The bots on your team

Team Fortress 2 balances every Mann vs Machine wave for six players on RED. With two, the robots get through. So the server fills the empty seats with bots. Nothing to install, nothing to type.

What they do

  • They join RED when a wave begins and stay for the rest of it.
  • They pick classes, fight, and buy their own upgrades between waves.
  • They ready themselves, so a wave starts when you press F4.
  • A bot that dies comes back within a second.
  • When a friend joins a full team, one bot leaves and the friend takes the seat.

They are not human. They spot spies late, and they never do the clever thing your friend does. They make a wave winnable, and that is what they are for.

The settings

Launcher page: Settings, then Bots.

Launcher .env Default What it does
Fill RED with bots SRCDS_BOTS on Off keeps the bots off the field until an admin runs !addbots.
Fill RED to SRCDS_BOT_TEAM_SIZE 6 How many players the bots fill RED to, humans included.
One menu per seat SRCDS_BOT_TEAM_COMP engineer,medic,heavyweapons,soldier,demoman The classes the bots play, in the order the seats fill.
Classes, one tick per class SRCDS_BOT_CLASS_BLACKLIST empty The classes the mod draws from when a seat is not named. Untick the ones the bots never play.
One loadout per class SRCDS_BOT_LOADOUTS empty What a bot of each class carries. Empty is stock weapons.
Say what they buy TF2AP_BOT_UPGRADES_CHAT off Write each upgrade a bot buys in the chat.
Cosmetic items SRCDS_BOT_HATS on A random hat on every bot.
Unusual effects SRCDS_BOT_HAT_EFFECTS off A random unusual effect on that hat.

Every setting here applies at the next map load. Restart is the sure way.

Fewer bots, or none

  • Lower Fill RED to for a harder run. At 4, three friends get one bot.
  • Turn off Fill RED with bots when six of you play.

Change these against a record, not a memory. wave_failures in the bridge's health page names every wave the team lost, worst first. See Troubleshooting.

The team

Humans take seats before the bots do, so put the classes you cannot do without first. A team shorter than the empty seats leaves the rest to the mod, which draws from the classes you allowed.

Bots are poor snipers and spies. The class names are the mod's: scout, soldier, pyro, demoman, heavyweapons, engineer, medic, sniper, spy.

Loadouts

The presets cover the common builds. To make your own:

  1. Open Settings, then Loadouts.
  2. Pick a class, then a weapon per slot.
  3. Type a name and press Save.

The loadout then appears in the weapon menus of that class on the Bots page. Remove a loadout, and any seat that named it plays stock.

Looks

A bot draws a hat its class can wear and keeps it for the mission, so the hat tells one Heavy from another. Unusual effects are off by default because six particle effects on screen for a whole wave is a lot. Neither changes how a bot plays.

Changing the team mid-mission

  1. Open the Bots tab of the launcher.
  2. Set the seats.
  3. Press Apply to the running server.

The mod replaces only the seats whose class changed. The wave continues, and the bots keep the money they earned. In the game, !ap bots opens the same team as a menu for an admin.

A change made during a wave applies at the next break. A bot removed during a wave drops its buildings.

A short team

Valve tunes every wave for six defenders. Two settings help a team that is short of them:

  • Weapon buffs, on the Rewards page, make the team stronger. They are on by default. See Run options.
  • Robot health (%), on the Balancing page, scales the health of every robot. At 50, a play-test cleared three waves in eight where the same team had cleared none.

How they play

  • A bot holds its distance by what it carries. A Brass Beast closes in, a Tomislav holds a lane.
  • A bot switches to a weapon that still has ammo rather than walk at a robot with an empty one.
  • An Engineer nests near the hatch, not at the robots' spawn door. sm_redbots_manager_engineer_nest_depth says how far up the bomb path it can build, as a fraction of the path. The default is 0.4.
  • At the upgrade station, a bot buys damage first, for the weapon in its hands. A Medic buys healing, an Engineer buys the sentry. Resistances come last.

Who wrote them

The bots are OfficerSpy's MvM Defender TFBots, GPL-3.0, plus five dependencies: CBaseNPC, Actions, TF2Attributes, TF Econ Data and TF2Utils. The mod ships from m-this/tf2-mvm-bots-go, where the bots' decisions are written in Go and the SourcePawn is generated from it.

Report a bot that walks into a wall to that repository, not to this one.

On a server that is not this one

Every release attaches tf2-defender-bots.zip. It holds the plugins, the extensions for Linux and Windows, the gamedata and the navigation hints. The zip roots at addons/, so one unzip into tf/ installs it.

Then set these in server.cfg. The launcher and the Docker image do this for you:

sm_redbots_manager_mode 2
sm_redbots_manager_defender_team_size 6
sm_redbots_manager_min_players -1

mode 2 spawns the bots when a wave begins. min_players -1 matters: the mod's own ready-up gate defaults to 3 and counts RED before the wave, where a solo player has no bots yet. Left on, it blocks the F4 that spawns them.

Next: Troubleshooting.

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