Bots fill single-player games and any empty seats online. Each bot has two independent
dials:
A bot's difficulty and personality combine, so a "Brutal Taker" and an "Easy Noob" both exist
and play very differently.
Every bot attacks with Full Send,
and there's no rubber-banding — a bot's strength is fixed by its difficulty for the whole
match.
You set difficulty per-bot in Single Player, or one shared level for all
bots online. Normal is the default.
Taken-over seats use the match difficulty. When a disconnected, idle, or kicked player is
converted to a bot mid-match, that seat plays at the match's set bot difficulty — the same
shared level as the pre-filled bots, not a passive Neutral — and, like any bot, is given a
hidden personality. (A leftover Neutral only appears in offline/legacy games
that never set a difficulty.)
| Neutral | Easy | Normal | Hard | Brutal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attacks at… | never | only with a big edge (+3) | a small edge (+1) | even odds (0) | even when outmatched (−2) |
| Attacks without a dice advantage? | no | 60% of the time | 10% | never | never |
| Target smarts | none | basic | basic | values groups & capitals | values groups & capitals |
| Push after a win | — | holds ~⅓ back | holds ~¼ back | pushes everything | pushes everything |
| Capital defense (Capital mode) | 50% | 20% | 40% | 60% | 80% |
| Trades cards early (online) | no | no | no | 25% chance | 50% chance |
| Speed | fast | slowest | medium | fast | fastest |
Personality nudges the attack bar. The "Attacks at…" row is the baseline for a
difficulty; a bot's hidden personality shifts it a little in either
direction. A Turtle is markedly more cautious than its difficulty suggests, a Noob markedly
less. Difficulty still sets the range — a Brutal Turtle is nobody's pushover — but don't
expect every bot at a given level to pick its fights identically.
Speed up bots: in single player, a toggle appears during a bot's turn that makes all
bot turns play out ~5× faster — handy once you've seen enough of their deliberation. It is
not available online (every player would have to agree on the pace), nor in replays or
the tutorial.
Every bot must trade at 5 cards. Below that, it depends on where you're playing:
Every non-Neutral bot — including a human taken over by AI mid-match — is secretly assigned one
of nine personalities that shapes its strategy. These aren't shown on screen — they're how
the bot thinks — but you'll feel the difference.
How likely a bot is to be a clueless Noob depends on its difficulty:
| Difficulty | Chance of "Noob" |
|---|---|
| Easy | 50% |
| Normal | 25% |
| Hard | 10% |
| Brutal | 1% |
If it's not a Noob, it draws from the other eight. The weighting shifts with difficulty:
the sharper, more focused personalities get more common as you climb, while the wilder and
more self-handicapping ones (Noob, Turtle, Opportunist) become rare at Hard and Brutal. Any
personality can still appear at any difficulty.
In a match with several bots you'll usually meet several different personalities rather
than three of the same one.
Wildly misjudges which fight is worth taking, and attacks at odds no other bot would touch.
It isn't blind — it can still tell a hopeless fight from a good one — it just weighs them
badly and keeps swinging. This is what makes Easy games forgiving.
Plays to bank cards. Hunts the cheapest tile it can conquer, usually takes
just one territory a turn, then sits on a fortified stack. Slow to expand, but it quietly
accumulates cards and troops — dangerous if ignored for too long. Occasionally it commits to a
single big stack and blitzes with it instead.
Lives to deny enemies their continent bonuses. It heavily prioritizes attacking into
complete or nearly-complete enemy groups to crack them open. If you're about to lock down a
continent, expect the Breaker to come knocking.
The opposite of the Breaker: it wants to complete its own continents. It targets the exact
tiles it needs to finish a group, patches its weak borders, and rounds out territory bonuses.
Leave a Taker alone and it snowballs into a monster.
Attacks only on a clear edge, takes at most one territory a turn, and spends everything
else thickening its borders and keeping a real garrison on every front tile. Slow to threaten
you — and miserable to invade. The counterweight to every other personality on this list.
Locks onto whoever is weakest and keeps hitting them, pressing for the elimination and the
cards that come with it. If you fall behind, expect company. (In team games it
judges whole teams, not individual players.)
Only takes tiles that are nearly free — but takes as many of them as it can find, and never
commits a big stack to anything. Spreads wide and annoying rather than hitting hard.
Remembers who attacked it, for the whole match, and pays it back. Every attack against it
counts — whether it succeeded or not — and it never forgets. Hit it once and you stay on the
list; hit it repeatedly and you become its priority over far more sensible targets.
The mirror of the Bully: it pressures whoever is winning, so nobody runs away with the
game. Take a commanding lead and it turns on you. In Capital Conquest and King of the Hill it
judges "winning" by the objective, not just army count.
So a Hard Breaker attacks methodically (only with an edge) but laser-focuses on smashing
your continents, while a Brutal Taker steamrolls forward and fixates on completing its
own — a genuine threat.
Difficulty also sets how hard a personality leans on its habit. A Brutal Taker chases
continents far more single-mindedly than an Easy one; a Brutal Vindictive nurses a grudge much
further past the point of good sense. Same personality, very different intensity.
In King of the Hill:
In Capital Conquest, a bot won't throw itself at a capital the way it
would at an ordinary tile. It wants roughly a 1.95× army advantage before it considers the
attack worth making — a capital defends with an extra die, so anything less is a losing trade.
Hard and Brutal bots respect that ratio absolutely: below it, they simply will not
attack your capital. Easy and Normal bots can still stumble in anyway, via the same
random "attack at bad odds" chance that governs the rest of their play — so the sloppier
difficulties are, counter-intuitively, the ones most likely to throw themselves at a well-held
capital.
The practical read: garrison your capital to a bit over half of what a neighbouring bot could
bring, and a disciplined bot stops treating it as a target at all.
On maps with portals, bots use them exactly as you do: an open portal can
strike any other open portal on the map, however far apart they are. Bots treat those links
as real frontier — they will stack armies on their own open-portal tiles the same way they
reinforce an ordinary border, so a quiet-looking portal tile on the far side of the map is not
the safe back line it appears to be.
Bots only ever use free, default cosmetics — never premium store items. Each bot's face
comes from a dedicated bot avatar pool, picked by its seat number rather than at random — so
the bot in a given seat looks the same from match to match. Its troop model and attack sound
are randomised from the free defaults, and every bot rolls the same default white dice. (A
human who gets converted to a bot keeps their own chosen look.)
See also: Single Player · Combat & Dice · Match Settings → Bot Difficulty