AI Breaker: Difference between revisions

Either the programmers didn't consider the possibility of the player doing this, couldn't come up with an effective counter or there's a bug in the system that makes it perform in ways not intended. Ultimately, even if the AI does always respond in the "best possible" way to an action, it may still become an AI Breaker by making the opponent(s) too predictable.

** A really neat trick in ''Soul Calibur 4'' involves the final, topmost floor of the Tower of Lost Souls, where you face a severely souped-up version of the game's final boss... who can, however, easily be defeated by letting him knock you over, and then roll yourself on the floor so you're between him and the edge. He'll then do a jump over you--straightyou—straight off the edge of the tower, plunging to his death. By far the fastest way to make money in the game...

* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]'', when fighting the Harrier, you can't protect yourself from its missiles by hiding behind objects, because the missiles will always hit the object, and its explosion passes through the object and hits you. However, if you press yourself up against the object, the AI will think you're trying to move in that direction, and the missiles will always come in too low to hit you. May be the only way to beat it on Extreme.

* The original ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'' is full of them. All of these examples and more are demonstrated in a mostly finished [https://web.archive.org/web/20110917214130/http://www.viddler.com/explore/adelikat/videos/644/ tool-assisted speedrun of the game], done by theenglishman.

* You can trick the AI into a lot of things in ''[[Super Smash Bros.]] Brawl'', but the most memorable trick is probably the 'Fly To Survive' scheme... only useable with the handful of characters who posess limited flight capabilities, and mostly useful for the Cruel Brawl survival-test, where you face a bunch of SERIOUSLY overpowered AI's... but by simple constantly flying UNDER the island the battle takes place on - hanging off the ledge on either side to reset your flight-time counter - you can trick the AI's into jumping off the screen with a little practice.

** In the previous game, ''Melee'', one famous enemy was Donkey Kong who had one tactic if the opponent stayed still on his stage. Charge, jump, jump, flip-hammer-punch. Unfortunately for him, his flip-hammer-punch disables his ability to hang on to edges, you spawn on a fairly small platform, and to properly hit you, he has to miss your platform by a bit, over one of the few levels in the game where you can't really recover from a fall--particularlyfall—particularly since his timing puts him into the ground just when an instant death enemy jumps up to bite at people's heels...

***** [[Overly Long Gag|Even]] ''[[Overly Long Gag|easier,]]'' just leave Ness at level 1. He will do the same thing, minus PK Thunder.

* In ''[[Dragonball Z]]: Burst Limit'', several of the hardest challenges can be overcome by spamming Vegeta's 'Final Flash' super-move... apparently, the AI considers it a '[[Kamehame Hadoken|super beam]]' attack, and duly sidesteps it -- onlyit—only, the Final Flash is actually an [[Area of Effect]] cone, meaning that they step straight into it (instead of blocking, which would greatly reduce the damage). And because the AI considers dodging to be better than blocking, the higher the level of the AI is, the more likely it is to fall for this...

* In ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'', various MAP attacks aren't fun, since they either amount to powerful [[Sphere of Destruction|Spheres Of Destruction]] or [[Wave Motion Gun|Wave Motion Guns]]s. In either case, the accuracy means most of your units will get hit, and most of ''those'' will die after one or two shots. However... if the attack would hit even ''one'' other enemy unit, they won't use them.

* Attempting to convert a unit with two priests at once in the original ''[[Age of Empires I (Videovideo Gamegame)|Age of Empires I]]'' would leave it unable to decide which to attack, resulting in the unit standing still until converted.

** Gen V has a Pokemon, Zoroark, that disguises itself to look like another Pokemon in your party, but it still has the same moveset and Dark typing. This masquerade is revealed if Zoroark is hit with an attack. [[The All-Seeing AI|Unlike with many games]], this affects how the AI plays, so when fighting a trainer using Psychic-type Pokemon, a Zoroark can disguise itself as a Poison-type Pokemon, and as Psychic is super-effective against Poison but fails against Dark, this caused the AI to continuously use Psychic-type moves against my Dark-type. The Zoroark's illusion was never broken, and it became impossible to lose.

* Dante in ''[[Devil May Cry]] 4'' is [[That One Boss]] for a lot of players and is considered a [[Perfect Play AI]]. One of the reasons for this is if you try to shoot him, he will knock your bullet away [[Shoot the Bullet|with a bullet of his own.]] However, while he's shooting your bullets, he's vulnerable to attack. Get him into a shooting match and you can make him eat your [[Red Right Hand|Devil Bringer]], even on the highest difficulty.

