yes

Just have some do rainbows and some do actual strats :P shouldnt be that hard. If you can code a random factor in it could be 20% chance of building res or indies or somesuch.

honest opinion (no offence intended here...).

I don't think people (e.g. llaar with that FFA thing a while back) who have known links with cheating and abusing the gameplay mechanics of earth:2025 or Earth:empires should be allowed to have any input with these bots period. How can we trust people we KNOW deliberatly knowingly tolerated cheating in the past?

Ozzite you appear to just not get it. It's to be frank dis-respectful to introduce bot run countries to the server. It's a slap in the face and will drive a wedge between the recently clean clans/players and those who fought against bots and were clean all game.

Add to that, i think Rockman's points are also valid, unless you can guarentee that bots will act like players, suicide/missile like players, alter strategies like players, and react like a human mind, you might as well just add another explore option, since that's pretty much what your doing.

The more i think about it, the more i realise it's not a good idea at all.



And if it IS implemented, then the admins should drop them in, without letting anyone know, in small numbers first, AND NO ADMIN/DEV CAN BE ACTIVE INGAME OR IN THEIR ALLIANCE DURING THIS SET.

It would be an absolute traversty if someone who was helping dev the bots allowed their alliance to gain from them ahead of others, and would drive such a huge wedge of mis-trust between Admins and admin alliances and those ingame without admin's in their presence.. to a point where the game would disintegrate.

don't really necessarily agree with this. i'm pretty sure the admins can do much worse right now with the info they have. ultimately most of us trust the admins, bots or not.

DL i dont see why that would be necessary. none of the admins have ever done anything to make us think they would use the knowledge of the bots to an unfair advantage, especially when they could just as easily go into the database and add whatver resources they wanted to thier countries to gain advantage. id even go as far to say they would probably refrain from touching the bots at all.

DL, perhaps you should learn to trust these admins. They admit to their mistakes. They already have all the info you could want if they were to try to get their alliance a lead. A bot would do nothing more for them.

A slap in the face? Its time to get over past issues. You accept the bot runners and known cheaters playing(havnt done anything to stop them anyways) so this shouldn't be anywhere near as bad as that.

These bots are meant to be different and are simply meant to bolster the amount of land and give separate options for grabbers to grab, rather then do this retarded land trading stuff going on.

I would support this on a short term basis, till we hit X number of alliances and X number of members, then they are dopped except to continue abandoned countries.

I would also like to suggest that I know it'd be impossible to enforce, that we encourage the larger alliances not to hit the bots, but maybe smaller alliances, though I know that can't be done.



apporiate tags,

Vingthor
Delitez

we could be like the old 1A and EC servers...

have an alliance server for those that don't like bots, which would basically replace TEAM server, and then have another alliance server for those that wants to play with bots

The more i read, the less i like the idea.
Mainly because of the idea of allowing a person known to cheat/tolerate it, anywhere close to development or testing..
Ridiculous.

I actually agree... lets give RD another chance to run bots. I had forgot about the RD factor about bringing bots to the game.

we should so evo could camp the bots out of DR all day long? and ofcorse be the main gain of it?

terrible idea.

I think everyone spouting that it is a slap to the face and cheating is a kind of overreacting. This is really a game element they are proposing not a someone cheating.

They are asking the community for help. If poeple have knowledge on building bots help. Like it or not poeple who used bots or programs in past have some useful knowledge. If admins are comfortable using them I trust their judgment.

This is an effort by admins to try and make changes to the game to improve the environment. The Admins care about the game and they actively work to stop cheating. It may work it may not but at least they are trying.

p.s. i AM extremely biased on this issue btw.

SMz is right...

It's a game element that can easily be manipulated for free easy land by those in the know about how the bots operate and are programmed.

DL I respect u a whole lot but I think ur overreacting a bit here. Just b/c the word bot can describe what the admins are proposing and what use to haunt the 1A server in no way means they are really at all similar...

they might not be, but the symbolic meaning for me, is alot.

Hell i would even appreciate use of an alternate term.

These bots destroyed my alliance, one of my closest allies alliances and people who did this i have made peace with and respect for coming clean. However use of the word bots brings back bad memories.

Also i think that other points that have been brought up by some netgainers and others in here that i have also higlighted are reason enough to be cautious

I'd def. support calling them something else, I agree the name is a bit tainted...

e.g. in what way will bringing free land to the server improve the experience?

all it does is add 10k to the average players land total at the end of the set...

p.s. i'm not claiming to be unbiased a judge on this issue btw.

Plus i'm also not really the people that the admins should be targetting with most changes/additions anyway! =D

I don't see the negatives of grabbing 'Auto' land being any different than farming small alliances. Anyone who can will exploit them both equally.

But I do see the positives.

also think about strat balancing.

How would the introduction of large amounts of free land adversely affect the current strategy mix?

allowing farmers and cashers to get easy free land

I would stay away from past alliance names. ALso, make the bot a bit random, one in four chance of getting some kind of legit hit back.. So there is some risk

I don't see any downside. It will create a further gap between all-x and grabbing play sstyles which should be the case.

