MegaMek Cowardice

[plothos]

[Apologies if this is the wrong forum for this question]
Is there a way to turn off the withdrawl/flee option in MegaMek? I want to just do a throwdown brawl to the death and the bot keeps running, sometimes right at the start, even though they outweigh, outnumber, and outcost me. I feel like I'm missing an important setting somewhere. So far, the best I've been able to do is set the deploy on one end and the withdrawal on the far end, but they still make a bee-line to the far side with everything. I've cranked up the bot's bravery pretty high. Not sure what else to try.

[Hammer]

What version are you using.

Depending on that you can configure Princess options at the start of the game in the lobby.

[plothos]

Using the latest stable build.
I've customized a bunch of bot stuff, but specifically which settings would I look for?

[Simon Landmine]

When Princess runs for it, does the bot actually depart the map, or does it just cluster on the far edge until you approach and destroy it?
Princess shouldn't actually leave the field unless you've either got the "Auto-Flee" box checked or the units are 'Crippled'.
(If you have got the "Auto-Flee" box checked, uncheck it - it's specifically there for chase scenarios, where your units are pursuing a fleeing force.)

Could you share a screenshot example of some Princess settings where you are seeing the issue?

(Usual note - 0.48 is really quite old now, and 0.49.7 and 0.49.13 are roughly as stable as 0.48, and contain a huge number of quality-of-life improvements, including improvements to Princess' coding and to some of the presets.)

[dgorsman]

You can turn off the Forced Withdrawal setting in the Configure Princess Bot dialog.  It's a button to the left of the direction dropdown; when clicked it shows a red-ish X next to the text and disables the direction dropdown.  This will have Princess keep all units on the board, even when crippled.  However, it does tend to play more aggressively when doing this.

You will also need to disable the Auto Flee Board option.  Same dialog, just below Forced Withdrawal.  This is turned off by default, unless you are launching MegaMek from MekHQ, in which case certain scenario types will enable this and set a direction automatically.

Double blind/sensor contact rules can change this if used.  If Princess has no contacts - no visible targets or sensor contacts - then it won't move to seek out targets.  There's a few ways of handling that, while limited to 48.0 stable.  The first is to do what you've already mentioned, set the Auto Flee direction to the other side of the playing area; but once it makes contact/gets within weapons range, /kick the Princess player then use the Game menu => Replace Player... menu item to change the setting to turn off the Auto Flee setting.  Another option is to detach several scouting units into one or more separate players but all on the same team.  These can be set to exit the far edge, or they can be set with deployment zones of center or one of the corners or edges closer to the human players deployment zone.

[plothos]

Thanks guys. I have turned off the auto-flee and the forced withdrawal and it seems to have helped quite a bit, though I've still somehow seen units flee the field. What was confusing was when I had auto-flee off and had forced withdrawal on it (which would be my preferred way to go) it was having completely uninjured mechs flee. I still don't fully understand the where or why of it, but it seems far more playable now, because they're sticking around a lot more.