PC AI: Constructive Feedback Thread

(Changeable) #1

I know Splash has asked for this since the PC patch changes, but I searched through the threads (as best I could) and couldn’t find one dedicated to this subject - If there is one please point me to it and Mod’s please delete this one.

DISCLAIMER

For all those console guys your AI is already different from the PC (patched) - so while your feedback is useful it probably isn’t in this thread.

FEEDBACK:

It’s quite hard to remember how they were at game launch - I guess we just need to look to the console threads for that.

I definitely think they are better in terms of completing objectives, before they would be obsessed with command posts, now not so much.

I do think they are a bit too accurate still, and they seem to react unnaturally quickly at times.

On maps like Aquarium I’ve noticed the defending AI all tend to cluster around the VIP which makes it a bit harder.

When in disguise I seem to get spotted too readily - although maybe that’s just me sucking and being spotted by the guy I’m disguised as?

That’s my brief 2cents before needing to go to work, I encourage you guys to add your own thoughts…

(system) #2

They screwed them up. Now the enemy team is rubbish and can’t do jack. Hard difficulty is a joke.

(badman) #3

This thread deserves to be a sticky. If anyone else has any feedback on the PC AI changes from the last game update, please post it here.

(Bettik) #4

I suppose I should preface that my current bot experiences are based on a level 17 character as I know difficulty scales with rank. I’ll keep this short and off the top of my head.

PROS:

Bots are definitely more willing to branch out to secondary objectives now. Major plus. They even seem to occasionally take alternate routes that aren’t even necessarily opened up by a secondary objective. Again, major plus.

CONS:

The “dumbing down” of bot AI in conjunction with increasing bot AI for the enemy team in order to ramp up difficulty still remains a bit frustrating. It is still especially frustrating when friendly bots tackle delivery objectives as they tend to take the obvious route and stop to fire against any opposing force rather than seek cover or an alternate route and rely on friendly support. Delivery objectives require a human player to make the delivery. I really think bots simply shouldn’t attempt it at all.

(Acefisher1) #5

I’ll be adding additional feedback later, but for now there is one big problem I notice in every game with AI.

Medics - When a player is downed, the AI medics prioritize the downed player over everything else. They ignore enemies, running blindly to the player. In addition, if there are multiple AI Medics, they will all converge on the player.

Potential fix - leave the prioritization as is, but only let 1 AI Medic head to the player at a time.

Change the mechanics for reviving downed players - Make them try to clear the area to a max of 2 enemies before attempting to revive. (It doesn’t help getting revived when the whole enemy team is surrounding you).

(The_Happy_Friar) #6

While playing SP last night on the security mission with the SSM I decided to change it to “easy” to see if it would be easier to win the map. Fixing the crane was no big deal (I was an engy & there were two others) but for hacking the missile, that became impossible:
I started as an engy to do defense. I went ~8 minutes w/o dying at the missile controls but no covert ops would bother hacking for the most part, and if they did they would switch to their gun & fire instead of hack. It got to 48% hacked then I decided to change to covert ops to hack. My team offered no defense: no turrets were made, no mines planted, my team always ran after AI, never staying in the area to defend like they did with the crane. The other team easily removed the hack device & it never got above 5% as long as I was a covop.

It looks like they don’t think they should defend the actual area with the missile, they want to constantly attack with their guns on the ground. They don’t camp up above the missle or any other high spot & won’t offer me defense if I’m being attacked.

(Bettik) #7

I would just like to point out that perhaps it is the friendly bots that revive to early which is the problem. Remember that you don’t have to revive right away once receiving the syringe.

(system) #8

Yeah you’re perfectly fine as long as you don’t encounter the guy you’re disguised as. This guy always spots me as soon as I come across him, but I think that’s fine.

I general I think the AI on the players’ team doesn’t concentrate on main objectives enough. For example when you have to stop the security from planting a charge and you stay away for a moment (for finding a mine, etc.) the security almost immediately gets the charge planted.
Though if you stay around fighting them off, your AI mates do support you well.

