This is aimed mainly at PvP, but it would also work quite well for certain Invasion units like the smuggler or bounty hunter.
This rework intends to give Bots more realistic behaviour and make them display desirable traits for low-skill players to mimic. The tree main areas to assess are accuracy and aggression.
ACCURACY:
Bots are too accurate. Their firing accuracy should reduce based on range to target, and dodging should do more to throw their aim. Their perfect firing actually makes them more dangerous than many players, which is not desirable.
This change is also needed in Invasion.
AGGRESSION:
Bots are too aggressive and show no battlefield awareness. They hound targets long after it becomes suicidal to do so and will blindly rush into obvious meatgrinders.
To stop this, the following should apply;
- Bots cannot be the front man.
If there is no allied fighter or frigate ahead of the bot it will not advance any further unless it has no suitable leader. It will ignore Interceptors and Long Range Frigates when determining behaviour.
Next, when a Bot reaches 50% hull it enters Evasion mode. The Bot will retreat if locked onto and seek to heal at the nearest Engineer. If none are present it simply heads for Spawn. If not locked onto the Bot attacks as normal. This behaviour continues until shield or hull restores to 100%.
At 25% Hull the Bot enters Escape Mode. It will flee to nearest healer / spawn and will not attack until hull increases back to above 50%, which restores it to Evasion mode.
All Bots will carry hull repair modules to use in order to keep them battle ready.
If attacked while in Spawn a bot will fight to the death regardless of status - it has nowhere else to flee to!
For Invasion, this behaviour can be adjusted as follows: instead of fleeing to spawn, the Bot flees to the nearest active warp gate and will attempt to jump out of sector. Bots that jump are ‘killed’ but give no reward to any player and will respawn as normal. This also makes attacking high value targets more dangerous close to jump points, encouraging ambushes deep into the system or coordination to prevent targets fleeing.