Bots

[Deceth]

• Dumb bots!

[Deceth]

Creating bots is no simple task, but even if they are very dumb, having something to shoot at when nobody is online could be beneficial.

[Rushing]

I've had plenty of fun shooting at you before Deceth, which is pretty much the same concept as shooting at dumb bots. Thumbs up from me.

[rileyw]

What should bots be doing when they're turned on?

• Idling
• Chatting
• Squatting as city mayor
• Building defenses
• Hordes in the wilderness that attack players that are within range

[Deceth]

When the server is empty, there should be nothing going on.

As soon as the first player logs on, a configurable amount of "bot" cities should spawn on the map. I would set the amount of bot cities to 2 to test things out at first.

So, for each bot city, this is what would happen:

• Load demo city design
• Load all defensive items (this should be part of loading the demo city design but this functionality doesn't exist yet)
• Spawn 4 bot players (this functionality doesn't exist yet)

What do these bots then do?

Ideally we define a few types of bots.

• Defence bot
• Attack bot
• Mayor bot

Bots will spawn with their weapons, they won't need to go pick them up. This is to facilitate actually making bots.

A defence bot will drive around randomly, but always stay in range of the city. If it detects an enemy, it will pursue and shoot at the intruder.

An attack bot will leave the city in search of a nearby city. It will then proceed to attack the city (which is going to be difficult to program, so at first, it should just head towards and enemy city and shoot at things. Basically the same as a defence bot, except it has instructions to move away from the city towards the closest orbable target!)

Mayor bot will stay very close to the city, and otherwise behave as another defence bot. (ideally the mayor bot would rebuild the city, but that's probably complicated to program so for now, the BOT city should be intelligent and rebuild itself based on the city design it was loaded from.

Bot City

• The bot city should replace a destroyed building after X amount of time if the Mayor bot is alive. The "rebuild" time should pause while the Mayor bot is dead.
• The bot city should replace a destroyed defensive item after X amount of time (if the factory still exists)

When a bot city is orbed, there should be a check for the total players online. If less than 12, a bot city should be reloaded somewhere. If over 12, there are enough real players that the bot city is no longer needed.

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Alternatively, a first step would be to create as you suggest, hordes of bots in the wilderness that attack players that are within range.

In this scenario, there are no bot cities, but at least if you are alone on the server, you can hunt down and battle these bots to keep yourself busy.