(Indolo) #9

[QUOTE=The Happy Friar;312597]While playing SP last night on the security mission with the SSM I decided to change it to “easy” to see if it would be easier to win the map. Fixing the crane was no big deal (I was an engy & there were two others) but for hacking the missile, that became impossible:
I started as an engy to do defense. I went ~8 minutes w/o dying at the missile controls but no covert ops would bother hacking for the most part, and if they did they would switch to their gun & fire instead of hack. It got to 48% hacked then I decided to change to covert ops to hack. My team offered no defense: no turrets were made, no mines planted, my team always ran after AI, never staying in the area to defend like they did with the crane. The other team easily removed the hack device & it never got above 5% as long as I was a covop.

It looks like they don’t think they should defend the actual area with the missile, they want to constantly attack with their guns on the ground. They don’t camp up above the missle or any other high spot & won’t offer me defense if I’m being attacked.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I can’t complete this mission solo as rank 3 operative/soldier on normal difficulty. On the crane construct objective, the AI team is too busy running from one barricade to the next and ignores the primary objective. They blow up one barricade, and then rush to blow up the second one, at which point the first is rebuilt and they’re running back and forth. I have to switch to engineer and I haven’t seen any friendly engineers show up to help me complete the first objective. If one barricade is down, they should be supporting the primary objective.

If I can get to the second objective, there’s no way I can hack it. Problems already described above.

(burawura) #10

The main thing I don’t like about the AI is it’s tendency to clump together especially in chokepoints. The AI also seems to have no qualms about entering an cqc area with a large clump of enemy AI and the results are a big mess. If the AI could be set to keep spread out abit whenever possible, wait abit for the friendly unit ahead to move through the chokepoints, and be less likely to rush enemy-held chokepoints, this would help alot with the gameplay against the AI.

(xTengoku) #11

In the last minute of a game. Enemy AI get really good, while friendly AI get really bad.
There have been countless games where I’m defending an objective where the enemy can’t even get close and suddenly 1min on the clock to go, the enemy rolls my team, kills me, sets the bomb(etc), AND defends it. All the while, my team begins running into rooms one by one or not going near the objective together, etc.

AI have outrageous reaction times. I’ll shoot and they’ll do a 180 and kill me in the next second.

AI accuracy is like an aimbot.

(3Suns) #12

NOTE: These are general but concrete points that I believe should be the same on the PC and the 360. Regardless, I have purchased five 360 copies of the game, and I am not going to let my feedback get buried in the main forum. Apologies in advance if this is problematic.

Overall, our experience with the AI has been very mixed. Sometimes they help by doing the primary objective and help us when we are incapped etc., and other times, they run right by.

As for concrete feedback, the following is a consensus complaint from my community of Brink gamers. Furthermore, it has been punctuated around the web, including mention by Garnett Lee from Shacknews in his Weekend Confirmed #60 Podcast criticizing and praising Brink.

  1. Enemy AI Our single biggest problem with the AI is that they seem to be bullet sponges that can absorb many rounds from us, but then take us down with 2 or 3 shots. Perhaps this is because many of them run around with shotguns, I don’t know. Stupid AI is frustrating. Invincible and all-powerful AI is enraging.

  2. Friendly AI The second biggest complaint we have (having beat the AI on Hard, i.e., having spent considerable time with the AI) is that they are programmed to go after the Command Posts when we are trying to take the Primary objective. We need their help at the primary objective! There should be a limit on how many Friendly AI go for the Command posts - like only 1 or 2. Command Posts help (and perhaps as we get better at the game, their importance will become more evident - and the netvars can be tweaked again) but right now, it is very frustrating to hear about your AI having just secured a CP, when you have no back up at the Primary.

One final thing, Splash Damage, please consider that the settings you should use now may be very different from the settings should use xx months from now. Everyone is learning the game. We haven’t all put 100s of hours into it like the testers. Just like Valve didn’t release “Realism” mode for L4D because the game was simply too difficult, yet added it in L4D2 because people understood the main concepts etc. Some of your release settings I think were designed for best experience after people are more familiar and experienced with the game.

