Against bots.

Like real life, allow us to sell land on the public market.

Bots would be cool but it would have to be a very slick bot to not be abused by certain people/clans.

they need to be able to retal, wall, suicide (if provoked, not random). main problem is there are certain people who will camp the bots because they have no lives and will keep them in DR's for thier own benefit. if you add a retalling/suiciding aspect to this it might help, but then you will have other clans who will farm a country one time then kill it off before it can do anything back, which is unfair to the rest of the server.

basically the bot would need to be able to build a VERY solid country, matter fact it should have some additional advantages over the normal player, such as starting with some additional military, having someone kind of additional defensive bonuses, etc. to keep it from being vulnerable to people farming it and such.

wow super cool idea. we should be able to sell missiles on the market too? chems would go for probably 10 million a pop.

can you imagine a week 4-5 war being able to buy chems at 10mil a pop? an FS would include about 70 chems per country lol.

i do like the idea of buying and selling land as long as its done in a way that cannot be abused.

Adding bots would probably benefit netting clans more than warring
Clans. Personally I am against DR'ing neutrals into the ground but many aren't.

It could be a good idea for taking over abandonned countries or even add a story element about skynet.

The real issue is if you allow certain bots that virtually gives justification for other bots to return. This could/would cause a spiralling decay of the game. How would you keep other bots out?

The justification for farming neutrals out of the game is "you suck if you don't dr them into the ground"

It will simply be adjusted to "you suck if you don't get free land off bots"

Id be curious to see what happens with them.

Problem I see with bots is how you model bots to react. Are they purely passive or do they actively attack?
It gets hit 20 times by a country in Tag X. Does it retal country or retal someone in tag X ? When does it use specialty attacks or does it do them at random.

If Bots defend themselves. I don't see a scenario where they don't all get killed. Like what happens to untags now who give any kind of resistance.

If they are aggressive I see them getting killed and then being back to farmland as restarts.

If they are passive farm land it doesn't do much. If that is the case give everyone 200 acres instead of 20 a day.

If the idea is to artificially create land via the bots it doesn't make sense. You have to control to much of what it does. If adding land is your goal setting up system where you can buy/sell land might make more sense but that would dramatically change the game.

i want an answer too!!!

also i think the land selling thing could be better then bots.

I am against bots. Earth is like a poker game. Right now there are 52 cards in the deck. All making bots would do is add more cards. Right now 50k land is a huge amount of land. Making it to where 100k land does not make the game better. Its still the same game with the same principles. I say no to the bots.

denied!

it will be very difficult for me to not become a cynical annoying bastard if bots are introduced.

I spent years fighting against bots, some run/tolerated by many people who still play the game today, and to see the re-introduction of mechanical countries into the game will make me feel very sad about what was done to my alliance, and a few of my friends alliances by a select few ego-maniacs.

bad memories.

Im kind of on the fence.

If they can be made to be competitive, then it might work... but is that even possible? (Im not a bot maker, wouldnt even know where to start) If it is, then I'd be more open minded about it.

If you increase the ammount of farmland, then people will stop grabbing eachother, and opt for the easier gain. This would dumbdown/take away a major competitive aspect of the game (along with organized land trading, but thats another debate :P).

I'd still topfeed

DO THIS NOWA!

about the camping bots into dr thing

the obvious solution to that is tune the number of bots, if they are almost all at 0 dr because you have 100k you can delete some

if they are perma camped because you have 10 only you can make some more

you could even make it so bots were tracked by type and those being farmed too much were made more of and those never being hit were reduced

although not as much if bots were tagged as if they were untagged, and it would be better to track over the course of sets than days since different things happen at differing points in a set

lots of good points and discussion here :)

i don't see an overwhelming opinion in any direction, which means we'll take some more time to consider everything if and when bots are introduced to this server

I wonder if anyone will have the time/will to code AI elements that are as complex as the stuff that is being talked about on here and was talked about on the AI board q:p

against

so many reasons this could be bad

no

yes...we need more land

How are people who have complained about a lack of land saying no? There is no reason it should be a telltale sign that a country is a bot or whether it will retal or not. It would allow any clan to at least have a shot at playing a bit more as they want and the whining about bottomfeeding could go down. Less landgrabs on clans is a good thing. It isn't like it would stop completely.

Pang, save yourself time and effort and allow RD to flourish once more.

Yes. But be cautious, do not call them bots. They should be called Artificial Players. If you continue to call them bots SoF will get scared and run away to TEQ.

Well I am definitely against it if anyone outside of the Earth admins were allowed to run the bots. But if we get a few bots added that doesnt favour any specific alliance or group of players then I dont mind. Could be fun to see how that works.

I might be able to get some old bot code that was written a good long while ago and was never put to use, it was almost all completed but was mainly built to kill so perhaps not useful. ;)

Yes. PM me their numbers.

for it.


It will make it easier on new players and help retention of players, adds a new element to the game as well.

I wasn't a real big fan of bots back in the Earth 2025 days so i guess i'll be against it.

I think these bots are different than the bots back in the days, they were run just to suicide on certain alliances.

Some were there just for the land, but pang already said he wouldn't do that.

