Just add the tech selling function to the casher farmer and indy bots and activate it once the bot reached say 20 tech per acre on any one tech.

The commissions and the probable net loss(buy price will generally be higher than sell price, so demos are also kept in check by this) they will sell at will eat their resources while they will increase the market volume, more tech will reach the market and more tech will be sold at the market, which is good.
Further, I believe that the circumstances that make the bug in which the bots start buying only one tech is tied to the tech levels, which means it should no longer occur if this change is implemented, except perhaps briefly for the democracy bots.

Secondly, make techer bots buy tech for their excess cash above 500m, weighted buying of mostly the cheapest techs. This will increase the demand and supply for the low volume techs which is important both in peacetime and at all times in express where current lack of demand often make getting war techs almost impossible unless you are a techer.
This will solve the issue with techer bots carrying 4-6b cash at times while also improving the tech market.

I haven’t played all the servers, but I don’t see the need based on my experience.

And I’d advocate for making bots do more rational things, not different irrational things (both suggestions are value destructive). I suspect that the result of these changes would be to shift power between strategies for both netting and warring, and if we want to do that we should just change the governments transparently instead of having nuanced, irrational and less transparent bot behavior drive those outcomes.

I suspect that the markets might function better and general and transparently rebalance strategies if bots played more rationally: selling goods and tech based on recent market history as opposed to the single unit on the market at a given price,didn’t buy over 20 tpa, bought weapons tech as a cheaper expense alternative to more military, stocked food instead of tech, had better minimum selling prices (no $280 tanks). I’m probably forgetting 10 other things. This would likely require rebalancing the bot strategies (perhaps fewer techers and more indies).

I also definitely don’t want more warfare tech on express as it will get used for more griefing while also removing a small disincentive to techer griefing (you give up a ton of revenue if you tech warfare today). Plus if you get griefed and want to KR, it also doesn’t matter - I doubt griefers care if their crappy rainbow gets killed or not as long as they have ruined your fun.

And just to be clear, I think the bots are pretty awesome as is. They provide their own spin to the game, give land, provide liquidity. Im waaaay into nit picking on some pretty fine points. I also think we as humans should do a better job adapting - there was no reason for so many human cashers and so few human FFOs in alliance last reset.

Careful, you might get accused of making developers change fluff to benefit LaF.

Whatever bots stock will amount to trouble, so stocking food, or neglecting to buy tech will create issues. Those lumps of food stock will come back to the bot periodically for instance which will cause even more problems than the current techer bot cash do now. The techer bots sat on 4-6B cash last set and with food stocking you would find casher bots with 300-700m food and techer bots with similar amounts. Cash on hand at least decays when it goes above 2B.

There have been suggestions lately to make bots just waste excess cash by buying food on private market and perhaps then selling it on private market again. My suggestion does roughly the same thing for the bots but allow them to help the game more as well in stopping most of the huge lategame spikes in res/bus tech prices and smooths out the market volume over the day to the benefit of those that might not play at peak activity hours.

Market history is not something they can currently look at. So knowing what else is in the pipeline I suggest changes that can be implemented with probably an evening or an afternoon of work.

I don't think griefers should be attacked by making it so they cant buy what they need to make missiles or whatnot. I think that problem should be attacked in other ways, with game mechanics for instance. But maybe that is just me.

You did say something very good tho "had better minimum selling prices (no $280 tanks)". This is indeed an issue with all types of military and also with tech. Now I don't believe in changing the minimum prices or maximum prices, but I believe in making the variation in selling prices smaller which would generally have the same effect without encroaching on the free market principles of supply vs demand driving the price fluctuations.

I’m glad I said at least one very good thing :)

Food can be put back on the market. I'm not a programmer, but the logic to add a mandatory login and sale at [time to market] + [48 hrs] sounds pretty straight forward, and plays with the rational decision making mentioned by Z. Finding one in the 5 minute window where their food is home really wouldn't be any different than finding one with 0 DR.

If you look at the code that is the way they choose which bot is to log in and when. they will need to rebuild that entire function and build a database of the market times. You will also add new problems like

What will they do with all that food when the reset ends?
You want 200 bots to dump a total of 100B food on their private markets and then buy NW for them?

And how will the purchase of ~100B food affect the markets? The bots now are net supplyers of food to the market and they would instantly turn to vaccum cleaners for food. A set like last set with no farmers we could see food go too high for players to take turns. A normal set when LaF netgains that might not happen, but as others have pointed out the goal should be that the bots are somewhat self-balancing and not completely dependent on LaF netting.

My change suggestion would hurt techers for sure and I'm not sure that is needed in 1a (tho in express it sure is), but it wont cause any havoc.

If you want them to stop hoarding cash, make them buy bushels off their private market with excess cash. *Shrugs*

lol@sinistril

Isn't that what actual players do at the end of the set?
and..
Like the current state of Primary?

Dude. That is a great idea for a cash sink.

My bad. Still a great idea.

afaik its harder to build as well. the tech selling function is copy paste+ one line with a condition. but bots do not sell/buy on private market ATM so that function would have to be built from scratch.

Didn't read the second post before I posted that. Sorry. The thing about bots reselling tech is the unintended consequences.

What would those unintended consequences be?

Both solutions reduce the bots net demand of tech in equal fashion while actually increasing the volume, but if the money is spent on the private market it obliterates the tech market volume.