How to make bots more challenging

Anyone who has ever played a car racing game, or a first person shooter, with bots reaches a certain point. A point where you find yourself feeling unsatisfied, unchallenged, and ready to uninstall the game. How can you (at times like that) make bots more challenging to face? Here are some of our top suggestions, starting with the more universal available solutions:

5 ways to make bots more challenging

1. Increase the difficult level

This first solution might not apply to all games, but, if you are lucky your game might have an options to crank things up from ‘easy bots’ to ‘nightmare mode.’ Almost all games usually ship with the levels set to easy, in order to allow users to train and ease into the game. The modes can range like this: easy, normal, hard, nightmare or godlike. That should make things more interesting for you (if those options are available).

2. Give yourself personal objectives or targets

Personally, I also enjoy playing games with bots. And, one of my favourite games is Dota Underlords, which I play on hardcore. But, even when set to its highest difficulty, I sometimes find the bots – not as challenging as I would like (sometimes). Which is while I have my own set of special objectives, one of them being – I always challenge myself to win Dota Underlords with 100 health, or to win it with certain alliances. That solution is not for everyone, but it works wonders for me.

3. Set special game-conditions

As we step up a gear, you could improve the bots’ advantage by setting special game-conditions. Some games might (if you check hard enough) allow you to adjust things like enemy health, or the amount of starting resources that the bots have (in real time strategy games). Some of the adjustable conditions could include “winning conditions.” If you make the objectives harder, or trickier, you might rekindle your love for the game. Boomerang Fu has some decent game conditions worth checking out.

Advanced ways to make bots more challenging

4. Update the bots

This one is only applicable to games that allow mods. Not all games allow you to add user-made/improved bots, but you could do some community research and see. MOBAs are not known for having bots, but Dota 2 does. And the bots in Dota 2 can be somewhat modded.

5. Add some human players into the mix

I have saved point number 5 for last, because it requires you having friends to play games with. And those aren’t easy to find, lol. If you have a game with bots, and the bots can be assigned into teams. Then having another human player on the other side of the trenches could heat things up! Making the bots more competitive.

Conclusion

I hope these 5 tips are going to be helpful. But ultimately, most of the work needs to be done by the game developers who make the games. And, if we want to see more challenging bots in future games, lets start buying and supporting the devs who make such games.