Artificial Stupidity/Video Games/4X

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Examples of Artificial Stupidity in 4X video games include:

Civilization

  • The Civilization series has suffered from a great deal of this since its inception. It's gotten a lot better, but the other leaders often make astoundingly poor decisions. Examples include launching preemptive nuclear strikes against a fortified opponent or picking fights with someone with vastly superior technology.
    • Or refusing free money if they hate you enough. ("We would rather eat dung than accept your offer!")
    • The AI also doesn't know how to properly build up cities, instead relying on built-into-the-AI bonuses. While you wasted your time building up your economy, the AI is just blessed with an economy and can focus on military build-up. (You're probably going to have a technological edge, but see further down the page for answers to that issue...)
  • In addition to not knowing how to properly use their cities, the AI was usually a pretty bad judge of their inherent value. The ability to exchange cities via diplomacy (added in Civ 3) could be exploited to great effect, either to bleed an opponent dry simply by taking the same city over and over again, selling it back each time for massive profit, or merely as a way to dump a scrappy city that is doing you more harm than good. In either case, the computer is more than way too happy to take it off your hands.
    • A patch mostly removed this, so that AIs wouldn't include cities in trades any more, although they will include cities in peace treaties, and are still fine with you just giving them a city.
    • They also often give away every single city except one (Their capital, or a random city) if they are losing in a war, as part of the peace agreement. If you are in a war against three opponents and they all surrender at the same time, be prepared for unhappiness.
  • In Civ V, the AI seems all too happy to repeatedly insult someone who A) is decades, if not centuries, more advanced than they are, and B) has already conquered several other civilizations. Then, they act surprised when they're next.
    • Also from V, there is already one report of an AI (specifically, Oda Nobunaga) sending their entire army against a city-state only for it to be routed by the city. This is made much more annoying for the guy who witnessed it because said AI was their teammate.
    • But nothing tops Civilization V's Worker units. When automated, they do whatever makes sense to them—for instance, if (say) Townsville is at zero growth, meaning it has exactly as much food as it needs to sustain its population, and it accomplished that by putting farms on some hillsides... the Workers will go on ahead and turn those hills into mines, resulting in instant death-by-starvation in the city. And if you tell them not to, well, you're bound to Automate them again, at which point they'll return to that hill and mine it, by golly!—because you may be the ruler of an empire, but only Workers know what a city actually needs! Thankfully, The "Workers leave pre-existing improvements" option from Civilization IV has been patched back in.
      • Also applies to the town border expansion by culture. It will sometimes ignore valuable luxury resources in favor of tiles with the same cost and only initially better output in resources, such as water tiles.
    • Many reviews of V have commented that the AI is quite poor at strategically placing its military units. Apparently the game's own AI hates the new stacking rules.
    • Related to that, the AI seems to suffer from the calculation of relative military strengths not taking concentration of force into account. One civilization could have a greater total amount of military strength on its side by way of having lots of low-tech units, while another side has less total military strength, but what strength it does have is centralized in a small number of higher tech units. This leads the AI leading the more primitive civilization into war with the more advanced one where their larger army will get picked apart piece by piece by the much smaller, better equipped, force.
      • And your Military Advisor calculated by the same means, urging you to make peace while you are wiping the floor with such an enemy.
      • The AI also fails at realizing that indirect combat units cannot capture towns, bringing little or no direct combat units to lay siege to a town. Pick off the direct combat units and you can decimate the rest with the town defense and a ranged unit stationed in it.
    • Civilization V after researching trapping tech on the tech-tree which enables the building of trade-posts expect the enemy AI to build them on every freaking tile, meaning without some of the AI's Special bonuses on the higher difficulties expect them to be weak, bankrupt and technologically backwards past the 250 turn mark.
        • They do grow slightly with a certain tech, but so does any other tile improvement. They also provide one more gold during golden ages, which leads to them being better than most tile improvements early on, which is probably the source of this.
    • Another thing about the AI in V is how stubborn it tends to be. Imagine a Civ declares war on you, then you curbstomp their armies and take several of their cities and your armies are waiting just outside of another one of their cities and can take it easily. You'd imagine that when you give them demands for peace, they'd accept your conditions should they be reasonable. But no, anything other than an unconditional peace agreement (or one that doesn't favor you) is completely unacceptable. They won't even give you 1 gold if it means you will stop taking their cities. On the other hand, imagine the same situation, but they are demanding an insane amount of luxuries, resources, and gold from you to end the war. Or they demand such things even if they have yet to go into battle with one of your units.
  • Beyond the Sword expansion pack adds diplomatic features that the AI players tend to use extremely badly. For example, they will gladly cast their Apostolic Palace votes in favor of ending wars - even if they declared those wars themselves and had vastly superior armies.

