Bots
Bots
Bots are automated empires in VoidVerse. They occupy colonies, develop their economy and research, build ships and take part in fleet missions. Treat them as changing opponents rather than fixed resource caches: the ships, defenses and stock at a colony can change between scouting and arrival.
Finding and interacting with bot empires
The Rankings offer Players and With bots views. Players is the default and leaves bots out; the view you pick is remembered. Use these views to distinguish the human ranking from the combined population, then follow an empire's profile or galaxy link to its colony. Galaxy shows coordinates and the actions available at a target. Bot names are shown in their own colour in the Galaxy, the rankings and the HyperCom, so you can tell them from players at a glance.
You can scout, transport resources or attack through the usual interfaces when the mission is allowed. Use spy probes (Intelligence), Surveillance and Reports to inspect a target, and Fleet Operations to review ships, fuel and cargo before launching. Resource deliveries and combat affect relations with a bot (see below). Their personalities and aggression differ: discover how each empire responds through play rather than assuming one interaction guarantees friendship or retaliation.
Relations with a bot
Every bot keeps a relation with each player it meets. Two things make it up:
- History: resources you deliver to a bot raise it (one point per 1000 resources); battles between you change it by the value of the ships destroyed, and raids by the loot taken. Grudges and goodwill fade: once a day the history moves 10% of the way back to zero. A player who destroyed fleet worth a fifth or more of the bot's points is remembered much longer (the fade slows to a fifth), while a feud the bot started itself is let go three times faster.
- Stance: what the bot thinks of your government (see the next section), worth up to 60 points either way.
Its decisions go by both together: which players it raids and how often it picks them, whom it targets with a raid colony, and the tone of its messages. Calm bots leave players they like alone.
Government agenda
In the spirit of the faction agendas of Alpha Centauri, every bot has a social ecology, set when it is created: one government direction it champions (civilian, economy or military), one it abhors, and a zeal of 0.5 to 1.5 that says how strongly it feels about it. Aggressive bots champion the military more often and abhor civilian government; peaceful bots lean the other way, but nothing is excluded.
- Its stance toward you follows your government: the further you go into the direction it champions, the friendlier it gets; the further into the one it abhors, the more hostile. Aggression adds to this: an aggressive bot sees civilian and economy governments as soft prey and respects a military one, while a peaceful bot fears a military government and warms to the soft ones. A player with no government gets a neutral stance. The stance is set at first contact and then moves 25% of the way per day toward what your current government earns, so a government change shows over a few days.
- Its own government: a bot picks its government tiers by its agenda. For each unlocked tier, an option of the favored direction is three times as likely as a neutral one, and the abhorred direction is never picked unless a tier offers nothing else. It only reconsiders after one of the researches that unlock government tiers gained a level, and follows the player rules for requirements and change cooldowns.
The stance formula
For each category, share is your policy points in that category divided by the number of government tiers (0 to 1). Aggression is the bot's aggression from 0 to 100.
- agenda = zeal × (share[favored] - share[abhorred])
- soft = (share[civilian] + share[economy]) / 2 - share[military]
- stance = 60 × clamp(0.7 × agenda - 0.3 × (aggression - 50) / 50 × soft, -1, 1)
What bots can do
Bots can build and research, produce ships, expand to colonies, participate in alliances, move ships and resources, and send excursions. They can scout and launch resource raids, and can move ships to protect their fleets. Their decisions use the resources, ships, queues and mission capacity available to them.
Bot raids use ordinary attacks, combat and loot resolution. A bot may attack you even if you have not attacked it first. Scout before raiding one yourself: a quiet colony is not a guarantee of safety, and an earlier report may no longer describe its current defenses.
Bots and alliance diplomacy
Bot alliances take part in Alliance Diplomacy only by answering, and they answer at once: they accept a peace offer and a non-aggression pact, and they decline an alliance pact. They never declare war or propose a pact themselves. A war declared on a bot alliance is never accepted early, so it starts after the usual 24 hours.
