announcements

Hi everyone, as we kick off the June clan race, I want to thank you all for the fantastic amount of detailed feedback and thoughtful discussion over the past month regarding the May experiment and future ideas for the clan race. I've been reading through all of it - in the official May feedback thread, the All Bots Gain Monthly Energy discussion, and more. It's clear how passionate everyone is about this core aspect of the game, and I truly appreciate you sharing your insights.

This post will outline changes for June, as well as my current thinking on longer-term directions based on that feedback and ongoing observation. First though, a note on future plans: The ideas below for "later in June" and beyond are currently in various stages of planning or early consideration. Game development, especially for a solo developer, can have unpredictable timelines, and details may evolve as I work through implementation, balance, or based on further feedback and testing. Please consider these as directions I'm actively exploring, not firm promises with fixed ETAs. I always reserve the right to adjust plans to best serve the game's overall health.

Live now (effective June 1)

Daily energy exchange growth reduced from 10% to 5%

• Based on a lot of feedback from the May experiment, the daily energy exchange increase has been reduced from 10% to 5% per day. The spreadsheet I'd shared before has been updated to reflect this.
• Reasoning: While the 10% scaling aimed to keep the end-of-month competitive, many of you felt it was a bit too extreme, potentially devaluing early month effort more than intended and raising valid concerns about the rapid drain of system-wide "loose energy." Although the math showed the first half of the month still carried significant weight (~1/3 of total impact), perception and feel are very important. The new 5% daily increase will still provide a significant end-of-month multiplier (around 2.5x the base rate on the final day), aiming to keep things interesting and comebacks feasible, but in a way that should feel more balanced throughout the entire month.
• Regarding "total energy inflation" caused by scaling - I'm less concerned about this for the "total energy" stat itself in the long run, as I plan to re-evaluate its meaning and how we track long-term achievement (more on that below).

Ranking clan member cap remains at 10

• The reduction from 20 to 10 members for clan ranking and end-of-month clan trophies will remain in place for June.
• Reasoning: The primary goal here was to lower the barrier to entry for more clans to compete effectively. While May's race still saw a significant lead at the very top (often a reflection of concentrated resources or exceptional individual performance, as some of you noted, rather than just raw numbers of scorers), the top 10 change is a step I believe is in the right direction. I'll continue to monitor its impact on clan formation and competitive dynamics, and I'm mindful of balancing this with the experience of players in larger clans (like high-level training bots) and their opportunities for recognition.

Targeting later in June

Visible global buff for daily energy scaling

• To make the daily energy exchange scaling more transparent and easier for everyone to track, I'll be working to display it as a visible global buff that clearly shows the current day's energy exchange multiplier. This will remove any guesswork.

Fight list page revamp

• A significant quality-of-life improvement I'm aiming to get out later this month is a revamp of the fight list page. The goal is to drastically improve the process for identifying viable targets. My tentative plan is to move towards a single, paginated table (as opposed to level-specific tables/pages) that is sortable by various columns (like level, energy, ratio) and also filterable. I'm also looking to add new information/features, such as how recently you've attacked a bot and the ability to apply custom labels or notes to bots (e.g. "favorite", "easy", "hard", etc.).

Targeting July or later (requires more design and development)

"All bots gain energy" (conceptual exploration)

• There's clearly a lot of community interest in making energy more broadly accessible. I'm strongly considering and actively exploring concepts where a wider base of bots (i.e. unclanned) generate some baseline EPH.
• Reasoning: This could create a more ambient level of energy, provide more targets, and further lower the barrier to entry for new players and clans, while still ensuring that focused strategy and investment (like well-built dumpers or active clanned play) remain valuable.
• Key considerations would be limiting this to recently-active bots, providing an opt-out mechanism, and setting the EPH rate lower than dedicated clanned bots. This is a complex change with many potential effects, so tuning details are very much TBD and will require careful thought.

Ranked clan qualification

• To make the clan rankings better reflect active, competitive entities, I'm exploring ideas for qualification.
• Reasoning: The goal is to reduce the number of "fluff" or placeholder clans in the rankings. One tentative idea is requiring a clan to have a minimum energy ratio (say, x2) to be formally "ranked". Unranked clans would still be listed, though likely in a separate, collapsed-by-default section.