(BioSnark) #13

Oh, hai thar ai constructive feedback thread. My suggestion may be fairly radical. I had some other suggestions a long while ago but it’s probably way too late to implement those so forgetting that, here’s my suggestion for making AI fun… and not feel like a multiplayer game without players. This is for singleplayer and coop only.

Double the number of enemy bots and reduce their health and damage dealt to around half the current. This might possibly be applicable to vs. multiplayer but it’s really not necessary, there. The point is to make the player(s) and their team have a higher than 1 to 1 kill death ratio without sacrificing balance or having the feeling that the rest of the team is useless.

On that last point, friendly bots should be more deferential to players (and NOT NERF’d except in numerical comparison, if you want to dynamically adjust difficulty during mission, do it using enemy bot health/damage or even enemy bot numbers. Do NOT use intelligence/tactics level as seems to be the case, now). If a player is an objective class, one or two should switch to medic and guard the player. They should always priorities players for buffs, revives and possibly ai medics should keep an energy pip open for revives if a player is nearby.

I knew there was prerelease talk of making singleplayer/coop not player-centric and it’s not fun because fighting aimbot fillers does not replace the experience of fighting people. Cannon fodder works better in just about every other sp/coop game out there. L4D coop works because the AI zombie specials are not symmetrical to the players’ team. They respawn and are supported by or, perhaps more accurately, are backup for the zombie fodder.

To restate, summitry means bots aimbot to compensate for their faults, player’s ai is useless or both. It isn’t fun like that, how it is now. Don’t sacrifice entertainment to ‘train/transition’ sp players to get into multiplayer because they won’t want to play mp if it isn’t fun. It’s training enough if they know how to work with their team to do objectives.

(EnderWiggin.DA.) #14

I played around with bots in ETQW and Brink quite a bit. Is the AI for the bots in Brink based on Maleficus’ work or something new? If it’s Maleficus’ work, it makes me wonder if the AI works better for open maps rather than close quarters maps.

-Brink bots tended to take the main route too much and clustered at choke points. I think they are better now.

-Bots should say when they are out of charge. Example. Medic standing right next to you doesn’t throw syringe. It should say “charging my syringe” or something to let players know why it isn’t helping. This would be awesome for regular play as well. I know it says “sorry can’t make it” if it dies.

-bot fireteams. Bots should form 2-3 man fireteams and invite the players in as well. Players should not have to accept. Also, the bots should adjust their classes to support whatever class the human has chosen based on the current objective. If human chooses, the objective class, bots could support as medic or soldier. Although we may need more than one hack guy. Hacking is sloooooow. Need bot logic to adjust as human players join the fireteam.
Bto fireteams have two payoffs. 1)lets players know there are fireteams. 2) Would make it easier to designate bots which stick closer to human players. Playing a team game AS a team is funner. Bots that act like friends and stick together could make solo play better. I don’t know what to say about when the player takes a route that a heavy bot can’t take. The bots don’t have to stay on my ass, but withing a reasonable radius. If I go to the right of the map, they should try routes on the right of the map too.

-bots suck at hacking. I swear they never get there because they seem to choose the path in which they have to fight.

-I would argue bot_aimskill 2 isn’t that hard. I have tried using bot_aimskill 3 but I think it might be crashing my server so I stopped using it.

-I would also argue that si_botdifficulty isn’t that hard either. Mainly the thing that makes it hard is that the friendly bots aren’t/weren’t as good at supporting as the defending bots were at guarding choke points. I think this might just relate back to my first point.

Edit: Bad English day. Please just point and laugh.

(HeadStrikeRx) #15
  • Bots take way too long to fire

The last match i hacked the door on containercity and a bot just watched me. It’s not only this scenario, even if they are in group it seems they have troubles to find a target efficiently and fast, like a good player would.

(McAfee) #16

Please make difficulty levels standard across the board.

