Spiteful AI

Often, AI characters don't seem to care if they win so long as you lose. AI racers will ruin their standing just to screw with you, Mascot Fighter combatants will ignore weakened enemies and zero in on you and RTS opponents will hit you with everything they have even with your AI ally running rampant in their base.

While Spiteful AIs are more obvious in free-for-all situations, you'll see them in other places, too. It could be as simple as that annoying enemy in a Platform Game who leaps to its doom to interrupt your crucial leap over a Bottomless Pit. Perhaps, in an FPS, those terrified guards become reckless, suicidal berserkers as soon as the cutscene ends. In a Tactical RPG, enemy units might insist on certain death meandering around in the poison swamp instead of giving themselves a chance against your men, just to deny you the experience.

In short, this trope applies whenever it looks like the AI puts thwarting (or challenging) the player ahead of its own "well-being," whether in terms of the NPCs' survival or the objectives of the game. This is often the case.

Note that whatever it may feel like, the AI doesn't actually have it in for you. Right?

Tropes that can make you feel like a victim of Spiteful AI:
 * Action Bomb – A gray area: some enemies are simply built, born or trained to blow up on you. Fine. But why would wild animals or average soldiers act like that?
 * City Guards – Guards turn a blind eye to monsters terrorizing the populace and bandits openly assaulting citizens, though sometimes they'll protect everyone but you. If you step a toe out of line? Instant death penalty.
 * Collapsing Lair – Specifically, the idiots who often stay behind to impede you as you flee.
 * Gang Up On the Human – Apparently, second place and below doesn't care about winning so long as they can stop you.
 * Shoot the Medic First - They may not care so much about dying...as long as they can take the medic down.
 * Suicidal Overconfidence – Even when they're doing Scratch Damage and you're killing a dozen with each shot, the enemies still charge at you in a suicidal effort to chip off a few Hit Points.
 * Super Persistent Predator – Especially annoying in games that claim to represent whole worlds or ecosystems.
 * Too Dumb to Live – On the part of allies, obviously, but also includes enemies that you're trying to capture or that you need to beat up to fill your Mana Meter. Apparently, they're willing to die to stop you from pulling off your infinity plus-one combo.

Not to be confused with AI Is a Crapshoot, although a lot of those can be pretty spiteful, too. Related to We Win Because You Did Not.


 * Neverwinter Nights has an "enemy" faction, a "noncombatant" faction, and allows custom factions to be created in development. Any faction that becomes hostile to you (by hitting even one of their members) will cause them all to join the enemies. So if you come across some drow butchering innocent villagers and hit a dog, the drow, the villagers (including children), the dogs, and any animal (regardless of being a predator or prey) will all team up against you.
 * This isn't always true, depending on whether or not the faction is set to 'global' or not. If a faction is not marked as global, only observers will become hostile. And they'll still attack other enemies.
 * Gothic would have all enemy creatures attack you together. This could mean a wolf, a badger, an orc and a zombie somehow working together against you.
 * In the Pokémon games, wild Pokémon such as Geodude and Voltorb will often blow up on you for no good reason. Why would wild animals knock themselves unconscious just to damage you? How bizarre.
 * When your Pokémon team starts to get stronger, you really start to wonder about the stupid Lv. 2 Caterpie jumping out of the brush at you. Are they just trying to slow you down or what?
 * In the 5-Maid Knockout Exact-Turn Attack Challenge of Pokémon Platinum, you go up against five trainers in a row, each of then with one Clefairy. The idea is that you have to beat them all in a specific number of turns. Not "equal to or less than"; an EXACT number of turns. The problem is that every single one of the maids loves to spam the Endure move, which allows a mon to survive any hit with one hit point remaining. There is absolutely no reason to do this in a battle; the CPU just wants to throw off your turn count.
 * Additionally, the trainer match you get as a reward's true purpose is to steal the Rare Candy from their one Pokémon, since this is the only way Rare Candies are farmable (you can take the challenge once a day, but the item is replaced every time). However it will immediately destroy the item by using the move "Fling", so you still can't get it unless the first mon in your party can, in addition to taking down all those Clefairy at the exact right time, steal it from them immediately or keep them from attacking and switch to a different mon that can steal it.
