Squad AI needs a desperate buff

Suggestions
1

Look, this is going to be a bit of a rant, so I’m sorry if I get a little carried away.

*Rant: The Squadmate AI in this game needs some real help. I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m tired of watching a single player soldier walk into a squad with his bolt action rifle and slowly, one round at a time, sometimes plus a reload, kill an entire squad without the AI even reacting. I’m tired of watching someone lean out a window and blast an entire squad from the flank without the AI making a single shot. I’m so, so tired of watching people run up on a squad, cook a grenade and then toss it, killing most of a squad, without the AI even looking at him. I once watched an AI squad, from a third story floor, watch a lone soldier run past them, plant a TNT on a tank, and run away and detonate it, and only once he had run past them a second time did 1 of the AI finally stand up, turn towards him and fire a single round, before he turned and gunned the squad down. The only time they react at all seems to be when you are close enough to melee, then suddenly they turn to you like a hunter-killer robot, and actively chase you trying to stab you to death.

I’m tired of killing fish in a barrel. I’m tired of beating baby seals without any resistance. The AI needs HELP. Please Devs! Do something!
*Rant Over. Mostly…

**Here’s what I propose, in no particular order:

  1. Increase the AI squadmate’s awareness and reaction speeds. Once a single member of the squad gets killed they either need to turn towards the gunfire, or seek cover, not stand idly in a room next to a window as a sniper picks them off one at a time. Standing next to open windows and dying should not be common place, they need to hit the deck (go prone) or get behind walls or cover opposite to the incoming fire, if not fire back (suppression). Players aren’t going to stand idly by a window as 6 people are picked off through said window and wait for death to take them, too. It kills me to watch a squad basically be nothing more than ‘Extra Lives’ and ‘Free Kills’ for players, when they could easily just take cover and return fire.

  2. Callouts! The squad needs to report movement or incoming gunfire. I’m not saying they should mark tanks, or spot snipers from 500 meters out, but they need to callout when one of their own has died, or when someone has run up next to them and starting firing on the squad. ‘Take cover!’ or ‘Sniper! Get down!’ would be great. Even going prone or running away from grenades, though they will toss them back if given the chance, they need to CALL IT OUT.

  3. Aim and Reactions based on distance and sightlines. They should have a field of view, such as 90 degrees, out to maybe 150m or more, where they fire on enemies they spot. They should obviously turn towards gunfire within 50 meters and look for enemy targets. Especially when taking fire. Suppression fire for SMGs and LMGs, too, not just the 5-round burst I see so commonly.

  4. The AI needs some amount of squad coherence. If you try to tell a squad to get into a room or bunker or house that is too small, they will run outside and stand next to the walls. This causes them to die, often, and even reveal player positions, rally points, and waste tickets. This is absolutely the most horrible thing to watch when you are trying to get your squad inside, and a bombing run is inbound and the suicidal fools won’t come inside to survive, costing lives that could have easily been saved.

***TL;DR- Buff the freaking AI! I’ve been playing this off and on for years and the AI has REMAINED terrible. I’m tired of babysitting my squad. I’m tired of getting 1st place on a team from kills, knowing the vast majority of my kills are from slaughtering squad AI as they stand out in the open and wait to die, whilst the players go prone, get behind sandbags, and try to survive, as their field of view is turned into red mist by exploding AI giblets. And for the love of any god, please let the AI use Anti-tank weapons when ordered to fire on tanks. (Yeah, I get it, costumes, gold tanks and battlepass guns make money, and better AI don’t, but right now ask any player in the game, the AI is a joke. Please, please, work on it.)

17 Likes
2

you are asking too much from devs. start with smaller things… like AI not getting stuck at spawn, or fixing their pathfinding…

only buff they can easily implement is reaction time and aimbot, but then you will get forum flooded with cheater accusations from some player that got shot by a bot through some bush (that was rather often topic before they nerfed the bots).

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However, the features that the OP proposes are features that the game should have had to have.
Most of the features that the OP seems to be asking for were implemented even in Operation flashpoint, the first FPS game I ever played. That was 20 years ago.
24a1ec35037cb7fccf136ad8fe005cc4

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we can talk about everything that the game should have had, but devs cant even fix bots moving to stuff you are building (and getting stuck in them), or bots getting stuck on spawn, or broken pathfinding when bots need to get out of the spawn, or bots moving in front of you when you are shooting, so i dont really have great expectations that they will add bug free features if they add them at all…

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5

Its weird that how bf 1942 has better ai than %90 of modern shooters.
Cant they really or have no intention to do it ?

