A lightweight bot overhaul that improves how bots prioritize enemies, lets them help you dominate, lets them attack turrets, improves their civilian intimidation and other small tweaks.
Requires HopLib
Customizable Features
- Highly customizable target priority settings to tweak which enemies have priority and how priority is calculated
- Option to make bots dominate enemies on their own or assist player domination attempts (normal game rules apply to bots, only works with custom target priority enabled)
- Option to make bots help securing loot once the player they follow does it
- Option to make bots not crouch and always use a standing pose
- Option to make bots not abandon their positions when they are too far from the player
- Option to make bots stop at the player's position when they are told to hold position
- Option to make bots announce when they are low on health, just like player characters do
- Option to disable bots marking special enemies
- Option to disable bot battle cries
- Option to prevent bots from getting into slow vehicles like forklifts
- Option to disable ammo drops from enemies killed by bots
- Option to make bots avoid using Inspire when they are already within revive range
- Option to make a bots defend a reviving player
- Option to increase revive range for bots reviving other bots
- Option to make bots drop bags only when they exceed a certain weight threshold
Target priority
By default, there is some basic setup for improved bot target priority which should already feel a lot better than the vanilla targeting. You can fine tune all priority modifiers to your liking in the mod options. Multipliers you set in the options are applied to the calculated base priority of a target. The base priority settings define the initial priority of an enemy, based on the setting:
"By weapon stats" prioritizes targets based on the bots weapon stats for the target distance.
"By distance" prioritizes targets only based on their distance to the bot, the bot's weapon stats will not be accounted for.
"No changes" disables the custom target priority code entirely and use the vanilla code. Any multipliers defined will be ignored if this setting is used.
Loot securing
If the option is enabled, bots will pick up and secure loot bags when certain conditions are met. For bots to start securing loot, the player they follow must have secured at least one loot bag already. Bots will then pick up bags if they or the player they follow are close to a bag and they will secure bags they carry if they or the player they follow are close to a secure zone. If a player calls a bot that was following them while the bot is trying to pick up or secure bags, that player will have to secure loot again for the bot to continue doing it again as well.
Improvements
- Improved special spotting code so bots only mark targets they see and are higher priority
- Improved civilian intimidation code so bots will keep civilians down more reliably and not only when civilians are already running away
- Improved distance check to determine which bot is selected to revive a player
- Improved Inspire check to not rely on detected attention objects
- Changed weapon raycast and enemy slot masks so players and bots can shoot through each other and bots can target SWAT turrets
- Escort targets are now considered for civilian intimidation and bots will shout at stopped escorts to keep them moving
- Bots will no longer be able to damage tied down enemy hostages
- Bots will use player animations for spotting enemies and intimidating civilians
- Bots will try to kill Cloakers and Tasers before starting to revive
- Bots and Jokers will follow more directly to better keep up with players
- Bots will stop reviving when someone else starts reviving the same person
- Bots will stop immediately when told to stay and will return to their positions after helping up a downed player
Changes
- Bots will now fully count for game balancing
- Bots will now count for the crew alive bonus
You can also find this mod on GitHub, so if you want to help with anything, feel free to fork the project, make changes and create a pull request when you're done.
Credits
Chinese localization by LR_Daring
French localization by Ritrox008
Korean localization by Gullwing Door
Portuguese localization by gabsF
Russian localization by Miles and Literally Muils
Spanish localization by Kilowide
Everything about this mod is great - except for the thing that breaks it. That it increased spawn rates was neither wanted by the community nor the stated purpose of the mod. If the intention was to "improve existing feautures" then you failed. You broke it. At the very least you could have included an option to set it to the default, as the performance of the bots do not keep up with the increased difficulty.
To those saying "git gud" , I have nothing to prove to anyone when playing with three bots, essentially a single player game. I earned my dsod mask and my infamy levels without any mods. If I wanted to download something that changes spawn rates, thats the mod I wouldve downloaded. This is not that mod. You're supposed to make bots actually useful. Combined with the fact that Better Bots is essentially a cheat mod and will thus not be used by myself, there is now currently no mod that makes the bots actually useful.
Uninstalling, but continuing to follow to see if the author fixes this glaring issue.
That's what this mod does, yes.
The degree to which it improves team AI requires something to offset it, and making them fully count for game balancing is pretty much all that can be done
You would never notice the 4 player spawn limits if nobody told you - 18/27 more cops on the map really doesn't make the difference you think it does
@moon You're obviously wrong, otherwise I wouldnt be here. For example, holdouts were pretty easy with regular bots, but would now get swarmed by 8 minigun dozers in each late wave and endless regular mobs. The AI improvements themselves are quality of life only, it does nothing, as the author clearly states, to buff weapon or health presets, i.e. make them better at killing things. It makes them a little smarter in terms of what to target, but no dps changes to match the increased spawn rates. The game balancing was entirely unnecessary - if you say that noone would notice the 4 player spawn limits if not told in regular loud heists - then what is the point? Your logic is clearly inconsistent and the impact the so called balancing has is obviously greater than you state. A large number of players have already commented on how radically this ramps up difficulty especially when playing solo, and it seems obvious that the author misses the mark on what needs to be done here.
If the cost to have some quality of life improvements like better guidance and targeting is essentially double or triple the difficulty then the mod is not useful at all.
Opening with "You're obviously wrong" is shameful coming from someone who has not a single hard fact to back anything they say up.
Vanilla issue, Minigun Dozers ignore Dozer spawn limits
You should try shooting the cops, works great for solving this problem.
If anything, the additional cops only make the entire force less responsive on average - see this video
Making the team AI focus specials using their special attacks, better able to target enemies you consider to be high priority, and enabling them to attack a new enemy type altogether is indeed "making them better at killing things," as you put it
You're doing fantastic work projecting your inconsistent logic onto those around you
It seems obvious that you expect the bots to do all the killing for you.
If they could, this game would be more laughably trivial than it already is.
It does not double nor triple the difficulty of the game - especially on DS where it is much more difficult to get graced resulting from most enemies lacking falloff.
The issue is how fast enemies spawn - which is static regardless of difficulty and amount of players - much more than how many enemies there are on the map.
At the point you have 81 enemies, you for all intents and purposes might as well have 108, considering they come at you a small handful at a time anyway.
It's abundantly useful - especially being able to tell bots where to stay so much more easily than vanilla, and having them dominate enemies on their own or come to rescue a player who's being tased.
All in all,
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, however I simply don't agree with the balancing change making the other changes useless.
Firstly, it does not increase the rate at which enemies spawn, the only notable change is more enemies being allowed to spawn.
Secondly, depending on how you set up your bots (this mods targeting settings as well as weapons you gave your bots and how you use the bots ingame) may have a far more drastic effect than the ~18 more enemies allowed on the map.
What I mean by that is that it's definitely possible to decrease bot performance by overdoing the priority multipliers, making them switch targets too much and slowing them down.
Then there's also still the vanilla issue of a lot of weapons (mostly assault rifles) being objectively bad on bots, with a small amount of weapons being actually strong and the previously newest LMG being blatantly op. If you want bot weapons fixed I suggest using the other bot mod I made to actually make all the weapons useful.
Overall I feel that mods should be balanced in some way so all the advantages this mod gives you also come with this small balance change to make up for it.