* The AI in ''[[Golden Axe]]'' doesn't take holes in the floor into account, which means it is easy to [http://epicgoldenaxe.ytmnd.com/ trick] any computer opponent from walking or jumping into the game's many [[Bottomless Pits]]. [[Speed Run|Speed Runs]]s rely on this.

** The AI of a normally overpowered [[Boss in Mook Clothing|Komato Annihilator]] can be exploited to have it [[Hoist by His Own Petard|destroy itself with its enormous firepower]] in certain areas. If Iji jumps up onto a wall that the Annihilator cannot reach or break down and stays in front of the Annihilator, the AI's typical reaction would be to fire the Shocksplinter or Splintergun at Iji. This causes the weapon's explosions to rebound against the wall and back onto the Annihilator, dealing it [[Splash Damage]]. Have the AI repeat this several times trying to damage Iji, and eventually it will explode upon running out of health.

* One of the most common [['''AI Breaker]]''' tricks in a resource-gathering-and-management RTS is to starve the computer opponents of resources. They usually are not programmed to handle situations like that. At best, they stop trying to attack you directly and waste time throwing inadequate forces against your control points, trying to recapture a resource generator. At worst, they switch to turtling and never make another aggressive gesture.

* There's a well-known example in ''[[StarcraftStarCraft]]'': if you wall off a chokepoint with buildings that don't attack (generally Terran supply depots) and then put ranged attackers behind those buildings, the AI's Zerglings or Zealots will run around in front of the buildings looking for a nonexistent path while you shoot them to ribbons.

* At least in the DS port of ''[[Disgaea: Hour of Darkness]]'', there is a simple, if time-consuming method to defeat some monsters, especially low movement ones like the zombie king in the Cave of Ordeals. If you end your turn with all of your units out of reach from most melee-based enemies, they'll sit there doing nothing like in ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'' examples above. One powerful spear technique, Avalanche, deals a lot of damage and then sends you flying backwards quite a long way. You can then set up a chain throw to clear the spearman and everyone else out of there. So long as the monster behaves like this, you can run in and Avalanche to escape as long as you like, and the monster will be none the wiser. This doesn't always work because some monsters behave differently - it's probably not going to work on a fast monster, but it's really handy when it does, allowing you to handily defeat enemies you otherwise couldn't without [[Level Grinding]].

* The campaign missions in ''[[Warcraft]] II'' can often be dealt with by throwing your starting forces into suicide runs on the computer's transports (which the computer rarely if ever rebuilds) and/or town hall, buying all the time you need. [[Dungeon Bypass|Dungeon Bypasses]]es and the computer's inability to marshal distant forces when under attack help.

* The AI in ''[[Command and& Conquer|Red Alert 2]]'' will always (and we mean always) fire their once-per-ten-minutes superweapon at the most expensive cluster of your units and buildings possible. Usually this means your War Factory, source of your main assault forces. But the Naval units you can build rack up the expenses pretty quickly as well, and superweapons do next to nothing to Naval production facilities. Cluster a bunch of Subs/Destroyers/Aircraft Carriers/Dreadnoughts around your Naval Yard, then have them scurry off when the Superweapon alarm goes off. The Superweapon lightly grazes the naval pen, and you lose nothing.

* Invaders in ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' automatically [[The All-Seeing AI|take the shortest route to get into your fortress]], preferentially heading for unlocked doors and avoiding locked ones, even when they have creatures with them capable of bypassing said locked doors. Because of this, [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|it's quite possible]] to set up the entrance to your fortress with two doors with a long corridor full of weapon traps between them and constantly switch which of the two is locked, leaving the goblins marching back and forth through fields of + enormous steel corkscrews+ and * giant swinging iron axe blades* until [[Ludicrous Gibs|blood drips from the ceiling]].

** The[[Fright Deathtrap|Dodge traps]]: the AI will also dodge attacks without taking into account what it's dodging into and what's it dodging away from. Construct a narrow bridge over a deep pit and cover it with crappy wooden extending/retracting spikes, and even the toughest of (non-flying) enemies will dodge right off the edge and start falling. Nothing in the game is immune to fall damage.

