Playing offline against bots with proper duel settings?

Possibly a silly question, but I'm brand new to Xonotic (and Quake-style games in general, I come from the Unreal Tournament world), and am trying to get my feet wet with some games against bots.  I can't figure out how to get an offline game with a bot set up with proper duel settings (XPM/no pickups/etc.).  I've tried updating my /users/<name>/saved games/xonotic/data/server.cfg with:
exec balance-xpm.cfg
g_nopowerups
at the top, and added a balance-xpm.cfg file I found online to my /uers/<name>/saved games/xonotic/data/ folder, but no joy.  Is there some step I'm missing here?

server.cfg is only used when you start a dedicated server. For a local duel against a bot, that is probably overkill. When you start a local match using the multiplayer tab you can either run these two commands manually in the console (shift+esc) or put them in "autoexec.cfg" (same folder as your config), which will be executed when you start xonotic.
The balance for xpm is part of the game, you don't need to download that manually.

The configs have changed recently (a year ago) and been renamed. I recommend downloading the autobuild (nightly version) which has the new changes, it allows you to change the server config without fucking up your client config. balance-xpm.cfg is not enough for proper duel afaik, what you really want is ruleset-XPM.cfg which is only in autobuilds so far. 0.8.2 has a similar file - defaultXPM.cfg but execing it will reset your client config to defaults. Though actually balance-xpm.cfg should get you somewhat close to XPM - at least the health/armor limits are there.

Don't forget to delete the file you downloaded into data or it'll override the file bundled with xon with the same name.

Awesome; that seems to be working correctly!  Thanks!
On an unrelated note, I've seen posts around here saying that the "real community" is in various IRC channels, but I've also seen rumblings of a Discord server somewhere.  Which is the main place to go to look for games, and if it's the Discord, do you have an invite link?

The discord link is near the bottom of the main page: https://discordapp.com/invite/0uxcsw1XMkaOB936

It's connected to the main IRC channel but IRC has more channels that are active. Plus many servers have IRC channels: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/wikis/Channels

There is also a Duel Campaign someone created. I play that a lot when i play "offline". You might like that as well
https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.ph...t=campaign