Retix › How the Retix bots play

How the Retix bots play

Bots exist so a quiet hour still gives you a match. Picking a difficulty moves nine separate knobs at once, and the same setting decides what beating them is worth.

Why they are there

Matchmaking has a cold-start problem. The first person to queue for a mode has nobody to play against, so instead of making them wait for a lobby that may never fill, bots take the empty seats and the match starts. You can also skip the queue entirely and pick a mode, a map and a bot difficulty from the home screen.

What a difficulty actually changes

Difficulty is not a damage multiplier. Bots take and deal the damage the weapon table says, on the same classes you play. What changes is how well they are operated: nine behavioural knobs, interpolated together.

Two of those read backwards at first. A low strafe rate makes a bot easier, not harder, because a bot that walks straight at you is a bot that is easy to hit and evasion is what strafing buys.

A high heal-seek threshold makes it easier too: a bot that breaks off at 70% health ends the fight you were losing and hands you the ground.

Projectile lead is the knob separating a nuisance from a threat. Eight of the twelve weapons fire a round with a real flight time, so a bot applying 15% of the correct lead misses every moving target by design, while one applying 95% hits a running player at range with a Marksman Rifle.

The three bands

Easy, normal and hard are three overlapping windows on the same scale. Easy runs from 0.10 to 0.30, normal from 0.25 to 0.60, and hard covers the top of the range.

They overlap on purpose but they never cross: easy is below normal is below hard at every single point of a match, not just on average.

Skill also ramps within a match. A bot starts at the bottom of its band and climbs across the ramp window, so a hard bot in the first thirty seconds is not the hard bot you meet in the last minute. That is a warm-up and not a rubber band. It does not react to how well you are doing.

Hard is the original set of constants. The bots people were already playing against before the difficulty setting existed are the hard ones, so adding the setting could only ever make bots easier and never silently harder.

Bots do not get to break the rules

Nothing in the difficulty table changes a rule a human plays by. A bot's movement, fire cadence, reload timing and magazine work like yours, out of the same simulation code. The difference is entirely in what it decides to do.

Bot input never passes through the anti-cheat validators, since it is generated inside the server and there is nothing to authenticate. No anti-cheat ceiling moves to accommodate them either.

A bot that could out-shoot the cadence ceiling would be a bug, not a difficulty.

What the bots do not do

There is no rubber band. Skill ramps with the clock and not with the scoreboard, so a bot does not get better because you are winning or worse because you are losing. A hard bot in the last minute is at the top of its band whether you are 20–2 up or 2–20 down.

They also do not see through walls or track you across the map. A bot has a reaction delay before it may fire, 750 milliseconds at the bottom of the range and 130 at the top, and a bounded budget for recalculating its route, from 0.7 recalculations a second up to 2.5. An easy bot that loses sight of you genuinely loses you for a moment.

And they play the same classes you do, with the same health, the same weapons and the same abilities. A bot Gunner has 200 health and moves at ×0.55 like yours. What the difficulty decides is how often it remembers to use the ability at all, from a 5% chance up to 90%.

What beating them is worth

The difficulty you pick is the same field that decides the payout. A kill on an easy bot pays 10% of a kill on a person, a normal bot 20% and a hard bot 35%, and the flat awards for finishing, winning and MVP are discounted in proportion to how much of the lobby was bots, down to 50% on easy and 75% on normal.

That keeps asking for easy bots from being profitable, and it cuts both ways honestly. A lobby that is mostly real people pays essentially full whatever difficulty anybody picked, so being filled in at a quiet hour costs you almost nothing.

The first-win-of-the-day bonus is not discounted at all. Once per UTC day makes it a ceiling and not a rate, so no amount of easy bots makes it pay twice.