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I'm curious, what would it take to make the AI for a jungler?

EvilUnicornLord·9/5/2018, 9:59:06 PM·2 votes·2,224 views

I've been trying out some champions in co-op vs. ai to get a hang of their kit before bringing them into PvP and I noticed something rather consistent about every bot match that isn't accurate to a typical game:

There's no jungler.

While I always brushed this off before as "Oh, well junglers are probably hard to program so they just can't make the AI." But now I'm wondering just how hard is it to make the AI for a simple jungler? Nothing fantastic, just one that farms in the jungle and uses Smite, occasionally taking a camp from the enemy side, always picks a standard jungler champion like Warwick or Master Yi and waltzes into lanes every now and then to gank, and it would never go after epic monsters. Having a jungler in the Intermediate bots would greatly help new players understand the game better and make incentive for warding. Also, there's always that one bot that sits in the fountain AFK all game, it would be nice if it did anything.

So, to those of you familiar with the intricacies of AI and how it works, what would it take to make a simple jungler bot?

4 Comments

DuskDaUmbreon9/5/2018, 10:32:39 PM2 votes

Because ganking takes a lot of coordination.

The bots' little 10 byte brains can't process the complexities behind ganking. Sure, those complexities are actually pretty simple to people, but it'd be too easy to cheese the jungler bot into constantly switching between trying to gank and trying to farm by simply walking forward and backward past their invisible line. The bots don't even have basic lane trading down yet, even.

Also, bots are usually only fought at a level where players don't know how to jungle well yet. It'd be too hard for those level 8s to handle the jungling bot if it had even a single brain cell at all.

deadlychuck9/5/2018, 11:21:53 PM1 votes

A new one every season

Milton Fletcher9/5/2018, 11:34:26 PM1 votes

just clone any d5 jungle mains brain and you have the perfect ai bot.

they come in pairs.

ones that know how to play their role and pressure and ones that afk farm for 20 minutes then question why the enemy team has every tower down and baron at 20.

ZT Xperimentor9/6/2018, 8:24:21 PM1 votes

Short answer is too much work; it's taken them several years just to add in a handful of new bots, and they can't even keep those working consistently. For example they still haven't fixed the 5v4 issue in bot games and it's been a bug for patches now, then there's the problem of reworks making bots nonfunctional, similarly removed and new items have caused some interesting interactions.

Long answer is if the meta changes, it could be so drastic the bots won't function as intended; say it becomes a duo-jungle with one player per lane, then the solo ai jungle is unable to decide what to do from differing inputs, becoming a farm-able foe giving the player junglers more freedom to roam. Say the meta becomes three middle with one in the side lanes, and so on.