The bot countries are run by admins, they're just looking for knowedgable people to help the coding, if I am not mistaken? WIll also take pressure off of small alliances, and new players.

the reason to do this is so that the weakest untagged or tagged alliances can have a better experience since then they may not be the first choice to get land from

since if its not coming from exploring it has to come from someone

in the old days the land came from bots multies and new players all of which no longer exist in anywhere near the numbers or proportion they did

locket i trust the admins, i don't trust "others" helping with the coding.

infact if only pang was in charge i would be alot happier:p

what abouti if the code was public but no one knew which country used which code?

or if the code was semi public?

or if the code was private but only trusted people were allowed to submit it or it was tweaked before becoming active to be a little less easy to abuse or obvious which one was which?

or if people could only code growth patterns and retal behaviour was admin decided?

I honestly don't know.

As long as these issues are thought out and properly considered.

Like i said before, changing my mind on this issue is prob not a high priority for the admins since it will be so difficult to do due to previous bias.

I'm sure they'll be cautious DL. But how doesn't it help the issue of land? Laf alone has a lot of people I know would grab if there were more then 20 countries total to grab for the whole server not in other tags. If there were 100 untaggeds to grab you would see a lot more people doing what they actually want to do.


Lets call them skynet or cyborg countries? :P

the bots should be limited to netting and exploration only :)

If someone gets offended because they used to fight bots run by RD or whoever, and now bots are added to create land, I don't even know what to say to them. Are you really that slow?

I am also in complete support of this having nothing to do with alliance server. Clearly a decent portion of you are too stupid to comprehend the difference between bots run against you and bots run for you.

Make a new server with bots and see how people like it.

I think DLance has taken one too many Facebook Drama pills lately.

Bots back in the day, versus bots now, are two seperate topics. Unless the game admins are going to be blindsiding alliances randomly, then I see no issue with it.

I remember getting botted by RD, and how much of a fluff it was to war them. But it's not going to repeat itself. Stop whining.

when I say bots, I mean the same thing as CS bots, goldeneye bots, etc
bots is just the actual term I best equate to something being run using an AI. I write bots all the time for work/school stuff, Googlebot visits this site often (it's probably here right now.... shhh), no issues :p

but like I said earlier, this post was mainly to check whether there was a ton of support for adding in even the simplest AI elements to make the server more attractive for new, inexperienced players and small clans. There was a mixed reaction, so we'll keep going with our original plans to do a ton of development and testing and make some complex AI countries. :)

I'm still in favor of adding a 'solo' server, where you can net/fight/interact with bots. Could be slightly randomized. This would allow you to play all your turns immediately and the bots would evolve as you play.

This might be more complex, but it would definitely be great training for new players and would provide some of the people who are bored and want to play turns immediately with some entertainment. I haven't played in a long time, since it's too demanding in time, but I would come back to play this.

Maybe (long shot), it would be possible to have a couple of players who are online play in one game against bots (you get 10 turns, then have to wait until others play turns or give up, or stop taking turns for longer then... 5 minutes?). That would be neato!

i like to call the google bot a spider, at least thats what i remember the altavista one being called which was the first search engine to do that

on the other hand people to use the robots.txt file to talk to them these days which would imply calling them robots


also once bots work fine there really should be an offline version of the game included in an android/iphone/winmob application

maybe even symbian maemo meego or whatever the other os's are current and x64/x86

seems like more support it then not pang :P

lets try it. if it seams like it is not working then they go.

don't be so afraid of change.

you can mental masturbate all day and night over it, but i want to see it in action before i pass judgment.

p.s my mamma told me too much masturbation makes you go blind.

locket didn't i see a pic of you with thick glasses?

masturbation makes u happy, not blind.

lol did you actually see a pic of me zip? :P i dont wear thick glasses no :P

just the one lady d gave me

i think complex AI countries bring alot more to the table and are worth the effort pang!

who knows.. one day you could make what becomes skynet ;-)

I thought that was how it happened :P I was always fairly closely guarded about anything from RL myself.. lol



And DL I think Watson from jeapordy or the robot that went with the shuttle today are the start of that :P google them if you must

i think bots could be good if done right

for, as long as bottom feeding on them wasn't profitable - retals ranging from nothing to random individual suiciding on the tag that hit them to a swarm (5 or 6) hitting that tag. Basically, have them handle retals like HAN - unpredictable so there is enough risk to deter experienced players from gaining an advantage by hitting them.

Don't tag them, vary them enough that a simple spy op can't tell you if the country is a bot or not, and we get to encourage mid-feeding, while making a survivable environment for new players.

GLORY TO HAN!

I think the implementation of an AI would just increase the activity of what is left of the player base, so thats a good thing. It would definately have to not be free land, there would have to be some form of human like reaction to being attacked.


I think if there was an AI it would allow for smaller start up alliances to succeed more, which imo would be the most important factor involved. Right now start up alliances really cant do anything unless they start up at above 20-30 members...

lol locket, i read a time article about AI development, mentioned the jeopardy computer. Was fairly amusing.

If we buy into the theory that new players create untaggeds and quit because they get farmed, adding bots will not necessarily improve the situation for them. Gains from recruiting will be lower if we add in bots and players aren't going to feel any guilt about farming what they think is a bot country.

With that said, I'm not exactly sure why you guys want the bots to be able to do amazing things. If they play better than a new player, why isn't that good enough?

Make it so the bots are more likely to retaliate multi taps?

you can always just add enough bots that theres no reason to hit the new untagged players 30 times a day