I really liked Lord of the Rings when it first came out.
More specifically: Helm’s Deep.
I wanted nothing more than to be able to recreate it in a computer game, as though I was one
of the brave soldiers in that battle.
At the time the only game I had was Unreal Tournament, which isn’t exactly known as
a medieval combat simulator.
LUCKILY, the game was super moddable and I could add swords and up the bot numbers to
as many as my computer could handle.
And then some.
I’d watch as my framerates plummeted and as players started to spill out all over the
place.
It was beautiful.
I started imagining some far-off time when I’d have a computer able to run it smoothly.
Then I’d DEFINITELY be happy for ever.
Problem is, I moved to Counter Strike and Global Offensive isn’t quite so flexible.
If you have no friends then bots are available as a second choice.
A horrible, depressing second choice.
But still a choice!
HOWEVER, you’re limited with how many you can get.
You can play 5v5, as intended.
Or, by playing casual gamemode you can spam bot_add into the console to bring it up to
20 bots on an offline server.
This is better.
But still not enough to make you feel super popular.
Or like you’re in the middle of a huge battle.
Luckily, you can get more.
The easiest way to do this is to type -maxplayers_override 1000000 into CS:GO’s launch options.
It doesn’t have to be 1000000, but that figure shouldn’t limit us!
For now.
Using this, you’ll probably find you can only get 30 or 32 bots.
This depends on the map being played.
Some use 3 rings of 5 spawns, others add an extra player somewhere to bring it up to 16
per side.
CS:GO’s developers never thought you’d want more than that so didn’t bother placing
extra.
Very short-sighted of them, I know.
Luckily I always go well overboard with my maps and was able to get 24 v 24.
A total of 48 players!
This certainly isn’t bad.
In fact, it’s frantic and exciting.
And it starts breaking the game since you see lots of scary errors popping up in the
console.
But are we really happy with 48?
What if we want more still?
HMM.
The difficulty every time is working out what’s limiting it.
And since 48 is 16 x 3, it sounds like a logical limit for a programmer to place upon CS:GO.
LUCKILY FOR US though, it isn’t anything to do with that!
By happy chance, 48 is also the number if you have yourself and every different medium
difficulty bot profile available in CS:GO added at the same time.
The reason you can’t go higher than 47 bots is because there aren’t enough of them to
join!
You can change the bot difficulty level to get others to join, but at 0, 2 or 3 the limit
will actually be fewer than this.
But we don’t want fewer.
We want MORE.
And we can make it so all of the bots in the whole of CS:GO can be added at the same time!
Go to the CS:GO folder and open the botprofile config using notepad.
Here are all of the values used to give bots their skill, voice and so on.
It’s hours of endless fun on its own but I’ll let you mess with it in your own time.
Bez discovered that if you scroll to the skill templates section, you can make each bot available
for ALL difficulty settings by adding EASY+NORMAL+HARD+EXPERT to each of the difficulty profiles.
This ups the number of potential bots to 146!
Sadly, in-game you’ll find that you can only get 64 before the server is full.
No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get around this limit.
Visiting the Valve Developer Community site revealed an explanation.
64 is Counter Strike Source’s limit.
And I’ll assume for GO as well, since at this point I’m out of ideas.
But Garry’s Mod will allow up to 128, and Source itself can go all the way up to 255!
This makes me hopeful that one day, Valve learns the error of their ways and ups CS:GO’s
maximum players to this amount.
But why stop there?
Why not allow for EVEN MORE in Source 2?
255 is the maximum for 8 bits of information.
If they were to up it to, say…
16 bits, we could potentially see 65,535 bots on a single server!
Strip bots to knives only and my dream of recreating Helm’s Deep in-game can finally
be a reality.
But until then, this rather excellent Left 4 Dead 2 map will have to do.
Valve, please deliver.