Make it so that bots try to keep up with you with how fast your going

[MorNloR]

make it so that bots try to keep up with you with how fast your going, aka sprinting when you’re sprinting, sprinting than running to keep up with you, just like irl, when a soldier sees their commander run and they are far away, they immediately try to keep up the pace

[Vyury]

I think it’s more of a route optimization thing rather than a speed thing, as if I run on flat terrain, all bots with similar stats manage to keep the pace and aren’t very far behind. Problems start when I pick a more adventurous route with rocks, heights and windows in my path. While I blitz parkour over a trench and two windows, bots in the meantime get to the trench, stop to think, climb over it and then take a detour through doors 10 meters away, and as a result they start lagging behind.

[TimTaine]

Definitely - bots as a rule should just copy you. You run - they run, you shoot - they shoot, you take cover - they take cover. If I stop and ADS, they should also stop BEHIND me, not wander in front.

Unless they’ve been given a specific instruction.

[Luvs2spooge]

My squad bots are always dead 20 seconds after I spawn, so keeping up is not an issue with me. LOL Of course when they aren’t dead, they do their best to get in between myself and the enemy I am trying to shoot, or crawl in front of me when I am laying down trying to hide thus giving my position away.

[Widar_Thule]

@Vyury

I think it’s more of a route optimization thing rather than a speed thing, as if I run on flat terrain, all bots with similar stats manage to keep the pace and aren’t very far behind.

I do not think route optimization has anything to do with it.

Setup a 10 versus 10 Custom Match in Enlisted on the Omer map, which is a mostly intact flat urban map, with a password so that you are the only human in the match.

Then, instead of actually playing the Custom Match to win, observe and study the AI squads, both the friendly and enemy ones. You will see that even the fully AI controlled Enlisted squads have this weird feature that they always advance in column (so in an “idiot” row, one behind the other) and that the first soldier in the AI squad (let us call him the squad leader for simplicity’s sake) is always running way ahead of the rest of his AI squad. If he is killed the second soldier takes the lead and he again will be running way ahead of the rest of his AI squad.

Then take a look at the comparatively superb AI, so compared to the AI in Enlisted, in the by now old game “Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising”. In that game, as in the even older Panzer Elite, the AI soldiers respectively vehicles can even move in formation IN FRONT of the formation leader in an inverted V formation, and they will generally stay in formation, no matter what. The AI in those games are able to do that both in fully AI controlled squads/units and in human controlled squads/units. And they even communicate to the human player in what direction the enemy is and at what range.

I put some YouTube links to those games in this post so that you can see what the AI can do in those old games, :

Authentic AI

In my opnion it is best to focus first and foremost on what makes Enlisted unique and improve that, in other words to focus on the must-have instead of the should-have or nice-to-have. For me the overriding factor what sets Enlisted apart from other WW2 FPS online MMO games is the AI squad system. A fairly unique feature of Enlisted is that the human player is supposed to be the Squad Leader of an AI squad. For that to be authentic the AI squad needs to become “smarter” and “more human”. The…

If all that is possible in those old games, then it can be done in Enlisted as well.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

[Vyury]

Probably should word it better. Yeah, the bots are always a step behind, they take a second to start following after players book it. What I exactly meant is that that gap doesn’t widen, they might be 5 meters behind, but will always be these 5 meters behind. And if you run with a class that is on average slower (MG/AT) they even catch up. Unless you take any kind of moderately challenging route. Then they start to lag behind.

OP initially suggested that this is because they can’t run, which was a problem before, but isn’t now. The true problem is that they can’t run smart.

The route optimization I mentioned is part of the AI problem. They always pick the shortest path to target in their navmesh. Or at least the one AI think is (ignoring the fact that it has bushes, barbed wire and machinegun in the way). This also causes the AI to conga line, they all pick the same route. It also works poorly with environmental obstacles. Trench, player will jump over it, AI either walk around or walk into one and then climb out, losing time. Same with windows. Player will jump early and get through it faster, and AI will either ignore windows and search for the door (which mostly ends in their death) or if they somehow acknowledge the window, first they need to walk to it, stop and then climb. And let’s not forget different shortcuts players will take, but not bots, just because it’s not in their navmesh.

If I had to think of a way to improve that, I would probably make it so that AI can parrot player movements, moving slightly outside their navmesh, and act quicker between actions, without stopping to “think”.

The problem is, I don’t know how feasible it is with the current developer (do they have the skill to do it?), software (can Dagor support this?) and hardware (will server hamster live through this?). Just because it was done before, doesn’t mean it can be done now, with different circumstances than in the past.