Just trying to reconnect; Life has been crazy crazy, but I'm trying to make time for this again.

What are your current opinions on the bots? And what needs tweaking?

I'm not going to promise a whole bunch of new features yet, I'll need to see how the next while pans out here, but I may have more time as things slow down a little bit.

Can we have bots that actually fight back please :(

We'll get there =/

Let the bots have spies.

Bots do have spies...

Just the indys

Fixed that for you.

There were very few bots without indies (and spies) in at least some capacity last set. Assuming he uses that same code here, the bots would have spies to some extent.

Can we remove bots altogether. There are enough mechanical players here already.

This is wrong.

Can you get the bots to buy more weapons tech :(

How so, blid? I made 846 grabs in alliance last set, and did most of my own spy ops. A majority of the bots had spies.

EDIT: In all fairness, I'm going off memory and don't have access to those old ops. If there is actually a DB somewhere that is tracking bot builds and spies/troops/turrets/tanks, I'd be curious to see it, or help gather more data for it. Bot farming is one of the few entertaining things left in the game IMO

Bots don't have spies ! their programming does :P

There's only certain types of BOTs that have spies.

The R, D, T or H BOTs never have spies. C always do. And sometimes I.

My suggestion for BOTs would be:
Buy more tech.
The R BOTs have 0 bus/res tech and fully built.
Farmer BOTs dont buy agri tech.
Have BOTs buy some oil.
Lower the random factor of bus/res tech and raise the random factor of military/weaps/military strat more.
(Though true they will likely not use them immediately, it will cause techers not to exclusively tech one tech only, which creates walls of bus / res tech on market.)
Create a base number of ICs for each bot type. (Could add it to your BPT if-then statement).

Improvements made so far are:
No large stockpiles of cash/food are exploited anymore.
BOTs are more focused on buying turrets rather than exclusively troops for defense.
Some BOTs went from carrying 0 spies to 20% spies on indy made BOTs.

don't know if you will accept my suggestion but when I and only I spy on a bot have it sell all its defense then buy back whatever it can after I'm done farming it :)

Thanks for the feedback so far :) Thanks as usual Celphi! :)

It definitely helps me to ponder and think about these things for a few days, gets my brain going in the right direction so I can actually jump into some code, you know?

Good points, Celphi. I concur - unless the intent was to have them as a land resource for the human players. Still, qz, you have come a long way with them!

bots need lazurs

Pew Pew lazurs or Shzoom Shzoom lazurs?

We need to turn the bots in to sharks with lazurs on their heads.

we just need to add about 400 more bots...we need more land :p

Every player should be allotted one personal bot... if you attack my bot then its war :)

bot wars ! :) but yeah.. more bots would be interesting after making them harder to hit from that is.

tech seems lacking in all the bots with random techs bought with wrong strats like what celphi highlighted. Bots buying tech would make the market play more interesting.

how much stuff does the bots dump on the market ? at what range of prices from the current market prices ?

yur not 1st to suggest that although earlier suggest was 2-3 bots per player.

Bots need some more tech also they gotta build their freaking land. Why have 6k when 3k is unbuilt all the time!

to reduce buildings or ghost acres you gain ?
.. right now this is one of the methods to gauge if the country is a bot or not.. if this changes .. maybe grabbing will become a little more interesting.

The reasoning that the bots are building 50% land on some (not all) is because they don't have enough $ on hand to build 50BPT so it defaults to exploring then cashing.

When a bot gets attacked & I'm not sure if Qzjul has implimented it yet, but he has a function that has them buy additional defensive units. This in-turn contributes to making it harder to afford 50BPT.

I understand many of you want the bots to fight back, but it requires considerable amount of coding. Qzjul has been very busy, but has mentioned he'd have more time in the fall to work on the project more.

Would Bots losing just Land, be better, than Bots losing both Building and Land?

If the Bots can't fight back yet, could we then fortify their base Income, Weapons and Medical levels to +50% to +100% to negate the effects of over farming?

Would Bots losing just Land, be better, than Bots losing both Building and Land?
No.

If the Bots can't fight back yet, then at least fortify them up a bit in the form of "Government" Bonuses i.e. Medical, Weapons & Income?
At the moment, the bots carry more defensive units than any player. In many of the cases they almost carry more defense than networth.

Weapons tech would help in terms of expenses & medical tech wouldn't help. The primary problem is slight changes to the decision if-then statement & having the bots buy more tech.
Honestly- what's more important? An app or upgraded changes to the bots? I can try to start on one -

@Qzjul:
The bot names need to be completely changed. They're too easily recognizable. I'll try to come up with a random-name generator.

@Qzjul:

So here's my suggestion for selecting BOT names.

At the current moment BOTs are identified by:
Their easily recognizable names.
Their builds recognizable after being spied.

Solution:
Collect all the player made names from old sets of the ALLIANCE server into one pool. Remove doubles completely from list. Randomly select names from that pool to be BOT names on EXPRESS. Using this method will make names nearly impossible to identify as a bot. I chose the ALLIANCE server because it has a larger pool of names.

Solution:
Add 300-500 indys (random) to make spies per BOT. (This can still be accomplished with the current code, even w/o the adjusting of %s).
Adjust tech / military buying. Currently it's 10:90. (10% tech & 90% military) (some are lower than that). It should be adjusted to 60:40 at least. (60% tech & 40% military). (If you want to get fancy, randomize those #s).

ffa has largest pool of countrynames.

True,. but many of the names are repeats. The idea is to get unique names.

Skynet is coming to EE!

Yeah, bump the tech. Help bots to be more productive and it makes tech market more fun

Hmk; Let me mull on this; I have some things I *need* to do for work this week, but if I can hammer them out, maybe I can squeeze some time in for the bots.

what's wrong with 10 donnies/wangers/etc?