[qwertyuiop924]

This might revive my interest in Generals, as I found it a mixture of boring and excitingly stressful when I played by hand.

However, because Generals is an RTS, bots might have a pretty steep advantage (although movements take a good bit of time, so it's not as bad as it could be). Does anybody know how bad this is in real play?

[popey456963]

Although we haven't had many bots on bot.generals.io yet (early days), my experience of playing against bots on the main leagues show that although we had several dozen bots built, all of them were no match for a competent human being. The only one that comes close is called "Sora AI", but that AI can be easily beaten by anyone in the top fifty odd.

I'd be interested to see if a bot will be able to always defeat players, waiting for what will happen with this latest release.

[reitzensteinm]

The bots were all pretty incompetent, but it was INFURIATING to play against a dumb bot that does nothing but attack you.

Unlike a player, where you have a decent chance to juke their stack and cap them (and then have a great chance to win), many dumb bot implementations would just aggressively trade 1:1, basically guaranteeing that you're both screwed.

I got up to rank #3 on the FFA US server, and spawning next to Simple Bot would mess me up more than spawning next to an 80+ (back when it topped out at ~86).

That, and the terrible latency handling (if your internet is acting up a tiny but, you basically have no chance to win), was what made me stop playing eventually.

[popey456963]

Well, then I'm glad I think we've fixed both of these issues! Bots now can only play on one server, so people have the choice of playing against them.

Also we've significantly reduced the impact of lag by allowing you to queue up moves, even in enemy territory. Although all real-time games need a certain amount of reliability in your internet connection to work, I think we've recently reduced it significantly. Although, of course, any suggestions you have for improvement would still be useful!

[reitzensteinm]

No, that's perfect. Certainly there's always going to be a limit to lag compensation, but it was very frustrating when you could no longer double move, but your opponent could.

[vzhou842]

Everyone is server-capped at 2 moves per second, and bots will also be subject to networking conditions (ping, lag spikes) just as players are since bots are hosted by their creators.

[TheSmiddy]

Yeah but you can also host your bot in a datacentre which doesnt have the same reliability issues as residential internet.

[Matetricks]

I think the move rate is capped at two per second, so even bots will have limitations in their movement speed.