After going on auto and watching the AI in Bounties several times it is apparent just how bad the AI truly is in this game. They don’t even try to maximize hero skills, will waste so much time running between cover, and will make very poor decisions overall. It makes them nearly worthless.
I watched Yaeger crouch down behind cover no less than three times while his Archangel buff was going. There was no need to do it once, let alone three times since there is no reason to reload with this ability up. Dog will use his silver, unload it all, THEN use his bronze. He wastes dozens of shots by not timing and stacking them correctly, not to mention a HUGE amount of damage wasted. Astrix will use her Boomerang on heroes with less hp than a single tick of her ability does in damage.
Meanwhile in PVP the AI will just randomly target whatever hero they want and won’t help focus down anyone until you get them low enough. The support heroes are actually decent because they use abilities that only require a one time use on a low health aly. This is something the AI can handle. In Bounties though, they will waste time topping off other heroes who are barely hurt instead of doing damage.
Then you have the whole issue with invisible heroes. Poor AI is why Mandrake is so powerful. The AI go full on idiot mode and won’t even attempt to attack an invisible hero. I understand the AI can’t be perfect and a human controlled hero should be better, but why not make it so they at least target an invis hero at least 30% of the time? Or use their abilities at least at 50%+ efficiency? Or actually help focus a herop when they are at 70% hp?
I agree… watching the AI shoot at other enemies and not the actual bounty is kinda annoying. That’s even worse than not using their skills lol. Hopefully they can fix this
The AI is worse than playing manually, if the AI was too good then you wouldn’t be playing the game, you would be watching it.
For bounty you are losing anywhere from 30% to 50% the damage you could be doing if playing manual. I.e. fischer this bounty I can kill a 37m bounty on wave 1 by playing manually but the AI may take both rounds and not actually kill the bounty. I only auto PVE at this point as any other game mode you will lose by not going manual.
We didn’t purposefully design bad AI. That’s an incorrect assumption. AI, no matter how good it is, will never replace a person’s intuition, so we recommend that people play Manual during serious moments. That’s because people will always be better than AI. It isn’t because we made bad AI on purpose to force you into playing manually.
I get that, but the AI COULD be far superior than a player, no matter how good the player is. I’ve seen articles how game AI is able to beat top world players in other games with little to no learning implemented. It’s just the nature of AI. It can aquire a target in a split second and make every shot a head shot. The advantage humans have is developing strats.
The problem is the AI in Hero Hunters is absolutely terrible. Fisher was brought up by someone else and is a perfect example. Why would AI Grapple anything but the main bounty target when the ability does several million damage? It’s several million damage of overkill on any target except the bounty. I brought up Yaeger before. Why does he stop shooting with Archangel only to crouch, then start shooting with Archangel still active again? It makes no sense considering he is not taking damage and has over 100 shots with the abiity going. Other times AI will run clear across the map to cover, only to have it broken, then run all the way back wasting time. AI will run out of shields and just overall make really bad decisions.
Obviously I am not advocating the AI be better than players. If that were the case, as others have pointed out, then there would be no reason to manually play anything and you could auto it all. Howerver, I think the AI could still use a dramatic boost. Right now tank and dps heroes seem to play around 10-20% of a decent player’s ability. Why not make it something like 40-50%? This is dependant on each person’s skill level, but I think 50% would still be far worse than most people who have some experience and played the game for a few days.
This would still give players incentive to manually play, but not make AI so dumb it’s painful to play with them. When you can only control 1 hero at a time and have 2-4 others the AI really should be decent, at the very least.
Hmm… Well, the AI isn’t supposed to be better than a manual player since that’s too OP and its also ridiculously difficult to program AI to act like a human. It could be worse though, at least the AI targets the bounty most of the time, and won’t waste heals if your whole team is full health (but they might not heal a dying teammate). Only additions I would put in the AI is:
When an ally falls below a certain health threshold (eg 60%) use a healing skill (if available)
When ammo is not empty don’t go into cover unless taking a lot of damage
Do not run from one side of the map to the other without making stops (this is really annoying and is a dead giveaway you’re dealing with AI)
I have also run my heroes on auto sometimes and what I’ve found the most frustrating is when my hero is attacking an enemy from the side. For some reason the AI is programmed to aim at the enemies feet or at best the torso. Never the head. But worst of all, when attacking from the side your hero is actually aiming at the barrier in front of your enemy’s feet. This means that even though there’s a clear shot at your enemy from the side your hero will avoid them completely and just shoot at the barrier in front of them. Try it some time any of you who are interested. It leaves me speechless.