Other 4X games

  • The AI in Master of Magic was about as dumb as it got.
    • It would do things like trade Great Drake (1200 research points) for Hell Hound (45 research points). The game needed to give AI triple on almost all relevant resources to keep up with a decent player to make it even somewhat competitive.
    • keep huge armies around and then do nothing with them
    • load up elite units onto weak transport ships and then run them at powerful warfleets
    • waste all its mana throwing firebolt after firebolt at a unit that was immune to fire.
    • Cast Berserk (enhances attack, but nullifies Armor) on basic infantry facing cavalry (this only wastes mana and together with cavalry's First Strike ensures the unit will be killed with impunity) before contact, rather than when (and if) it has a chance to attack. And/or combines it with Armor-enhancing spells (which are already negated). Or cast Web on an approaching non-flying unit, then just sit within city walls, since everyone's already out of ammunition - this only wastes mana and 2-3 turns until the attacker breaks out of the webs.
    • But for me, the crowning moment of stupid was when the following occurs. Freyja casts Nature's revenge, a spell that attacks all of a player's cities with an earthquake whenever that player casts a chaos or death spell. Jafar, who had taken some red books in this game, casts time stop, and while the rest of us are paralyzed, summons hellhounds about 60 times. When he lets go of the time stop, every single one of his cities is in ruins.
    • A lot of this was remedied with the 1.31 patch for Master of Magic. Some of it still applies though.
  • In Europa Universalis II, the AI does not know the army attrition rules. You can bring pretty much any enemy to his knees by letting him besiege one of your fortresses with his entire 60,000-man army while you send small forces to take over the rest of his territory. By the time you're done, attrition will have brought his army down to a size where you can take him easily, even if he started out 6 times your size.
    • Europa Universalis III has a bug that's survived years of expansions and constant patching known as the Naval AI Death Spiral. Every country has a limit of how many naval units it can support, and as it goes above that unit, every ship is has gets an exponentially-growing penalty to upkeep, meaning the country has to pay more for each additional ship. The limit depends on the number of provinces a country has. If it's near this limit and loses a few provinces in a war, then it can suddenly be above the limit. The AI doesn't know to disband ships when it can no longer afford them. This increased cost often leads to bankruptcy, which makes the country significantly weaker and even more vulnerable to neighbors and rebellion. It loses more and more land, incurring greater and greater penalties due to the size of its navy, eventually collapsing altogether.
  • The "planetary viceroy" AI in Master of Orion III, supposedly there to help run your empire for you and eliminate the need for micromanagement, is pretty much your main adversary for the duration of the game. It usually manages to hinder your efforts far more efficiently than the equally incompetent computer-controlled opponents.
  • While the AI in Galactic Civilizations is usually alarmingly smart, it occasionally suffers from minor glitches. For example, if a mega-event suddenly upgrades all the hitherto useless planets in its home system to class 7 or 8, it will periodically fail to realise that colonies = power and not start building colony ships instantaneously. It also has a bit of an issue with disabled victory conditions, meaning that in a huge game it can research the entire tech tree (which would normally give a tech victory), then leave its now useless research facilities sitting around costing them maintenance funds, rather than, say, replacing them with manufacturing or economic buildings.
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