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. In a Calculated lobby a bot commits its
whole stack and won't launch an attack that shows 7% or less.
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.)
Every bot above Neutral weighs the same things: completing its own continents and breaking
yours, eliminating players (and taking their cards), defending its borders and
bonuses, and what each fight will cost it. Difficulty doesn't change what a bot cares
about — it changes how well it judges it.
| Neutral | Easy | Normal | Hard | Brutal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Judgement | passive | frequent mistakes | occasional mistakes | rare mistakes | no random mistakes |
| Reads the odds | — | roughly | exactly | exactly | exactly |
| Watches for counter-attacks | — | barely | somewhat | mostly | fully |
| Plans eliminations (finishes off a player holding…) | never | never | 1 territory | up to 3 territories | any number |
| Card timing (see Cards) | only at 5 | as soon as it has a set | weighs waiting | + its own safety, the next card | + rivals' hands |
| Capital defense (Capital mode) | 50% | 20% | 20% | 20% | 20% |
| Speed | fast | slowest | medium | fast | fastest |
Capital defense. In Capital Conquest every Easy-to-Brutal bot keeps 20% of its armies
on its capital before planning anything else (a Neutral placeholder adds nothing extra to its capital).
Stalled games don't last forever. If the whole table goes about eight rounds without a
single territory changing hands (or a long stretch of only trivial back-and-forth), bots drop
their self-imposed habits for the rest of the match — one-conquest-a-turn limits, extra
caution, border garrisons and most of their capital reserve — to force a result.
Teammates coordinate. In team games, bots on the same team pick a common
target and focus it (following a human teammate's lead when there is one), leave each other the
continents each is closest to finishing, cover a teammate's threatened border, and hand off
a nearly-dead enemy to whichever of them can finish it.
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.
Bots are on the clock online. In an online match a bot gets the same
turn timer as everyone else. If it runs out, its turn ends
just like a player's would — unplaced troops are placed automatically and play moves on. A
bot that takes over a seat mid-turn inherits the time that was left, not a fresh clock.
(Single Player has no turn timer, so bots there take as long as they need.)
Every bot must trade at 5 cards. Below that, a bot decides whether to cash its best set
now or hold it for something better — the same way online and in single player:
Early trades only happen during a bot's own reinforcement phase; cards it takes by eliminating
a player mid-attack are only traded if that puts it at 5 or more.
Every non-Neutral bot — including a human taken over by AI mid-match — has one of ten
personalities that shapes its strategy. Online they're secret — never shown anywhere —
but you'll feel the difference. In Single Player you can choose each
bot's personality yourself (or leave it on Random).
A randomly assigned personality is rolled at match start. How likely a bot is to be a clueless
Noob depends on its difficulty; Dynamic has the same chance at every difficulty:
| Difficulty | Chance of "Noob" | Chance of "Dynamic" |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | 45.0% | 9.9% |
| Normal | 22.5% | 9.9% |
| Hard | 9.0% | 9.9% |
| Brutal | 0.9% | 9.9% |
Otherwise it draws from the remaining 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.
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. It judges "winning" by income — territories,
continent bonuses and (in Capital Conquest) capitals — not just army count.
Its tastes are rolled fresh each match: how much it wants to complete continents, break
yours, eliminate players, earn cards, chase the leader, pick on the weakest, hold grudges and
work with teammates — each from 1 to 10, and always with at least one strong appetite (8 or
more). Its judgement — caution, how much it minds losses and exposure, how hard it defends its
bonuses, how patient it is with cards — is rolled inside a band set by its difficulty:
| Difficulty | Judgement rolls |
|---|---|
| Easy | 1–10 |
| Normal | 3–9 |
| Hard | 4–8 |
| Brutal | 5–8 |
So a Brutal Dynamic can want odd things, but it never plays them recklessly. In Single Player
the post-match screen reveals what each Dynamic bot rolled.
So a Hard Breaker rarely misjudges a fight and laser-focuses on smashing your continents,
while an Easy Taker wants its own continents just as badly but keeps picking the wrong
fights to get them. A personality wants the same things at every difficulty — a higher
difficulty just pursues them better.
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.
Every bot, at every difficulty, respects that ratio absolutely: below it, it simply will not
attack your capital.
Bots guard their own capital too: every Easy-to-Brutal bot keeps 20% of its armies there,
tops it up before anything else, and won't attack out of it when the fight would likely leave
it below the reserve.
The practical read: garrison your capital to a bit over half of what a neighbouring bot could
bring, and no bot will treat 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