Here's an idea...what about a system where there's a constant, perpuetual Frigate battle?

say X vs Y

X's Fleet consists of 4 Frigates
Y's Fleet consists of 4 Frigates

And players can watch or join in on the battle. Instant respawn for the frigates. Or you could do kind of a betting game, player's could contact a bot and place credits down on one team, either X or Y, and watch the battle. If their team won, there could be certain odds calibrated to figure the winning total, such as "How many times have they won today?" stuff like that.

Or, you could make it a flat, 1:2 ratio across the board so the money doubles to each winning better.

It'll add some definite entertainment value to the game and perhaps cause traffic to increase in the 7000+ sectors.

/me bets 50,000c on team X! :)

that'd be kinda cool though. it would put some meaning to s16 :)

Not just s16, it would increase traffic in whatever system it was implemented in. I don't think s16 should change, since many players like it for it's cargo and botting against the Frigate there.

I think this should take one of the new sectors after the new galaxy is implemented, it would help alliviate the risk of "open space"

I quite like the idea of betting on bot matches. Like watching boxing in Vegas.

A "Horse Racing" sector along the same lines but bots racing instead of fighting seems cool too.

For either one you could have a live feed in the stations that gives up the match results. It would be like betting on Satelite feed matches.

Maybe richer players could sponser a bot and have some control over its config. Like being Don King or owning a race horse, I guess you get a cut of the house profits if your bot wins?

you know why the bots dont shoot each other now? (at least i think they dont, didn't they stop at 3.2?) Their AI is good enough that they will never hit each other except for the occassional really lucky shot

No. Because if they shot each other, the lag would be uber bad for people. I mean, 20 people fighting in a sector is bad. What about 40 bots, AND the people?

Rogue, Sam is right. Two bots shooting each other would be perpetualy fighting because they couldn't hit each other.

No. I'm confident that the Assaults could hit the Drones, the drones could hit the transports, and the recons could outfly them all.

Im with roguelazer on this one, they could hit each other by using specs, not tactics. Although, hey, this is post-release idea anyway, if the Devs want this ingame they could simply write bot software for "Tournament Bots" that mimiks pre-3.2 AI so that the Tournament Bots can hit each other and shoot each other and all of that.

The thing is, 2 bots of a kind cant kill each other, and in say.. Assult III vs Drone 1 we all know who will win.

Why can't they?

I'm talking about a semi-new AI idea that causes the bots to fight more by a select pattern. There are variations of the pattern but the AI must pick one and repeat it until dead.

so have like different stratagies the bots would follow, each stratagy picked at the start of the fight? It might work, i would like to see the bots actualy try stuff other than point at you, fire, try to dodge.

oh yes, much more complex than that.

BTW, you've gotta be crousing the boards more than anybody else! lol

Ideally, the AI should have many styles at its disposal, and should choose/change them rapidly and on-the-fly.

That would probably require lots of coding, but eventualy i think this would be possible. But are their any stratagies that actualy work vs. circle strafing?

The bots somehow reverse when you close in on them. I wish players could do that too.

When in doubt, use industrial strength deterrance.

If circle strafing is uncounterable with a bot's agility factor, the Devs can simply opt not to teach the bot that strategy.

And yes, this would probably require tons of coding, but again, this idea is ideally post-release if they put it in, it also requires the expanded galaxy...a new sector

To make the bots more random, bots could 'mutate', they could acquire a new pattern. The devs could write a program which generates a random pattern and assigns a random task to it (evade, attack, defend etc). This would then end up in a 'big library of random patterns'. Some of the bots acquire one of these new patterns from the library.

This could look something like this:

There is a big 'bot war sector', in here, bots have deatmatches against each other.

- New bots are spawned, some are 'mutated'
- All the bots fight with each other (deatmatch)
- The bot that gets the highest number of kills will be the new "aggressive type".
- The bot that survives the longest will be the new "surviving type".
- And the rules that both winning bots use (the aggressive and the surviving) would be combined and would become the "combo type".
- New bots are spawned, some are 'mutated', all are of any of the 3 types and some have 'mutations'
- A new deatmatch begun!
- etc, etc, etc

There could also be team fights, where teams fight against each other.
In such a case, a team gets a random lay-out of bots (attack, survive and combo) and in such a case the best lay-out wins.

There should be at least 7 teams, 2 survive teams (1 normal and 1 with slight modifications), 2 attack teams (1 normal and 1 with slight modifications), 2 combo teams (1 normal and 1 with slight modifications) and 1 team with a random lay-out.

For example:

The attack team that wins has 8 attack bots and 2 combo bots.
The survive team that wins has 6 attack bots and 4 survive bots.
The combo team would then have 7 attack bots, 1 combo bot and 2 survive bots.

Basically this is a sort of evolution.

Or instead of having the same bots which only differ in tactics, the teams could even have different ships (and all with different tactics to make it even more random). Of course, they could eventually end up with a valk-only lay-out. But that would still leave open many possibilities (maybe they could evolve an anti-valkjock strategy); or even a more efficient valk strategy, who knows. Maybe we could eventually learn new stuff from the bots ;)

What worries me is this all leads to Rise Of The Machines...

Although Sheean is right, assuming they can get the AI to 'learn' new tactics (Im not sure if it's possible) but if they can, the bots maybe able to develop counters to common opponents. It could be that a Bot Academy could open where players can just study bot tactics.

The problem is that the learning AI must not be leaked into the main flow of the game because it would cause the bots to eventually learn to counter the players ingame and maybe even the devs thus, we lose the system...

prohaps if the bots could learn they would have "levels" of abilities to learn... certain bots could only learn to a certain point, while others could become very, very good and require teamwork to remove.