 * Interestingly, Discworld might hold the explanation for moves like Explosion and Self Destruct. To sum up, dragons in this series breath fire not by being intensely magical, but by having more in common with a badly run chemical factory than your average lizard, and thus are prone to exploding at the slightest provocation. This, posit the books, is actually quite beneficial on a species level (not, obviously, on an individual level); if you taste like a faceful of violent explosive death, predators drop you from the menu really fast.
 * Or for a real world example, look at poisonous creatures, such as monarch butterflies. Their toxins only kick in after the monarch has been eaten, meaning it doesn't do that particular butterfly any good - but the predator learns to not eat the monarch's siblings.
 * All too often, that Olympus Mons that you're trying to catch would rather commit suicide by self-damaging moves like Double Edge, or just faint from Poison/Burn damage, than allow itself to be captured by you.
 * Up until the 5th gen, the battle facilities were particularly cruel about this: if you tie (such as if you KO their last Pokemon with a recoil move, but faint to the recoil) the AI wins. Yes, you read that right. And this will often happen through no fault of your own via the AI exploding their last Pokemon. Fortunately, this was fixed in Black/White.
 * Darth Bob, from Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2, a Tie Fighter that kills you by crashing his ship into you. It is generally accepted that this wasn't what the programmers intended, and that it's a flaw in the programming the AI taking things into its own hands to kill you.
 * Similarly, in the sequel of Battalion Wars, just to make enemy Fighters' Demonic Spider status even worse, they will crash into your AI Fighters to make them die instantly sometimes. As if your AI Fighters not picking up Jerry Cans and being Too Dumb to Live as a result wasn't enough.
 * Enemies in Disgaea will sometimes kill their allies with area attacks, depriving you of experience and items. They also prioritize destroying any treasure chests, level spheres, or innocents/specialists present on the map over attacking you, just so you can't claim them (No longer the case for the former two in Disgaea 3 and Disgaea 4 a Promise Unforgotten, thankfully).
 * The Druid class introduced in Disgaea 2 has an ability called Bonus Blast, which removes one of the bonuses you can potentially receive at the end of the fight from the list. It serves absolutely no purpose for the player, but the AI will use it very frequently, often enough that killing off any Druids on the map should be a top priority if there's a good reward.
 * Enemies in Phantom Brave will sometimes waste attacks on the corpses of your party members, even before you get the ability to revive. This does absolutely nothing to help them win the match, but makes it much more expensive to revive your guys afterwards.
 * Phantom Brave players who spend long enough in the random dungeons might eventually come across a map filled with awesomely powerful items and objects strewn about all over the place, and a bunch of enemy Prinnies. The Prinnies will focus exclusively on systematically wandering from item to item, picking them all up and throwing them all out of bounds, one by one. They pretty much won't stop until all the stuff you might have wanted has been destroyed.
 * Not to mention the enemies who constantly try to steal your weapons. Phantom Brave has some of the most Spiteful AI of any Strategy RPG I've ever played.
 * Also, the chances of stealing an item only depend on the unit's level and species (Merchants are better than average, Bottlemails have an almost 100% chance even if they're half the enemy's level.) Enjoying beating up on weakened level 150 enemies with your level 60 Marona armed with a super-duper weapon?Just wait until one of them finally gets one single turn, and uses that turn to nab your weapon and use it to kill you in one hit.
 * This rarely happens in Final Fantasy Tactics, but given that you don't get EXP for killing blows, it's less of an inconvenience. Now, when your allies do it...
 * In Final Fantasy Tactics a 2, there are quite a few escort missions, and while in some the allies will actively flee your foes, some insist on diving right into the action, exposing themselves to certain doom as the enemies will usually target them when able. The Paladin's Cover ability can solve this problem, though.
 * Furthermore, sometimes, an enemy near death will abandon all strategy and blindly launch a physical attack on your clan members, even if they'd get KO'd by the counterattack. This is often done to prevent players from Mounting their Chocobo Knights, or getting the finishing strike with Hunting for more loot.
 * Also in tactics A2, in one quest you have a single character supporting a bunch of moggles in a fight. This is a teammate who will constantly try to use the haste spell until it works. The problem with this is it's a tinkerer, meaning that he will keep using red gear (grants one team's entire party haste, determined by what amounts to a coin flip but the RNG seems to favor the enemy team) and, if failing, keeping the other team sped up getting in too many attacks that the player can do nothing at all against it. The thing is, unless you can haste your entire party, he will do this unless rendered unable to, such as by debuff, and the second one member has slown down he will start up again. However, aside from that he actually acts rather smartly in combat, meaning that if you can stop him from casting he will start fighting.
