Are all bots created equal?

Question

When I'm playing a match of me + 4 medium bots against 5 medium bots, I'm occasionally the worst player on my team by a fair margin (e.g. as a carry, I died 3 times in the beginning of the match and got absolutely no kills the entire match). However, I never lose to medium bots. If all medium bots have a skill of "10" and I never lose to them, then I must have a skill of greater than "10". However, if out of my team I get the least kills, assists, gold/min, and xp/min, and the most deaths, then I'd think my skill would be less than "10".

The only two explanations I can think of for this are

• I contribute to the team a very large amount in ways other than killing the enemy team (unlikely, especially when I try to play as a hard carry.
• The "medium" bots on my team are better than the "medium" on the enemy team, e.g. the enemy has bots with "9" skill, but the bots on my team have "10" skill to more than balance out my mere "7" skill.

Is there another explanation?

Answer 1

What Dispenser says is absolutely true: every bot requires its own different AI, and some are better than others. Sand King being particularly famous for burrowstriking into trees and just chilling there. Maybe epicentering there. Viper bot and Warlock bot, in contrast, are regarded as terrors who nearly always win their lanes no matter what, and in some cases can win you the entire game by themselves.

On top of that, you can change the effectiveness of your bots simply by being on their team. A team of 5 bots can coordinate more effectively than, say, 3 bots and 2 humans. If a bot decides "we should fight here" on a team of 5 bots, it's pretty likely they will all reach the same conclusion and go fight. If a bot decides that same thing with a team of non-bots, then it's just gonna feed alone unless its human teammates are following it around.

That said, this:

I contribute to the team a very large amount in ways other than killing the enemy team (unlikely, especially when I try to play as a hard carry.

is entirely possible. Especially if you're receiving a lot of attention from the enemy team and you have other carries/cores that get farm while you're effectively making space (less likely with bots than in a normal match, imo, but still possible).

As for this:

The "medium" bots on my team are better than the "medium" on the enemy team, e.g. the enemy has bots with "9" skill, but the bots on my team have "10" skill to more than balance out my mere "7" skill.

I've never seen any indication that bots have intentional skill differences beyond "Passive, Easy, Medium, Hard, Unfair"

Answer 2

On medium difficulty I have seen a similar same thing actually. Your team of bots will tend to always win a medium difficulty game unless you feed like 20 kills or something. It's actually really hard to lose, mainly because on medium I notice that the opponent bots reach a plateau of items, whereas your bots tend to keep getting better and better items. Check out their hit points later game and the enemy will have very low hit points, whereas your team will get really fat over time. I don't think that I've lost a medium difficulty game unless I was utterly terrible, maybe not even then.

On hard and insane difficulties I've noticed that unless you basically carry the game then your team will tend to lose a lot more often than win. Maybe it's because it's 4v5 ai, so you really need to be doing well in the teamfights to sway the outcomes.

Answer 3

In my experience, I found that in bot match, difficulty of the game increasing as you choose bot "Passive, Easy, Medium, Hard, Unfair". On Unfair mode, there are some case that bot try to make team fight in mid and end up feed them all.