TWEAKING BOTS FOR THE CONQUEST MOD These are basic problems I have encountered with the bots when mapping for the Conquest mod. I have wrote a small tutorial to hopefully aid other mappers into getting the bots to work well. I have seen many excellent maps in UT but allot of them have been let down with the bot paths which for me takes away the fun offline. We all want a challenge whilst trying to learn the map offline, so please read the hints and make those bloody bots work :-) Pathing alternate routes. One important thing I have seen when pathing for a single CP is that the bots will always take the shortest route possible to get to the control point. This can cause problems when wanting to path the bots to go alternate routes, this can be achieved by means of "cheating". You must place player starts at each route, for this example we will have two routes (top route 1, bottom route 2). You must then make sure that the playerstarts from alternate route 1 paths are broken from playerstarts 2 alternate path (This means no blue or red path). This will mean the bots will spawn and take the route which they spawn at. For a good example see either of my first two maps for the conquest mod CNQ-Overlord and CNQ-Highspeed. Go into view paths and you will see that on Overlord the bottom section of the beach has no path to the top section of the beach where the stone path is. This means if a bot spawns at the top of the beach it will take the top route, if a bot spawns at the bottom section of the beach it will go through the fox tunnels. This gives a feeling of alternate route but its really achieved by "cheating". Making bots jump gaps without the TL When mapping CNQ-Highspeed I pathed the top route with lift exits and jumpspots, this was fine until I turned off the Translocator in the options. I then realized that the bots would no longer take the top route, they just camped. As soon as I turned the TL back on the bots would jump the route again but wouldn't use the TL. Nine times out of ten this would be fine, but if you see that the bots don't jump parts of the map try changing the jumpspots for lift centers. Getting the bots to tag the CP straight away and stay there. Another problem that arose when mapping for Conquest was the bots behavior. Bots will firstly look for weapons/items and ammo, this can be a problem with the way that CNQ maps are laid out. You could end up with the bots just running around at the playerstarts fragging each other and totally ignoring the CP due to the best weapons/items being placed at the start. The way around this is to weight the CP (Networking-Extracost) and the pathnodes around it. Also increasing the maximum desirability or the items you have around the CP. I tend to place a few bits of ammo and low class weapons near the CP, a couple of health paks and maybe a Thigh pad. I would then increase the Thigh pads maximum desirability up to 200-500 to encourage the bots to the area.