So People have been asking for April difficulty to come back to the game and I thought we get a poll going to see who actually supports this idea and who doesn’t
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(I messed up the poll redoing it )
- April difficulty returns as its own difficulty.
- April difficulty returns as Guerrilla difficulty.
- I do not want April difficulty to return
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Uhh the poll broke again ffs ( ok it’s all good it just reset)
I can’t pick either. The April diff. was bugged. Most noticeably, machines could see you through terrain, so stealth was pretty much out the window. And of course you have the light speed, non-dodgeable rockets…
What I do want is a totally revamped AI, where machines are smarter and more aggressive.
Simply put, the problems are IMO:
Tick: Ok, I guess.
Seeker: It’s easy to hide from, and it takes too long to sound the siren when it spots you.
Runner: Should be more mobile in a fight. Should move and flank you, not stand still and shoot.
Harvester: Not too bad after they got to call in Hunters. Uses their rockets a bit too seldom, though.
Tank: Too dumb! Their machinegun is their only real strength. It’s also way too easy to take advantage of terrain to defeat them. They should have an instinct to seek higher ground in a fight, and if you can shoot at them from cover, they should be much more active in seeking you out.
Hunter: These guys have the most severe AI faults. When a large group of Hunters attack you, 4-5 of them fight, and the rest stand in the background and wait for their turn. They need to be made more aggressive! Their secondary attacks never hit you anymore. The railguns and flechettes always miss as long as you keep walking/running. Getting caught in the open by a group of Hunters should be a death sentence 9 out of 10 times, instead, what we get with the current AI, is a turkey shoot.
I hope this is something the devs also are aware of, and that AI improvement is something they want to prioritize. 
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But wait isn’t it like it was in Jackie Chan movies? Only one attacks while the others just fumble around 
I totally agree. They often even loose aggro and wander off when I fiddle in the inventory. Very annoying because of this I try to attract seeker so they can hold the aggro of tanks. Having the tanks seeking higher ground would be awesome. Sometimes they just stomp around.
I’d love if the spawned hunters would recognize when the harvester is aggroed. I often shoot one bullet at the harvester and extract him from the pack since they tend to slowly approach the player while the hunter just stand around and look awkwardly ;D
That was indeed the biggest gripe I had with that difficulty. They just could see you anywhere from anywhere and glitch even harder inside buildings. I think making the machines smarter is the right way to go, instead of just having .01s reaction time to anything and bullet sponges all around.
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I agree. Also, I’d like to see more machines all over the place. Currently, the game is laid out so that we hunt the machines (which is a combination of lackluster AI and too few of them), while the opposite should be the case. Increase their numbers, increase their ability to call in others in from a much larger area. Make their roaming more unpredictable.
The april update, while fun in it’s own way, was way over the top, with railgun hunters having dead on precision shooting through rocks and buildings from miles away. If they could find a sweetspot between then, and now, they’d be on to something really cool imho.
I don’t think an increase in difficulty should only be for guerilla, since I loathe that everything seems to be a bulletsponge on that difficulty compared to skirmish. Best would be to bring the health of machines down to skirmish levels, as I find that to be perfectly balanced, while keeping all the rest.
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Agreed, the game really is lacking something now, feels lukewarm. I almost miss the robots “I can see you anywhere” compared to this anemic version. I had to play on the PS4 adventure mode , anything else was a insane medkit drain. I really hope they hear and fix it
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I only play on Skirmish, and the main reason I avoid Guerilla is because I don’t like bullet sponges.
Increasing enemies health doesn’t make them harder, it just makes it take longer to fight them, which again is no fun, at least in my opinion.
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I’d love to see machines that work more program-like. Currently, I miss the inhuman, blue-and-orange morality you’d expect from robots - calling in reinforcements, diverting larger machines to hot spots, having seekers patrol the most likely hideouts for humans etc.
Difficulty-wise, I think the April difficulty was mostly fine. As noted back then, the amount of enemies per encounter should be limited: If a seeker detects the player(s), send a few runners and hunters, maybe a few additional seekers, to investigate and kill. If that didn’t work out, send a tank (if the terrain allows it) with additional hunters, or else cease pursuit. Sending in hundreds of cannon fodder enemies doesn’t seem logical/machine-like.
Also, as mentioned by @NJR87 and @OGDH, the rocket spam, the railgun spam, the gas grenade spam, the flechette spam - those were baaaaaaad and should be readjusted. Not that the attacks were wrong/bad per se, but that they worked without pause / ammo limit / through walls / without machines leaving their initial position. Let the machines reposition, flank the player(s), call in a ammo resupply or break off the attack after their ammo is depleted.
And, for god’s sake, make the enemies more reactive again. Nothing worse than a hunter running past you, standing around for some time, then shooting and missing. 
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The April difficulty was fine enough and was good for certain players, the main issue was that no matter what difficulty you selected, the game was still really hard, so there was no way to avoid it.
If it was a selectable difficulty that changed the AI, then that would be fine.
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I’d like to add to this post about machine behavior. One thing that could be implemented first of all, is to allow machines to ‘run and gun’, not like they do now, move for a bit, then stand still and fire. Combine the ability to fire when moving with more unpredictable behavior and more flanking tactics, and we’re off to a good start I think.
I’ve been very fascinated with ‘AI’ ever since the first bots came to Quake (like the reaperbot for example), and with every version see them evolve more and more in their abilities and playstyle to how humans played the game.
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Perhaps not the prototypes, as a new player may have a hard time while adjusting to the game’s mechanics. This can be applied from the military machines to the above with the precision and accuracy improving for the other tiers.
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It’s funny, the magnitude of the amount of people that complained about the “April Difficulty” really put the point across that this was something that not a lot of people wanted. And I’m not talking about the bugs, many really did not approve of the difficulty spike.
But here we are, poll and everything. And I can agree, a fourth difficulty mode that brought back the obscenely difficult Machines of April 2020 could be interesting to see, especially for co-op sessions.
If nothing else, perhaps they could tweak the Machines’ AI a bit more depending on the difficulty, other than just health points and damage output to be more like how the difficulty spike back in April was.
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Well, April diff was a nasty Drill Sergeant for me and boiz at the time and that rubbed into me. After FR patch I kept wishing for “harder daddy” situations, where I really should’ve been considering “should I bother with laying extremely risky trap or prepare more lubricants and meds for my sorry ass?”
I’m all for revamping machine AI and segregated difficulties, where Adventure is basically FR-easy, skirmish is based on current Nov’20 and Guerilla is basically April Horror. All that spiced up by wider selection in machines’ loadouts and behaviours. Like I see nothing wrong with FNIX Hunter having typical Army loadout (MG, teargas and mili-ticks) but when that thing start run’n’gun and dodge bullets…
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