I had a conversation about 2 years ago with Wildcard, who did a lot of the work on bots before me, and he had planned to change bots to be inherited off of mercs when they were finished. After doing a little bit of work on mercs, I'm not sure how easy or beneficial that would be, but I guess we'll see. The one real problem with bots (that won't be an issue with mercs), is the option to build without them, meaning a lot of code has to be rewritten or copied to get bots to work and still compile when they aren't enabled. Mercs should be built into the actual build so that they work a little more seamlessly than bots, even if they are less flexible.
On the other hand, with some changes on the live client, switching between multiple mercs, and editing the dbstring files, I think a lot could be done to merge the two. Incorporating the upkeep system into bots would be a benefit as well.
Once mercs get closer to being viable, I think the decision will have to be made whether to keep bots as is or inherit off of mercs, but unless someone can find other advantages to doing so, I see bots remaining as is.
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