against them is odd... to say the least... and Tycorps are easy to hit... at least when compared to Valents...

Odd. The only bots I hunt with rockets are Prosus, everything else falls to my energy weapons. Of course, I never use a piddly one-gun ship. I fight Tycorps with quad-chainfire-Neut2 Hornets, and Valents with a Centaur III armed with AGT/Megaposis and neut2.

Nice to hear the bot AI hasn't been radically improved in the Hive. I kept hearing it had from people since the Hive was moved to the production server.

My primary tool against bots is a Centurion with two gauss cannons. These bots certainly don't have perfect technique. Their instant reaction times are a gift and a curse.

You can take advantage of their behavior by leading them into a dodge and then striking them where they move because it's easy to tell which way they're going to go if they dodge.

I actually really like the bots the way they are... They are machines after all, they should act like it.

Now, the human simulator bots, i.e. Border Patrol bots, should have more lifelike AI. Which is where all this development will go to great use. Hopefully Guild can make convincing human-simulating AI. Pirates and Patrol Ships will be able to roam the galaxy so there will be something to do even if the player count is low.

I have noticed a difference. I was prospecting in a sector in Giera R, an <i>unmarked<-i> sector, found asteriods and 4 Artemis.
- first difference was they were dodging my shots really well. the only way to take them out quickly was to get them in a tight spiral.
- second, they respawned as fast as I could kill them, and they imediately came to the area I was. Not just a pair, but all 4.

In Sedina, the queens don't back off when hit with energy weps any more...

Was that a bug fix? or something else?