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To be fair, Battlefield1942’s AI is as good as or a little stupider than Enlisted’s.
They did not communicate with the player in any way and were simple bots that just walked to the CP and killed anyone they encountered there. Enlisted’s bots can do this as well. :laughing:

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7

They make the AI bad on purpose just to make the game more frustrating when you notice your whole squad you had hidden is dead because they love the ai being unable to react to one guy with an SMG.

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8

In fact, I think players have very low requirements for AI.
It’s good to just keep up with the players like CS1.6
But on this point, DF has spent so many years and still hasn’t been able to do it lol

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9

I’d be happy if my AI squadmates would just:

  1. actually follow me, like swimming across a river instead of sometimes taking 200m+ walking detours to a bridge (the crossing of which, to certain death, being what I was trying to avoid in the first place), or going completely around to the opposite (enemy controlled) side of a building to walk in the front door, rather than follow me through a window.

  2. actually respond to enemy fire/presence in their immediate vicinity. A room full of men with guns being methodically knifed to death by a player when I leave them (within the too-short “hold position” tether distance, naturally) is just absurd.

Once they are able to actually pay attention/respond to what’s directly in front of them, a great addition would be to add a direction to the hold position marker (like you can change the facing of engineer-built structures in 90-degree intervals, and then fine tune them by turning), so you can set a “facing” for the squad - a general direction in which they should provide overwatch.

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Funnily enough the BF1942 bots were more aggressive in their combat response when spotting an enemy.

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Are you sure? It was 20 years ago, so I don’t remember much, but I remember them standing bonkers and doing nothing while I was standing right in front of them.

BTW, custom game bots are quicker to react and smarter than public match bots.
I think the public match bots may have been intentionally nerfed, or what we think are bots may not be bots.

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I played BF1942 on and off all the way up to 2016-2018. They certainly were more aggressive and a fair bit more accurate than what the Enlisted bots are capable of right now. The enlisted bots used to be better back in 2021 and 2022 but they were nerfed due to players getting their butts kicked by bots than by other players.

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Btw, I miss the days when you had to buy a CD from a game store and install it.
aka

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it is a very delicate topic, and one that will never satisfy all the community at once.

because, you see, what for YOU might be an idiotic bot squad that is just waiting for you to shoot and wipe the entire squad, for another player, for example a completely new player, might be an insurmountable mountain of extreme difficulty just to aim and kill one bot, with their spasmic and twitchy movement patterns, let alone a squad.

therefore, the bots must be adjusted to behave just a little below the AVERAGE player skill level, else low to mid level of skill players will find bots kill them all the time, are impossible to deal with, quit and uninstall. not good, specially for new player retention, in the slightest.

the quality of the bots, if its really tuned to meet the average skill level of players, really tells more about the said average skill, than the AI of the bots.

the behavior of the bots, on the other hand, specially pathfinding, is completely out of whack…but think in that situation…would a new player perhaps do the exact same things, if they have zero map knowledge? we all see these “special” players doing the most foolish things all the time…

by the way, still to this day we keep bouncing back of bugged windows when trying to go through, stay there forever hanging in a window opening just to fall back, or not being able to even grab the damn window edge at all…if we as humans get completely owned by a fkin window, can we really expect the bots to do better???

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cs1.6 had terrible bot pathfinding system. i know it cause i made waypoints for few maps.

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So, the bot is stupid because many of us players are stupid? :pleading_face:

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there was a time, a long, long time ago, when players specifically picked sniper squads cause sniper bots just one shot your entire squad from spawn to spawn. to put it kindly, it wasnt funny for anyone. except the bots, i guess; never asked them, was afraid they actually answered.

i think they could actually tweak the bots lethality based on the BR they are fighting, but that is giving too much credit to the AI programmers. id be happy if they just stood where i put them, a thing they not always do.

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it is part of equation. other part is that devs dont know how to make smarter bots that will take cover, not go in front of you when you are shooting, actually look at the direction of enemy etc.

only easy buff that devs can give to bots is to give them better reaction time and tune up the aimbot, but then you have loads of topics on forum about cheaters (btw did you notice that since they dumbed down bots that there are significantly less cheater accusations on forum?)

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19

Losing against stupid enlisted bots must be the lowest point for any gamer.
Holy moly !
Is half of the playerbase quadrouple amputee slots ?

20

people without use of hands and legs can play better than half enlisted playerbase

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