Up Your Bottage!
By Dave McGraw
Saturday, February 28, 2004
An Unreal Tournament 2003 Capture the Flag Tutorial by CaptainElectron
The CTF skill that is probably most underrated is the handling of team balancer bots. The super-leet ladder teams may eschew bots entirely, but most public CTF servers out there are configured to use bots to balance and fill out team player counts. Using and abusing bots effectively is a valid skill to acquire.
Own the Bots
Bots are easy. If you don't believe me go to "instant action", set the bot skill on "godlike", set the map to "Lost Faith", and command your bots to "take their flag!" Then simply grab the rockets, stand on the level directly behind and above your flag and shoot every enemy bot that comes to take your flag. Launch a rocket as they come in, and if you miss they will have splash damage. Launch another if they try to leave with the flag, and this should finish them. Don't bother checking behind you: enemy bots will not normally come that way. Back up to add shields when you hear the shield spawn and quick run down to replenish your rockets if and when necessary. Your bot team will eventually win, and you will have a very high personal score.
The reason this works is that bots have pathing -- invisible paths that they prefer to take on a map, and behavior -- actions they will predictably repeat. Every map has invisible paths and every bot has predictable behaviors. Learn the paths; learn the behaviors, own the bots.
Bots will find you!
You'll understand the importance of bots if you try to hide with the flag. Unless the other team has mishandled their bots by issuing the wrong commands, their bots are probably going to find you. Bots don't care about your cunning hammer jump up between pipes where you can't be seen. They will come directly to battle you, and in the ensuing exchange of noisy weapon discharges, the enemy team members will probably find you as well.
Find a Sweet Spot
There are a very few sweet spots where you can sort of hide from bots. They'll find you all right, but depending on the bot skill setting, they may not be able to damage you. We lost some sweet spots with the AI upgrades in the patches, but in Orbital, it used to be possible to carry the enemy flag just inside your side of the map and stand next to the wall in the point depicted below. All of the enemy bots would gather up on the walkway behind you and shoot harmlessly at the wall. I always came out for a turkey shoot when I'd hear the bots run out of ammo!
Hiding at the crosshairs used to work.
There are still some bot-disabling places to hide with the v2225 upgrade. For example, go capture the enemy flag in Orbital, and then lift jump up on to the pipes, followed by a hammer jump to the next level of pipes. If you hide next to the wall, bots will tend to accumulate in confusion down by the shock rifle and not shoot at you unless you move away from this spot. Strangely enough, a bot with a higher skill setting is often dysfunctional where a bot with a lower setting is not.
Hiding at the crosshairs still sometimes works for skilled bots.
Orbital has a few other interesting hiding spots that still work. One involves a lift/transporter combo jump and has the strange characteristic that bots will not shoot at you unless you first shoot at them. Unfortunately, I am not going to give my every last secret away, so I leave it as an exercise to the dedicated student to find the other places on the map.
Know the Bot Modes
Bot AI is squad based and a bot has three basic modes: defense, attack and freelance. The freelancers are the bots that wander the map, but are switched over to support either the attackers or defenders whenever needed. Attackers and Defenders will temporarily change roles at times too, but not as easily as Freelancers. With the proper commands, you can often force this switch.
Be a Bot Commander
Imagine that it is just you and ThRaWn70 playing the map with team filler bots. One of Thrawn's bots has your flag and you have Thrawn's flag. One of your bots stays to defend you but you want it to join the others on retrieval duty. If you use the speech menu to tell your bots to "get our flag back!", then nothing different happens. The reason nothing happens is that this is a speech item, but not a command. Command your bots to "take their flag!", and your helpful bot just might leave to join the others in getting your flag back.
I know that this seems weird because you already have the enemy flag. However, since it is a bot that has your flag you can predict its behavior, and you know that it will go to wait very close to Thrawn's flag stand. You also know the behavior of your own bots when given the command to "take their flag": if they switch to attack mode, they will be inexorably drawn to Thrawn's flag stand as well. In fact, they may take the same path as Thrawn's flag carrier to get there, but will go faster, because they can use the teleporter. (This depends on the map designer's path placements.) Predictably, they will engage the enemy flag carrier any time it is within sight.
Learn the bot behavior for other commands as well. Some work quite a bit differently depending on the map, server revision level, bot skill setting, the total bot counts, and what exactly is going on in the game at the moment. A bot's mode of operation is overridden if it gets into a fight. If you've commanded your bots to "defend the flag" but none of them are showing up, it is likely that they are busy fighting somewhere else on the map. Sometimes you'll have to repeat a command, but they should tell you if they have switched modes.
It's fun commanding bots, but remember to return them to their default behavior after the intended purpose of each command is no longer relevant. Return bots to default operations with the command "search and destroy!" One final warning though! Bots that have never been given a command at all sometimes seem to have the best overall AI behavior, so issuing the command "search and destroy!" occasionally seems to leave the bots in the wrong balance of squad modes.
Happy botting, and I'll see you on the pubs.
CaptainElectron still has his first computer: an IMSAI 8080 he built from a kit in 1978. Most significantly, it still works! He also runs a gaming center and sells modded performance computers at http://www.digitalcup.net