Challenges:
They should have locked and predictable difficulty. There is no reason a person who finished the campaign first and then jumped to the challenges should have such a bad time compared to those who tried the challenges first. I haven’t done the 3-stars yet but what does this make of the leaderboards? Anyone can create a new character and finish them easy?

Campaign:
First of all Easy should be “Easy” and hard should be “Hard” (obvious no?). If the easiest level is not easy enough even for the most inexperienced person, then there should be a “Very Easy” option. And if the Hard is not challenging enough for the pros add an “Insane” option.

In other words, I rather have 5 standard/predictable levels. Then 3 levels that vary wildly. Some people claim their first mission on “Hard” was pretty easy, but now that they’ve ranked up, they are having problems on the “Easy” difficulty. Maybe add a “My Skill” option in addition to locked difficulty settings.

Try changing one AI not both, per difficulty change. There should be a minimum to how useless the ally AI is. Even when playing on an “Insane” difficulty level. The friendly AI should be at least close to average.

Players don’t really keep a close eye on how each individual enemy class is performing, but they do keep an eye on allies. And it gets frustrating when the allies playing the other classes are useless. You can loose, but feel your team tried and put up a good fight. Or you can loose and be frustrated that the only one on your team doing something was You. That applies to human games too, but would be nice to keep the feeling away from Solo games with bots.

So assuming the bots can scale between 4 difficulties (0=easy 1=medium 2=expert 3=master):


V.Easy: Allied(2) vs Enemy(0) <-- optional
Easy  : Allied(1) vs Enemy(0)
Medium: Allied(1) vs Enemy(1)
Hard  : Allied(1) vs Enemy(2)
Insane: Allied(1) vs Enemy(3)

Alternate Layout:


V.Easy: Allied(2) vs Enemy(0)
Easy  : Allied(2) vs Enemy(1)
Medium: Allied(2) vs Enemy(2)
Hard  : Allied(2) vs Enemy(3)
Insane: Allied(1) vs Enemy(3) <-- optional

Notes:

[ul]
[li]Notice Allied team is pretty consistent across skill levels for both layouts. Or you can just strip out the row where it changes.
[/li][li]I’ve kept the medium option matched on both layouts, but since perceived difficulty may vary, the allied column could all be raised by 1, or lowered by 1.
[/li][/ul]

(Faux) #17

Ah, just the thread I was looking for. After playing a round tonight with an all bot team on Easy as Security at Shipyard and watching my bots flail around for 8 minutes before losing, I think I can have some feedback. I’ll break it up into Friendly AI, Enemy AI, and Map Specific Oddities. (As other posters have done.)

  1. Friendly AI.
  • The AI feels anemic and wholly outclassed by the enemy AI. If I review the XP, the enemy team typically has 1.5x to 2x (I even saw 3x tonight) higher XP on average than friendly bots.
  • Medics seem schizophrenic about resurrecting players. Sometimes they’ll suicidally rush into a hail of bullets to attempt to save me and die in the process, and other times they’ll run within 10ft of me and ignore me entirely.
  • Friendly engineers build guns in inappropriate places. This is usually map-dependent, but on attack/defend maps when we’re the attacking team, my bots seem to deploy guns way back in our lines - where they’re totally ineffective.
  • Friendly bots are suicidal. This will be addressed in greater detail in my Map Specific section, but all too often I will watch friendly bots run right into withering enemy fire or fortified enemy positions and die immediately. They’ll run in piecemeal instead of in a group, die, respawn, and run right back in.
  • As mentioned, friendly bots seem to love capturing command posts way too much; especially when no progress is being made on the main objective. I can understand if they capture command posts when it’s safe to do so, but when the team isn’t making any headway, we need those extra bodies.
  • Friendly bots sometimes take way too long to recognize an enemy. I’ve seen enemy bots run right past friendly bots and neither open fire on each other. (This is more of a general AI problem.)
  • Sometimes friendly bots don’t complete objectives. (Another poster mentioned a lone operative bot refusing to hack the Resistance missile battery and instead preferred to fire his gun.)