 * The AI in Civilization IV sometimes do this, sending all of their armies to pillage your country while they themselves are being crippled. This can sometimes be explained with the 'personalities' of the civilization rulers, and other times it's just the AI taking leave of its senses.
 * The same behaviour is the source of much frustration among Total War players. An enemy nation might be down to one city, every port blockaded, its treasury so far in the negative that it's threatening to plunge the world into a new Ice Age, but will it sue for peace or stop sending rag tag bands of peasants to get slaughtered by your invincible armies ? Fuck no, motherfucker, THIS IS TOTALLY SUICIDAL WAR !
 * Don't forget the goddamn Pope. You might have been fighting a defensive war against a nation 3 times larger than you for 5-6 game years. You finally launch a counter attack on your former city AND THE POPE THREATENS TO EXCOMMUNICATE YOU. Muslims have it easy...
 * AI countries can be excommunicated too -- in theory -- so at least they'll get punished for their spite. In theory.
 * In Smuggler's Run, the police cars don't really do much except try to crash into you as hard as possible. They don't mind flipping over in crazy ways that no normal human could survive, or brutally totaling their car every now and then. They just want to TAKE YOU DOWN.
 * Same thing happens in the Grand Theft Auto series. Even if you're driving a tank and their cars instantly explode when they hit, the Lemming Cops will still constantly ram you just to slowly drain your Hit Points.
 * Another way the police AI in Grand Theft Auto, and it's clones, hates you is seen when other criminals go after you. In one of the early missions in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, you can be riding a bicycle while three men in a car are gunning you down. Even if a policeman is standing in the line of fire, he won't respond. But god help you if your bicycle hits the policeman. Some older games take this Up to Eleven: The police may be in a neutral or hostile (to you) state, and any criminal action against the police by AI enemies will cause the police to act as if YOU attacked them.
 * Somewhat averted in another sandbox game where the player deals with police frequently (Postal 2). If the police see or hear another NPC fire a weapon, whether it's at you, them, or anybody else, they will attack back - in fact, the NPCs have it worse than you in this case, as the cops will continue sending more men until that NPC is dead, whereas the player has the option of throwing down his weapon and surrendering. However, if the above NPC was shooting at you and you try to fight back, or even if you just have a weapon in hand when in a cop's line of sight at all, they'll drop everything and focus on you instead.
 * The pirates will fight you to the bitter end in Metroid, even by attacking you as you flee after killing the Load-Bearing Boss. They might have an excuse, though, since it's often a whole freaking planet that's exploding. Where would they escape to?
 * There is one available method of escape: your ship. They must be trying to kill you and take your keys.
 * Except in Zero Mission, in which
 * The entirety of Fire Emblem 6 hard mode consists of this. The enemies are too generally too weak to kill you normally, but have at least a 1% chance of scoring a critical hit, which will probably kill their target. There are often 50 or more of them per level, and they will gladly suicide themselves into a situation that WILL kill them the next turn, just in the hope they get to kill 1 of your dudes, forcing you to restart the level if you ever want to see that character again, essentially making the entire Fire Emblem 6 hard campaign a Luck Based Mission. Fortunately starting from Fire Emblem 7 (the first American one), enemies rely less on lucky critical hits to kill you, but are still willing to sacrifice their lives when they have no hope of winning.
 * In Fire Emblem 7, if you leave Lyn or any one of your three lords exposed, it's actually best to hope that they don't kill the enemies attacking them so the rest of the enemies get body-blocked while you use the next turn to retreat and put someone stronger in the way. Numerous times the AI will sacrifice their nameless mooks to chip your health down so that one of them runs in and gets a kill, causing a game over. This most commonly happens on Lyn and Eliwood, especially later in the game where they throw a lot of lance-wielding enemies at you and the two sword-users are disadvantaged against lances. (And Lyn can't even counterattack if she has a bow like she gets later on!)