Wait… it is a 2-way street. Remember BOTH side’s AI got smarter. And there are other game mode that we constantly outnumber massively by enemy AI. True, I got 4 smarter AI working with me… but now I m against 20 smarter AI on the other side. Haha… it is a no no to me.
Maybe it would be a neat idea to design a straightforward hero with a distinct, “advanced” AI of its own, something which would make fighting them much more of a challenge.
This is an interesting thread to say the least. There are several things about AI that bothers me, but I think the most annoying is shooting barriers right in front of you because the target is lower than you. Happens mostly with characters that shoot from the hip and with the character you are currently on. I think if you aren’t on the character this visual glitch doesn’t happen, but not sure.
BUT, with regards to AI in general, could it be better? Of course it could. I’m not a programmer but I suspect that AI has to be a generalized program or it has to be specific to each character. The latter would allow the programmer to have the AI optimize the particular character’s skill set clearly. But this game has new heroes monthly. I’m betting customized AI would greatly slow down that expectation. Probably a monster job to go back through 80+ heroes and customize their AI.
At the end of the day, the AI is the same for everyone so there is no advantage or disadvantage. Everyone’s AI controlled Hardscope is dumber than a box of bricks. So, two options: learn to optimize AI controlled teams or learn to manually control your heroes.
In no way do I find it “painful” to manual one character while the AI handles the rest because my opponent is in the same situation. AND, I’d much rather the developers focus on bug fixes and new content.
Oh, I am sure. A hero like Dogface would possibly be a pain to program since you would have to have him use his silver first, use it down to the last shot, then use his bronze to maximize the damage. I think some general changes would greatly help though. For instance all heroes would benefit from not using a damage ability on an opponent if there was 70-80% overkill or something (unless it was the last opponent). This would greatly reduce AI wasting abilities on anyone but the main bounty target. Also using your entire clip without hiding behind cover, unless taking heavy focus fire would be another relatively easy change, I imagine. Making it so AI still shoot invis heroes at least a little would also help tone down heroes like Mandrake and Min without having to nerf their skills into oblivion.
Well that’s not always the case. If you PVP a lot you will notice it’s pretty random with your AI. Some matches the stars will align and they will all focus fire the main threat you are on. In other matches you will lose and the last thing you see is every oppoonent around 30-50% hp because all of your AI decided to focus their own target with no focusing whatsoever.
Hey, guys.
I’d just like to add that, making the AI too weak enables certain playstyles that aren’t fun to play against. For instance, stacking one character that’s very powerful with a bunch of other characters that are very weak. Whether or not it’s Ronin sandbagging or someone else, since the AI doesn’t do anything anyway, why wouldn’t I just run a team of the characters with the strongest passives in the game - Phalanx, Mandrake, Flatline, etc - rather than actually think of any other team composition that synergises well, since the other characters on my team won’t do anything? There’s been tons of examples, even in PvE, where my AI will refuse to shoot anything, and my healers and shielders just won’t use their abilities (or even worse, my Kobold will instantly consume her shield and leave my team vulnerable. Huge oversight IMO.). I suppose there’s a skill to being able to quickly switch between characters and manage their ability cooldowns, but why would I do that when I can just run Ronin or Shivs with 4 passive characters?
Great point Longboy. Heroes like Kurtz don’t even use Execute when AI controlled. Playing a Shiv/Phalanx/Fran team is super effective, even with a huge power disadvantage vs your opponent, because you are effectively piloting 33% of your team vs 20% on a normal 5 man team. The higher power on a few heroes and the control makes these teams easy wins, despite the penalties.
This is a great point aswell. I’ve actually never seen a person running 3 heroes work against me, so I didn’t think to make this point. But yes, this is also very frustrating, and part of another issue, which is allowing people to actually run into lower level players by weakening their team in some way, whether that be by penalising their team capacity by only running 3 heroes, or as I said, running 1-2 strong heroes and 3-4 weaker, passive heroes. This is something that should be addressed as well, but I digress.
