It doesn’t have to be effective, aimed fire, but bots should shoot at the general area of markers placed. Right now, I can’t tell what actually gets a bot to stop, aim, and fire at something, but it’s not reliable and it’s usually, to my observation, close distance.
If I’m supposed to be leading a squad, the markers I place are the best I can do to tell my AI there’s contact over there. The bots should shoot at any targets they can actually see, or supress in that direction if they don’t have a clear LOS.
The bots actually focus and prioritize marks but if you test it in the practice range, it takes seconds for them to “lock on” so to speak. This reality is the current state of the bots. They will return fire and shoot quite accurately but their reaction time is a lot slower than aware players
Actually AI will focus on an area that you or others mark. Making them more likely to shoot at enemies in that rough location.
Its only effective up to a certain range, as otherwise they are far too effective. There are already issues where they will shoot through bushes and such, even without markers. IF they extended that range, it would be strongest to hang in the back of the map with a 9 man rifleman squad with bolt-actions and a pair of binoculars. Needless to say, that would not be good for the game.
Yeah, that wouldn’t be great, but also having 30-80 dumb bots on each team doesn’t do much other than provide extra lives and cannon fodder for the players isn’t ideal. There’s a lot of resources that go into making the bots perks and equipment better, they need to be more than what they currently are, within reason.
I wasn’t thinking long-range accurate rifle fire, I’m thinking supression. Honestly, this occurred to me while using an engineer to man an HMG while my LMG armed bots just stand there and watch. Would be nice to get them to at least supress an area on command.
Press and hold - place marker AND order your squad suppression fire on that spot (bots target the area with a higher volume of fire, aggro actual targets slightly better, at the cost of a reduced peripherical awareness in the meantime), effect lasting 10 seconds or so.
I made a suggestion a while ago to give us a separate keybind to mark separately for your own squad. I have a play style where I sometimes mark for my AI but not for the team
One of the other major issues here is that currently, the bots don’t run out of ammo. They use a mag, reload, but the mag is replaced when its an AI in control.
That’s a major issue when talking about bots using suppression fire. If it were players there would at least be a short break to grab ammo, but that’s not a thing for the AI. So unless you add in that and make AI use ammo boxes when low (and give the points for such), then I’m going to have to say no.
This would be huge, imagine if we could control them like the brothers in arms games. That would be so massive. It would be best if you could point at an infantry unit and they would fire at it. Plain and simple. This alone would make the game absolutely incredible and many more would stick with it. It would also be ideal to have it so that the infantry could take cover using a cover mechanic(leave it so the player is just like a normal shooter, but give ai a gears of war style cover system on things like sandbags and inside buildings). This would just make this game skyrocket in quality and the development time to get this done is 100% worth it for the devs, this would make a significant increase in player interest, no doubt in my mind. The #1 complaint is that the ai don’t serve a purpose and this would completely change that.
i do wish that when bot turn and look at the marker, they can actually react fast to a close enough enemy, and slowly be more aware at farther enemy after that.
unlike now where it doesn’t matter if it’s in their face or 100 m away.