 * The military in Prototype is hell-bent on stopping you, and only you. If you so much as twitch wrong in their presence, they will drop whatever they're doing, no matter how suicidally stupid that may be, and try to turn you into mush. You could be standing in a crowd of pedestrians or even other soldiers, and they'll still unload on you with no care as to who gets caught in the cross-fire. Sometimes it seems like the death toll would be much lower if they just let Alex kill a few thousand people without interfering. While the military is just as reckless with the infected, they still prioritize you over all else. There are a scant few missions in which the military outright will not attack you, but that's it. Even during the boss fights, they'll try to pick you off, though they're not as persistent about it.
 * The Infected are quite similar, with the added bonus that they can spot you in disguise or not. However, the game subtly justifies this later on, when a cutscene shows an Infected's point of view: to the Infected, you're glowing like the freaking sun, so naturally they'll focus on you above the dim bulbs that are regular humans.
 * In the Lego Star Wars games enemies will only attack the character you control (unless you're a droid). This becomes extremely frustrating when Obi-Wan is swinging a lightsaber in the face of some stormtroopers, and all Han Solo wants to do is build a switch to open a door. Needless to say, the enemies don't give a damn about anyone but the guy who isn't attacking them.
 * This is also why Force Ghost characters cost so many studs. They're not seen, and partially transparent, so not targetted, and weapon fire passes through when shooting at others. Their sabers still work as well.
 * In Star Wars Battlefront 2, the AI, no matter how far away they are, will often ignore every other threat just to target you, even when they are physically incapable of hitting you. Try shooting a walker on Hoth with a sniper rifle and you'll see. Even the giant AT-AT pauses in its march, to turn and start blasting at a sniper for a stray shot that did nothing.
 * The allied AI is just as bad. They literally give away control posts to the enemy, moreso if you originally spawned from that post or had a hand in capturing it at all (which means pretty much all of them).
 * Just one of the many factors that confirm that the computer is indeed a cheating bastard in Dissidia Final Fantasy. When playing through any of the protagonists' campaign mode, encounters against certain mooks have in-battle conditions to be fulfilled (for instance, winning with a Flawless Victory, scoring a Critical Hit within a time limit, etc.) in order for a chance to win back Destiny Points (which deplete with every turn you take; the more you have by the end of the campaign, the better the rewards you receive). It seems that the computer wants to deny you ALL of this, and, from the start of the battle, will immediately take measures to prevent you from fulfilling these conditions.
 * In Baldurs Gate and similar games, when enemies manage to paralyse or stun one of your party members, they'll invariably gang up on and murder them, taking advantage of the fact that an immobile party member can't avoid hits. Tactically, it would make more sense for them to focus on the characters that can still move and attack; killing the one that can't take any action anyway doesn't help them win. What it does do, however, is inconvenience you and soften you up for the next group of enemies.
 * If an enemy targets one of your characters, they will almost never change target unless you put a lot of distance between the character and enemy, go invisible, or get away in some other way. Maybe you get hurt and want to back off and let healthier characters take over the fight? Too bad, that monster will push its way past your fighters and archers even as they fill it with arrows and swords, just to finish what it started. This can be used to kite the enemy while the rest of the party wails on them with impunity, or to lead them into a series of traps, but it's still annoying.
 * The Baldurs Gate example actually happens in Tactics Ogre. Often they might petrify a party member...and then proceed to find the immobile party member and beat the shit out of them. Additionally, if you bewitch an enemy, they know you won't damage them because that'll end the bewitching...if they can't cure the bewitchment, they may instead heal the bewitched enemy so when it does wear off, you have to beat them back down again.
 * In SSX, if you keep knocking down your opponents, they get a red exclamation point over their head. In Tricky, these racers will slow down if they're ahead of you to wait for you and try to knock you down.
 * For once, the trope is justified. If you were repeatedly knocked over by someone while trying to race you'd be pretty spiteful too, and want to return the favor.
 * War Craft 3 has the multiplayer mode. The enemy generals are worth enough experience to advance to level two, so it's usually a good idea to try and kill them before they can make any additional troops. If you get the generals down to low health, however, they will run off in search of the nearest monster do they can die and deny you the experience. It doesn't help that by that time you're usually too low on health yourself to fight the monsters.
 * In multiplayer LAN games with one or more human players, AI will always attack the host, even above the other humans. The AI could be in the middle of attacking you, but turn around and attack a gold mine your buddy just built on the other side of the map without any way of knowing this had even happened -- all because you aren't the host.