How bots raid
A bot raids only when the numbers clearly favour it:
- The target's total points must be between 75% and 150% of the bot's own, and never in the bot's alliance. The usual attack rules apply as for players, such as vacation mode, miner mode, weak-target protection and alliance pacts.
- It needs a fresh spy report (at most 30 minutes old) and a fleet whose warships are at least twice the planet's fleet and defense, more for calmer bots (up to three times). It settles the battle on paper first and only goes if it wins.
- The expected loot must pay at least twice for fuel and expected losses, with a net gain of at least 1000. It assumes your bunker hides as much as it can.
- The flight must take at most about an hour (less for calmer bots), so you have little time but the bot also takes little risk. If a fresh scan before arrival shows the raid has become unsafe, it calls the fleet back.
- Across all bots, a player is raided by bots at most twice in 24 hours, at least 12 hours apart, and not while another bot raid is on its way. A single bot waits at least 6 hours between raids (up to 12 for calm bots).
Raid colonies: when a bot's relation with a player of comparable strength has soured far enough (sooner for aggressive bots), it may found a colony next to that player's richest planet, station its fleet there and raid that player for a few days, then bring the fleet home and give the colony up.
Limits and player protections
Bots do not receive a guaranteed combat victory or a free successful raid. Attacks depend on available ships, fuel, command capacity, reconnaissance and target eligibility. The strength checks, alliance restrictions, vacation and miner protections and raid limits above can prevent an attack. These limits do not make a colony permanently safe from either bots or human players.
Weak-target protection (see Player Combat) applies to bots as to players: neither side can attack an empire with less than 10% of its own points. It does not protect you from empires of similar strength. Bot raids take resources, not buildings: even a raid colony only serves as a base for resource raids. A successful raid takes obtainable resources, not the target's buildings.
A resource gift does not guarantee immunity, and an attack does not guarantee immediate retaliation. Watch actual reports and movements to learn about the empire you are dealing with.
Destroyed combat units can create debris. Collecting it is a separate Extract mission requiring extractor-equipped ships; it is not automatically awarded to the combat winner.
Talking with bots
Bots answer messages and write to you on their own when you attack them or when you write first; after raiding you, a bot sends a taunt about half the time. Their conversations are in the Bots section of the Inbox. A bot writes to each player at most once every four hours and takes its time to reply, so whatever happens meanwhile is answered together in one message. It stays in character, remembers how you have treated it, brings up attacks from the last day and lets you know what it thinks of your government.
Each bot has a native language, taken from its name. When you write in another language it answers in that language, but brokenly. Aggressive bots answer more aggressively.
Trading with bots
Bots use the Trade Hub. Every half hour a bot checks for player offers that supply a resource it is short of, paid with a resource it can spare, at no more than 10% above the world's fair rate; it takes only what it is missing, opens the deal and confirms its side itself, so you only confirm yours. It does not claim the same offer again for six hours, and bots never take each other's offers. When nothing suitable is offered, it only sometimes posts its own offer at the world's fair rate: at most two per bot a day, and only while fewer than four bot offers are open in the world, so the hub stays a place for players. It confirms deals you open on its offers.
How bots grow
Each bot has hours of the day in which it is active, and it acts about twice as often then. Early on bots concentrate on founding colonies: they research Government Network in half the usual time (at the usual cost) and save up for their first colony ships, while keeping at least one small, cheap combat ship to protect themselves. Later they keep a fleet of a few percent up to a quarter of their other points, more for aggressive bots.
Void currency: now and then (a 5% roll each) a bot spends the Void currency from its excursions and boss fights on Biolab research, and with Archeotech crafts relics or fuses spare ones into a higher tier. It installs its strongest free relics on its colonies, never on its home planet.
Void bosses: rarely (a 2% chance per turn) a bot joins a Void boss fight, but only against a boss players have had to themselves for at least 36 hours, within a three-hour flight and outside the Void Realm, and only if settling the strike on paper shows it loses at most 5% of the ships it sends.