Player controlled bases should auto-spawn bots
I think it would fix a few issues.
* When the front gets wide, there’s a lot of back-capping. I don’t think back-capping is inherently bad but it does slow down the pace of the game. It can be a chore to go hunt down one guy with a radio set up in the woods over and over.
* It’s silly that you can capture a military installation by sitting in a bush next to it.
* It’s odd that tons of fancy military hardware is being left completely unsupervised in the woods.
* When you *are* the one guy with the radio, it can be boring to hike to a base, hide in a bush while the timer tics down, rinse and repeat until a human starts looking for you.
The solution to these issues is having bots. I know the common advice when leaving a base is to spawn some defending bots but there often isn’t a sgt there to spawn them.
Imagine this: If a base goes unmolested for 5 minutes, a single officer NPC spawns in the command tent. Maybe certain criteria need to be met, like having a radio tower built.
* Back-cappers must now actually engage the base, even if only to kill the NPC.
* When you sneak behind enemy lines, you have a target to bump off to break up the monotony of bush dwelling.
Now imagine that certain buildings spawned NPCs to reflect their nature as a built up base and make the game a little more alive.
* Arsenals spawn an ammo carrier
* Large living quarters spawn a fireteam
* Medical tents spawn a medical team
* A base with every building gets a patrol team to walk the perimeter
* Maybe, a base with every building spawns bots to man machine gun nests?
What are the downsides?
* The NPCs would be an utterly trivial roadbump for experienced players, but I think dealing with them would still be more of a fun activity than a chore.
* Server limits. Auto-spawning swarms of bots would make servers chug, but I doubt this would create more load than the FIA or spawnable bots as they exist now.
* Players won’t defend bases if there are bots doing the job for them. I’d say that players already don’t defend bases unless they expect an imminent attack. You can’t expect a human to wait around just in case something happens, but you can expect that from a bot.
* Bots will jump onto turrets and start shooting down helicopters. Fine. Cool. Good, even! Helis shouldn’t be flying low over enemy FOBs just because they have the meta knowledge that players probably won’t be there.
What do you think? Please discuss