 * On Toontown Online, of all places, in the Cog Thief minigame, the cogs try to steal money, and you try to throw pies at them to make them explode. If they hit you, they explode and you fly into the air. When this happens, the cogs currently on screen will turn away from the money and try to run into you, even though they will instantly explode upon running into you.
 * Mario Kart. Specifically, Super Mario Kart, where all non-player characters have unique attacks in Grand Prix mode, like Mario and Luigi's invincibility, Bowser's fireballs, or Yoshi's eggs, but they will never use them against each other and will be perfectly happy to remain in whatever spot they started the race in. But if you come up behind them, or you had the insolence to take their spot...
 * Mario Kart DS makes this worse with team races or battles. Because friendly fire applies, the AI on your team doesn't care WHO they hit as long as they hit someone with an item, even if it costs your team the whole game.
 * Mario Kart 7 takes the spiting AI to a whole new level. The AI will aggressively swerve into your path just so you don't get the item boxes or coins you were trying to get. It's possible to go an entire lap without getting a single item because the AI wants to make sure you don't get any.
 * Destruction Derby 2 has the Death Bowl, an enclosed arena with a cliff. Even if you drive straight off all the other drivers will go after you to make certain you're wrecked.
 * Super Smash Bros is guilty of this to a degree. In multiplayer free-for-all, computer controlled opponents will still fight each other, as it is free for all. However, stray far enough from the fray, and notice how enemies tend to drift towards you, all while fighting each other. This is even more prevalent in Brawl, where certain 'finishing' moves (such as the Dragoon) will always be aimed solely at you, even if you aren't in the lead. Likewise, Final Smashes won't get activated unless you are the target.
 * Doubly so with Final Smashes, triply so when it's a Final Smash that targets one person (Link, Ike, Marth) or moves about the screen (Pikachu, Sonic). You can spend an entire four-minute 4-player match (you plus 3 computers) just running away from someone with a Final Smash because the computer refuses to use it on anyone except you, they will hunt you down everywhere you go (and if you're on a huge stage like New Pork City and Hyrule Temple, and the computer grabs the Smash Ball when you and he are on opposite sides of the stage, you get to watch as the computer runs across the stage after you, completely ignoring the other computer opponents).
 * Computers have been known to waste certain Final Smashes, like Snake's which has an ammo limit or a time limit, just waiting for a human to respawn, completely ignoring any other computers that are present.
 * In Vanquish even if you are surrounded by bulky marines carrying rocket launchers while you are completely out of ammo, every single enemy will try to gun you down specifically provided you aren't hiding behind cover, in which case many enemies will suicidally charge forward just to get behind your barricade and stab you in the face. It is somewhat justified in that the enemies for 99% of the game are robots and the fact that you have the super prototype ARS, you are probably considered to be a bigger threat. Not so justified when your allies seem to enjoy running in front of you while you're firing or rushing into an enemy warp point which pretty much automatically kills them as well as 'sitting' on grenades. Even worse, the more allied kills you get, the lower your overall score.
 * Obscure racing game Fatal Racing has eight teams of two cars on the track, and on higher difficulty levels most races take about 10 minutes. It is not uncommon to see opponents turn around and head the wrong way if they are lagging behind, apparently to try and eliminate someone else out of spite because they are doing poorly. On higher damage settings this is a legitimate danger: hit one and you take enough damage to burst into flames and slow down, enabling other opponents to catch up to you and kill you before you reach the pitlane.
 * And sometimes a driver on low health heads into the pitlane and doesn't stop, plowing into anyone standing there waiting for repairs and catapulting them back onto the track. This typically results in a quick death for both cars involved.
 * Somewhat averted in that the enemies don't specifically target you, they just decide they're done racing and attempt to ruin someone else's day for no reason.
 * Original War is an RTS where it's not possible to get new men. Soldiers fall unconscious before dying, and can be saved with prompt attention - except when fighting the douchebag faction, which seems to take the time to execute wounded soldiers in the middle of combat.
 * In the PC game Driver, police will not interfere with any other activity done by other AI drivers, including two AI drivers involved in a car crash directly in front of a police car. However, once the heat is on you, ALL police cars in the area become laser-guided missiles aimed at destroying your car, even if your car is at a dead stop. Furthermore, the computer police will callously crash into other vehicles on the road just to get to you. Apparently the lives of other motorists takes second place to catching a person who was driving 10 miles over the speed limit.