Differentiated rewards for clan ranks 2-10

• To further incentivize the fight for every spot in the top 10, I plan to introduce more differentiated rewards.
• Reasoning: The current drop-off in reward value after 1st place is significant. I'm tentatively looking at using the F1 scoring system already used elsewhere in the game to scale the value of rewards for ranks 2 through 10. This would give more meaning to finishing 2nd vs. 3rd, 3rd vs. 4th, etc.

"Total energy" rethink

• The "total energy kept when leaving clans" feature is still a high priority. However, as many of you observed, and as the May scaling experiment highlighted, dramatic month-to-month variations in energy generation can make a single, cumulative "total energy" number less meaningful for comparing achievements across different months/mechanics.
• Reasoning: My goal is to reward longevity and a bot's historical achievements without being anchored to a single stat that might become inflated or less comparable over time. This gives us more freedom to experiment with core race mechanics. I'm exploring alternatives, possibly using a system that scores or ranks historical monthly performances (again, F1-style points for past monthly energy results could be one avenue) rather than a simple sum. More details on this once the path is clearer.

Maybe sometime in the future (speculative ideas)

Energy from trainers (PvE)

• Further down the line, I'm open to exploring how PvE activity, like battling trainers, could contribute some energy. It would need very careful tuning to ensure it's less efficient than dedicated PvP or energy-focused strategies but could offer a first step towards a more fleshed-out PvE mode. One idea is to have dynamic scaling for energy received based on attacker level vs. lowest level to beat that trainer in past X hours.

New clan-based game mode

• I'm also in the very early conceptual stages for an entirely new clan-based game mode. This would be designed to complement (definitely not replace!) the core battle loop and clan race, offering a different avenue for clans to work together on shared objectives and progression, adding another dimension to clan identity and teamwork. This is still extremely early thinking and I'm being intentionally vague about details, but it's a direction I'm interested in.

The May experiment was very informative. Please continue to share your constructive thoughts and suggestions - your feedback is invaluable as we work together to make the game more engaging for everyone!

It's kind of amazing (and honestly very cool) that people will still get so fired up over a 20-year-old text-based competitive link-clicking game.

Your work makes that possible and we appreciate everything that goes into keeping this wild little universe alive.

Visible global buff for daily energy scaling

This is now live.

There is no behavior change from before[*]. The only difference is that the daily energy scaling is now visible to players. A new global buff named "Monthly Crescendo" will now appear starting on the second day of every month. Each day, it grows by 5%. The name and effect will change each day to reflect this. The effect also calls out that it is stackable, unlike all other buffs. Pausing/unpausing the buff works across days - in other words, if you pause the buff today, it will still be paused tomorrow.

[*] Well, technically that's not true - you can now pause the scaling. You couldn't do that before. I don't know why anyone would want to do that, but my track record for predicting the usefulness of buff pausing is bad.

Please report any issues you uncover here or in the Bugs subforum.

Would be cool if there was "leveling/xp" graphs as well, remember we could check it on BU site during BOTS2 era, was cool.

Ender had hoped when he took over development of Bots that a new player would step up and take up the BU mantle.

Anything coming for July Mr. Ender? It's only 8 days away ;)

At this point, it's most likely that the core clan competition changes I outlined are unfortunately going to be in the "or later" part of my "July or later" estimate. The fight list page revamp is taking longer than expected, but the good news is that I think people are going to be really happy with this, so I'm excited to get that launched first. The core clan competition changes will likely be my next major focus once that's done.

Indeed, the fight list does need more of a revamp currently. I think that once that's done the energy changes would work better anyway. Say for example if you were to try the total war idea with all bots gaining energy at some rate then the fight list would be just crushed with energy and bots everywhere with no way to sort them well. At least if we had a way to sort through them like "low ratio bots first" or "highest energy available" with ascending/descending values like what you mentioned above with tags etc. then it would be at least manageable. That it of course if the total energy things were to happen. For now I'm pretty sure most people would be happy to just not have bots with no energy/not part of a clan show up on their pages :P

Thanks for keeping changes coming.

It's been a very long time since I played here. But I am now learning a bit of web development and am actually using Bots4 as a project to try and make a replica (absolutely for education purposes, not for distribution or anything like that).

I look forward to seeing what things come next.