Is there any way to play offline?

I'm not as good at Nuclear Dawn as I'd like. I think I would be better with the strategy element of being commander than with the point-and-shoot part, but I'm scared to attempt playing commander while there are real people counting on me.

Also, I would like to be able to practice playing soldier with some bots that are less effective than the online enemies I've encountered so far, so I can get a better hang of the game and not just jump in and make my team lose (like I've been doing).

Is there any way to play offline with bots*?

_{*I'm not counting training as that's not really the same as a full game.}

Solution 1:

Found this quote from Silverfell from InterWave Studios:

I'm afraid there's nothing we can do help there - we are not planning, and have never announced or talked about, a single player component for Nuclear Dawn.

Training with bots is about as close as you can get, but that lacks any kind of story, narrative or pacing.

But what you can do is host your own game and add bots to the server:

1. First you need to enable console for the game.

   2. Right click on Nuclear Dawn in your Steam Library and select Properties.
   3. Select SET LAUNCH OPTIONS....
   4. Type in -console in the text box.
   5. Press OK on the Launch Options window and CLOSE on the properties window.
2. Launch Nuclear Dawn and the console window should be open when the game starts.
3. In the console type in bot_quota X where X is the number of bots you wish to have in the game, so for a 5v5 you would type 9 for you and 9 bots. EDIT: looks like it is limited to 22 bots.
4. Close the console and select Create Game, here you can set up what map to play and some other things. I added a password but I am not sure that is needed.
5. Press Start and enjoy your fight against bots.

If you want to be commander it takes a couple of seconds for you to win the vote and if you want to add more bots during game you can open the console and type in the command again with a higher number, the default button for the console is `, you can not bring up the console while in command mode.

The bots do not know how to play commander so it should be fairly easy to beat them and playing this way will reward you with achievements and xp.

Also i did see some talk on the official forum about players making single player/co-op maps, but couldn't find any so guess they aren't done.