 * Not only that, but they will often try to smash "each other" out of the way to get to you. Do any replay with the camera facing behind you, and you can watch them destroy dozens of their own cars this way.
 * Sohees from Ragnarok Online often kill themselves when their HP is too low, so you don't get any items or exp.
 * In some of the Yu-Gi-Oh video games, the AI will occasionally do bizarre things like activate Magic Jammer (which disappears upon use and requires one additional card as a sacrifice) to block out a spell card of yours that was only targetting Magic Jammer. Or waste 1000 lifepoints and their Seven Tools of the Bandit card just to deny you using a perfectly harmless card like "Jar of Greed". They'll also often end up destroying their own high-level monsters and nets of traps with cards that hit both sides, like Torrential Tribute and Heavy Storm just to harm you, even though they are the ones that suffer far more damage in the process.
 * It's even funnier in some cases with Seven Tools Of The Bandit, as the AI will use it to negate a trap like Just Deserts (your opponent takes 500 damage for each monster they have), when they only have one or two monsters out. They'll give 1000 life points to stop themselves from taking 1000 or even 500 life points, and also end up losing a way to block one of your later, and presumably more important traps.
 * The City Guards in Morrowind have it in for you. They will always tell you to move along and ask you what you need, even when there's an annoyed Dark Elf trying to punch your lights out. You punch back, they'll immediately shout "YOU N'WAH!" and arrest you.
 * The first F Zero featured (non-competitor) vehicles so low on health that one touch would make them explode. Of course, rather than pull over to the side of the road and try to live, they prefer to try to ram you.
 * Elite, at least the Commodore 64 version, featured shuttles that would launch from a space station directly into the lane of oncoming traffic (i.e., you)--even when you were literally less than a second from successfully docking. If the collision didn't kill you outright, the instant plunge into wanted criminal status (for destroying an unarmed passenger shuttle) would mean getting ganked by the space police the moment you launched. Not so much the AI being spiteful as just dumb, but it wasn't hard to feel like the game was out to get you all the same.
 * Inverted at times in Galactic Civilizations, as demonstrated in this playthrough. The Drengin refused to wipe out the player's race because if they did, the Terrans would win an alliance victory.
 * Also played straight. If you're crushing the AI in a war, odds are good it will surrender all its stuff to someone who isn't you.
 * On the other hand, in the above-linked playthrough, the player got a bunch of planets from an empire who was losing an unrelated war...
 * Shining Force would have a poor AI that basically prioritizes Max or Bowie even if they can kill a squishy.
 * AI frequently does this in Europa Universalis and other Paradox games. It can take many forms. Little, pitiful nations, for example, frequently will ally with you, then almost immediately declare war against someone much stronger than them. Other countries, if they have constant casus belli against you, will declare subsequent wars even if they were beaten several times. It's especially infuriating if it results in a strong country deciding to abandon you, which invites other potential enemies to gang rape your poor nation.
 * The Saints Row series. If you're on the run from police and make the foolish mistake of trying to make your getaway in a vehicle, every pedestrian car in the city will suddenly think they're a cop too and deliberately get in your way, moreso if it's an activity where you can't afford to damage your vehicle. And then if you're on foot, they'll just panic from all the noise and lights and proceed to run you over, no matter where you are in relation to them.
 * In Zippy Race, it's painfully obvious that the other cars will actively try to swerve right in front of you.
 * Lampshaded in Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. Throughout the game, enemies continue to shoot at you, even when trapped in a burning building, a sinking ship, or a collapsing ancient city. Drake figures the enemies just don't care.
 * In the first Command and Conquer games, attacking a harvester or ore truck will cause the computer to go berserk and throw every single unit it has at you. It also has a habit of surrendering when all important structures were destroyed and it had no chance to win. Yuri's Revenge had the titular faction come across as spiteful, particularly the gattling and magnatron tanks and mind control units. The former loved to chip away while out of range, before running from any retalliation. Didn't matter if it killed anyone, what counted was they hurt and annoyed you. The latter takes damage if it mind controls too many units, but is only too happy to destroy itself if it means just turning one more unit and forcing their allies to shoot them.