** The effects of the Building Destroyer ability are also exploitable-: a creature with Building Destroyer level 2 is not only capable of battering down doors and destroying levers and various types of buildings, it actually prefers destroying buildings to doing anything else, including attacking your soldiers unless it's defending itself. If one of your soldiers interrupts a troll in the process of battering down a door, for example, the troll will beat the soldier into unconsciousness or immobility, then leave him or her lying there and return to beating on the door. Building destroyers will also happily stand on top of traps and get stabbed repeatedly, if it gets them close to a destroyable building. Capturing many building destroyer creatures is as simple as putting[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Trap_design#Bait_furniture leaving a Door to Nowhere in the middle of a ring of cage traps]. What's even better, they always do it using melee attacks, never special attacks like fireballs or spray of flesh-melting contagions.

* In the [[Microprose]] ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' game, the AI isn't very smart in itself, but it at least seems to understand the game, until you use [https://web.archive.org/web/20131020102400/http://www.cardkingdom.com/catalog/item/13018 Black Vise] and then the computer will do whatever it takes to reduce its own hand, even if the move itself is worse than just taking the damage or even if there's an obvious, obviously better move (using a card to kill his own creatures when he can kill yours, for example), and even if it's well below the four-card safe range.

* The first ''[[Command and& Conquer]]'' was full of these.

** The AI would rebuild its bases according to the predetermined layouts if any of it was destroyed, and it would ALWAYS replace lost buildings if it had the financial capability to do so, allowing the player to drain their funds easily if a vulnerable building could be found to continuously whale on (and the AI would always spend money to repair damaged buildings). The final mission of the GDI campaign actually seems to be designed to allow the player to exploit this; a large group of Nod [[Green Rocks|tiberium]] silos is concentrated outside of the main base, allowing the player to continuously capture them (stealing the money inside), sell the silos and transfer the stored tiberium to their own storage facilities, and then the AI would then rebuild them and fill them up to be captured again. On the flip side, another GDI final mission has the AI suddenly start building near a tiberium field, making the AI rather dangerous.

* In ''[[King's Quest: Mask of Eternity|King's Quest Mask of Eternity]]'', if you shoot at the [[Dem Bones|skeleton archers]] from a very large distance, they will never shoot back. It's not just that you're outside their range of fire--itfire—it will never occur to them to move closer so that they can shoot you. In the Underground Realm of the Gnomes, you can shoot the immobile [[Our Demons Are Different|rock demons]] from around a corner if you're very careful. If you stand just right, the stones they throw at you will crash against the wall.

* [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMOs]] in general, just by their very nature of (nearly) anything being possible, often have issues with this - as they have to make the AI fluid enough to allow players to use different strategies, while smart enough to prevent exploits. Since players tend to come up with solutions that the developers haven't thought of - this leads to more exploits than in other games.

* Melee combat in ''[[Rondo of Swords]]'' is based around the [[Foe-Tossing Charge]], so enemy melee units typically don't move until you're close enough that they can charge you. However, they can't end their turn in an occupied square, and they can't double back on their own path. If you put a unit just close enough that they should be able to charge it, then put three more units in the three adjacent squares they'd charge past your nearest unit to reach, they'll get confused and move to the one open square adjacent to your nearest unit--whichunit—which not only prevents them from damaging that unit, but allows your four nearby units to gang up on them on the following turn. (Note that this does not apply if the enemy unit has a significantly shorter movement range than your nearest unit--theyunit—they'll try to flee instead.)

* ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' has a few of these, but they're rare or situational enough that it's generally easier to either get better at the game, or level grind. However, players engaging in [[Challenge Run|challenge runs]] need every advantage they can get, and there are a number of well known tricks for various bosses. The most notable of all, however, is known as the Loss Strategy. Loss in an ability possessed by numerous bosses (in particular, the hardest ones) that can inflict the confusion status with 100% success rate. A confused unit will run around the battle field using random abilities at random targets. The AI is hard-wired to never break confusion unless it knows it can kill the target in two hits. Normally, this is not a problem, but in a solo challenge, when the player is confused and the boss cannot kill him quickly, the boss either does nothing, or uses mostly harmless spells that can't actually kill the player. With no allies to attack the confused character can only attack the boss. This means that many otherwise strategy intensive boss fights end up reduced to 'get confused with enough HP, enjoy a drink while the random AI slowly kills the boss'.