Hi,

when I last fought queens in September, fighting them required some skills (little, but still) but now... it's like "go backwards and unload tons of ammo in her face and her escorts, and you don't have to dodge anything because they don't care". Fix please, it's too boring this way... :(

Yeah but nice for weapons levels. >:P Killed 13 of em last night.

SOME of the queens in Sedina act properly. and SOME do not. It's odd.

is this even sedina he's talking about?

I haven't tried them in there yet, but they still work fine for me elsewhere... very little skill involved, but still they pose a slight challenge... and their escorts DO engage. You must dodge like crazy.

I fought 2 in Dau today. Almost completly passive.

They are rather passive.

They've been acting like this for quite a while (both in and out of Sedina). Ever since the devs changed the AI so bots would strafe less (too much bandwidth).

I've noticed that the Sedina bots on the test server are much better. They charge you, even if you're backing up, to get within firing range very quickly. After slaughtering queens on the production server for quite a while, it's almost scary when a queen charges to <150m very quickly and opens fire.

Nobody changed the AI to make them strafe less, but I did make some other change to the underlying steering control system to allow trading bots to dock better and accidentally made other bots kind of charge in closer to you than they used to. Anyway, John said "whatever you did to the bots, people love it, so don't change it back." So now I have to come up with a way to fix some bots without breaking others even though they all use the same code.

Queens always kinda sucked though, didn't they?

uh, remember the cool weapons effects john showed us in a couple pics?

why not debut those on some new queen weaponry? the reason theyre not remotely scary is because theyre slow as hell and are limited to forward-firing L ports...

Cool weapons effect? Why didn't I hear about/see this?

-Calder

/me jumps on the eye-candy bandwagon

I have yet to see an explaination with that link...

Queens always kinda sucked though, didn't they?

Yes, queens suck. But I don't think the solution is necessarily to beef them up. Even the Leviathan sucks one-on-one. The queen and leviathan's strength should come on their escorts. The Sedina AI are supposed to heals the queens & lev when they're hurt, but strategies like that fail when the queen charges you alone while the rest of the bots in the sector happily ignore you.
The solution is to make the hive act as a whole, not as individual bots taking turns attacking you. Collectors and the queen should hang back, while assaults and guardians attack like a mad bee hive.

last time i treid a queen in sedina a million little monsters came and started repairing her way faster than i could kill her or them

That sounds kind of cute, ananzi.

Hint: Lure the queen away from her court, she should be easy then. I just die if I doN#t watch out for their uber lag powers.

To qualify my previous post, I will say that, every once in a while, I do run into a sector in Sedina where the bots do act "like a mad bee hive". There's obviously code intended to do what I described, but for some reason it usually doesn't work.

When it does work, you get about 2-4 of each bot type (including collectors, which seems odd). Their AI works well in a group, because their dodge code forces them to flank you, even when you're backing up.

If the attacking group would replenish itself as you kill them, and the queen wasn't so easy to lure away from the court (and/or the repair bots did a better job of keeping up), then a Bastion would be a challenge.

P.S. When it's time for the bots to flee the sector, the assaults, seekers, and guardians are the first to jump, leaving the collectors to become slow, defenseless targets. The motto "every bot for itself" doesn't seem like hive mentality...