Enemy AI

  • The enemy AI feels like they have much higher damage resistance than they should. (I can put entire clips of SMG fire into enemies and maybe down one of them.)
  • The ‘snap headshot’ trick enemy AIs pull when they’re about to be killed is positively infuriating.
  • Enemy bots with tier 4 and tier 5 abilities are downright annoying. Every damn Operative explodes, almost everyone has Downed Fire (the most annoying of them all), and enemy Medics resurrect way more people than they should be able to.
  • Enemy Lights have a habit of barreling into you then running back and forth right on top of your model as they shoot you to death. This makes it extremely difficult to hit them as they move from behind in front of to behind you rapidly. It’s irritating as hell.
  • Enemy bots have happy feet and run around like spazzes while firing. (I mean running back and forth, two steps one direction, fire two shots, three steps another direction, fire another shot… they seem like drug addicts or something. And yes, I know about the ‘Move more than you shoot’ thing, but this is not in that spirit.)
  • Enemy bots seem to cheat a lot more when they’re about to lose a match. They begin getting more headshots, doing more damage, taking less damage, and rush points en masse. It also feels like they respawn quicker than they should be able to.
  • Enemy bots use flashbangs way too much. I can appreciate having them use interesting gear, but flashbang spam is one of the most annoying things in the game.
  • Enemy bots target prioritize against the player way more than they should. I’ve seen enemy bots getting shot from multiple sides randomly decide to single me out to shoot at even though I’m just running by. (It’s also worth mentioning friendly bots don’t seem to care if an enemy bot is attacking the player; even if that enemy is standing very close by.)

Map Specific Oddities

  • On attack/defend map segments, the defenders almost always slaughter the attackers. (If it’s bots v. bots.) I think this is largely because the enemies congregate in the area they need to defend (as you’d expect), but attacking bots just run in one by one and are gunned down immediately.
    ** I particularly dread several of the Security campaign maps as they are extremely hard attack/defend ones. (I cringe every time Shipyard starts and I’m on Security as it feels like the Resistance bots cheat much harder there for some reason.)
  • Resistance bots on Refuel feel largely ineffective compared to their Security counterparts. The Security bots are all over the map, getting kills like mad, but Resistance bots always seem to run around in odd places, take strange routes, and get their asses kicked by superior Security numbers. This is particularly evident around the airplane you have to refuel. Security locks that place down and I have not once seen Resistance bots ever assail it successfully.
  • Bots carrying intelligence should stick with other bots, but instead just run like mad to the objective. (Usually resulting in their death.)

That’s as much as I can think of right now. Basically, I wish friendly AI was more competent and I wish enemy AI didn’t have to cheat as much.

(Djean) #18

My feelings about the AI are a bit mixed. I usually play on Normal, so in combat the enemies let themselves be mowed down, which is satisfying. However they can become quite challenging by keeping me from completing objectives, though I feel like that has more to do with my allied bots not giving me enough cover. I’d like to see the allied bots in a stronger supporting position towards human players. I don’t want them to do too much, but now most of the time I feel like I really have to do everything on my own: shoot down all enemies by myself, try to do objective, hope enemies down come back before I finish, because my bots won’t save me.

Another thing I noted, was that the way the game gets harder doesn’t feel to be in proportion to the number of human players. Sometimes I feel like I’d be better off doing a mission by myself, because when playing with friends, enemies seem to get tougher, while allies seem to get even less motivated . That’s a shame, because it doesn’t promote playing the game with others.

Overall I think I would like the allied bots to be stronger.
Is there already a way to regulate how good the bots on a specific side are?

(crazyfoolish) #19

I think that since bots don’t seem to want to let you and the rest of the bot team support them while they complete the objective, they should nearly all support you. The experience would be similar to having a large bodyguard following you around and defending you as you complete objectives. That said, i don’t have much experience playing offline.

(Bettik) #20

This is a very good point that I would just like to reinforce.