I'm all for more countries in the server, make a few alliances and have them retal people or suicide even so that when you are grabbing a bot, you still need tanks/turrets/SDI.

Maybe have a bot wartag, that wars every set, make it a small tag ;)

When trying to recruit newbs into clans, how should we know who's a bot and who is real? Would be annoying to have to message a crapload of bots just to get one real player.

Hmmm... it might be interesting if we didn't know which were bots and which weren't, and then the bots would generate a random response to being grabbed, with percentages skewing as number of grabs grew higher. Say 30% no response, 50% attempt to landgrab back, 20% other harmful attack. As the number of attacks by a single country or tag grew, the likelihood of other harmful attacks or a PS would grow.

++ agrees to adding bots w/out reading everyone else's posts


(posting for bonus points, im an ass)

on the fence, but leaning against the introduction of bots. i think i could only be for them if they were super intelligent in ways outlined in other posts.

i can't foresee a scenario where they aren't gamed and abused and/or have an adverse effect on the market. it will just continue to polarize the alliances of real players.

make 5-6 untagged nuke bots that track which tags farm them into oblivion, then midset have them inherit 100 nukes and go to town.

People who hear the word bot and say they are automatically against it are, to be quite honest, fluffing retarded. If the admins wanted to kill you all with bots, why the fluff would they even talk to you about it. If you don't trust them to run a game, why are you playing it?

Everyone who said something along the lines of having bad memories needs to use what little bit of brain power they have and realize the difference between people running bots to KILL YOU and people running bots to offer you land, which may not even retal.

We can call it Imag and then they can finally leave the game. It can hit a clan because they smell funny etc

i think the admins should just drop 2-3 of them in the server without telling anyone and monitor them to see how everyone reacts (unknowingly). if it starts to get abused, delete them.

for the bots.

What is considered bot abuse? The entire point of creating them is to generate land! Them getting farmed to fluff should be considered a success. However I think they should be given some basic retalling capabilities or make them hard to break, because it should be land for free.

agree with this...i actually thought some of the untags this set were bots that were being tested.

I like big bots and I cannot lie. I can haz bots? TY.

I actually think having some bot countries could make for a better environment for new players. I don't see the problem with at least testing it out.

The thing is, I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference between bots and real players other than that bots would never reply to messages and real players occasionally reply to messages.

So this is what its come to over here...

So how exactly will hitting bots be different from exploring, aside from the loss of jets from attacking them?

Unless you provide significant variety to their military layouts, and give them the ability to alter their military layout from day to day in an unpredictable manner, then there won't even be a need to spy on a bot country before attacking it.

It will increase the demand for jets, which is a good thing, but hitting a bot will be very little different from hitting the explore button.

Instead, we could just create 2 explore options, one of which is exploration the way it is now, and the other option converts 1 turn + a number of jets at the cost of some readiness & oil into a larger quantity of land than could be gained through exploration.

I'd assume theyd all have different amounts of land based on how much they get grabbed and how successful any retals they might do are giving them different production and different defense.

THE BOTS WILL AUTOMAGICALLY BE PROGRAMMED TO KILL PEOPLE OPPOSED TO BOTS>..THAT IS WHY THE ADMINS ARE MAKING PEOPLE LINK FORUM ACCOUNTS FOR BONUSES> SO THEY CAN KILL PEOPLE WHO BAD MOUTH THEM ON THE FORUMS WITH BOTS!!!!!

That's easy to do. And the intention is that bots will sometimes take retals.

-Fooglmog
Guy with no clue.

y'all weren't ready to start discussing this stuff here IMO

on the AI dev board we have a bunch of ideas, most of which will cover all your concerns

nothing will be released to a main server before its tested in a focus group by non developers if i have any say in the matter :P

hypothetical scenarios: we can make bots retal, farm you, missile retal, all-x, play the market... even message you back if you hit them and ask for FA and if you dont send it they wack with AB's! lol. anything a player can do a bot could potentially do

in my opinion i'd like to see bots that could semi-compete with real players, and make the whole game a lot bigger and harder. none of us have the real time to actually develop AI that will take the top 10 against humans i dont think, we arent IBM lol. its just this shouldnt be about the 'oh more land' concept, b/c doing all this, for just that, would be a tad lame i think.

we've even discussed having different levels of bots, a few lower ones that will be n00bs and farmed, and more sophisticated ones what will give you a run for your money.

i proposed today on the AI dev board:
development -> bot competion -> development after feedback -> test server with real people + bots -> discussion of what happened, and how to proceed -> potential release to a real server

and no one would be "running" the bots

beginning of sets i believe:
1. the game admins would pick X # of scripts
2. assign them to Y # of countries
3. every day they would just run and do what they do

no one would own them or ever login to them.

definitely read my last post on the last page too btw, incase you're just checking this page ;)

Having bots competing for top anything would be ridiculous.

Ultimately a game only functions from player interaction. Bots should perform a temporary role to encourage a healthier playing environment that encourages more people to play. I don't think they should be a permanent part of the game.

I'd create a testing realm thing first.. make sure you can make it to where it'll run properly, retaling, and or just overall playing almost like a player.