Artificial Stupidity/Video Games/Real Time Strategy

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Command & Conquer

  • The Command & Conquer games alone have many examples of this, most evident in the first game, Tiberian Dawn. Some of the Aritificial Stupidities may overlap each other.
  • Tiberian Dawn has the most of them all and are is easiest to exploit. Some examples follow:
    • Wall Ignorance -- The AI would not target walls even if they were built into its base. This means you can literally build a chain of cheap sandbags right into its base, build armed buildings there and block all the exits with walls so that their units can't get out.
    • Suicidal Overconfidence -- The AI has a knack of fixating the first enemy it encounters until that enemy's defeated. This leads to almost total ignorance of anything else on the field, and will result in the AI sending loads and loads of units on suicidal runs against heavily fortified positions again and again until it runs out of resources.
      • When the AI sends all it's units into attack mode, the Harvesters attempt to attack, too. While this makes sense in RA 2 where half the harvesters have mounted machine guns, that's several years down the line.
    • Blind Shortcutting -- When given a command (by a commanding player or by the game's internal mechanics) units will use shortest route possible, even if it means running into a trap of a thousand guns. And if they're shot, they don't fire back, either. This is can be either a nuisance or an exploitable flaw, depending on whether you're losing or winning. See this video (starting from 6:40) for a hilarious, satirical parody of this loophole, complete with Double Take, for a demonstration.
      • Also, the shortest distance is determined with algebra, not calculus; that is, it takes the distance from point A to point B, ignoring any obstacles, meaning a slightly farther tiberium patch will be ignored despite having to go much further to get to the "closer" one.
      • If the player has two Harvesters, one attempting to return to base and the other to go out and collect through the same narrow path, the units will sometimes meet, turn twice (each time continuing to block the other's progress)... And then center their orientation, and move right through each other... The last few seconds of the clip above demonstrates this.
    • Blind Harvester Replacement -- An easy way to defeat the AI is to make them broke. To do that, you have to kill the AI's Harvesters which the AI will insist on replacing until runs out of credits to replace them... or, for that matter, anything else in its arsenal. At this point, the AI becomes a pushover and is wide open to attack.
      • If you side with Nod, you can take a Recon Bike and attack an enemy Harvester without losses. The Harvester is programmed to cease harvesting and attempt to run the Bike over as though it was a crushable infantryman, but since the Bike is a vehicle instead, it will fail to run the Bike over and just stand in front of the Bike like a sitting duck. It will remain fixated to the Bike and following the Bike everywhere, even if it means driving into a trap.
        • This might have been changed with a specific patch, but at least in some versions of the game it was perfectly possible to run over a bike with a harvester.
      • If you side with GDI you can do this by attacking the Harvester with a Rocket Soldier and then ordering that Rocket Soldier to escape back to base in an APC.
    • Targeting Fixation -- As Nod, you could completely avoid GDI air strikes by leaving an infantryman in the north-east corner of the map. The AI would always target this one man instead of your army or base.
    • In general, the AI in Command & Conquer is purely scripted and doe not respont to the type, number or direction you attack it at all. Each map data tell the AI when to build which units, and which way they should take to your base. This explains why the exact same enemy unit compositions attack after specific time intervalls again and again, and why they keep getting blocked by simple sandbag walls.
  • Red Alert examples:
    • Pathfinding Stupidity -- The AI would often decide that sending units as far as possible toward the north-western corner of the map, regardless of if there were enemy forces present, was an absolute priority. Cue a large multicoloured mass of AI units all moving to this one corner, ignoring each other completely in the process. This is most commonly seen in the V3.03 patch, but is also known to occur in all other versions.
  • Red Alert 2 examples:
    • Targeting Fixation -- When using superweapons, the AI suffers a similar problem to the one encountered Tiberian Dawn, only it was based on buildings. The AI would always target any super weapons you had, then any war factories, then your naval yards. And it would be the most recently built one as well. So all you had to do to avoid superweapons was place a targeted building away from the base.
      • When you play against hard computer with superweapons, just build a warfactory right beside their base right when their superweapon is ready, they'll be stupid enough to nuke themselves. And sell the building as soon as the superweapon is launched
    • The Allied (As opposed to Soviet, not allied as in allied with the player) AI will also fixate when it comes to using its jets. It will always attack the first tank built until it is destroyed. You can exploit this by putting that tank at the back of your base behind heavy anti-air and the AI will keep wasting its jets over and over again.
  • Generals examples:
    • Suicidal Overconfidence -- Unless there's an enemy unit nearby, the pathfinder would always take the exact same path to the enemy base. This led to situations where the player could amass a gigantic wall of artillery pieces and have them auto-target a single small area in which all enemy units passed through, and enemy units would always blindly go through the massive killzone, never changing up their pathfinding at all.
      • Considering playing the Nuclear General in the Zero Hour expansion, upgrade to Neutron Bombs and have 4 Neutron Artillery cannons force-fire on the path the AI takes. Every five minutes or so, scoop up the empty vehicles with your own infantry. Instant tank army at a very low cost!
      • Generals (and ZH) has prelaid AI pathwork, if you look in the map editor. So this explains it. Made the SP/skirmish game far too easy if you knew the AI paths (or looked em up using the handy map editor included with the game!).
    • In Generals (without the Expansion Pack) the USA AI had very poor strategy (bear with the Unfortunate Implications). With their units thrown erratically at your base, they almost refused to build defenses, and could be defeated just because they went bankrupt from their stupidity.
    • The higher-difficulty USA AIs in Zero Hour also make a mistake that the lower-ones don't. The brutal AI doesn't seem to grasp the fact that the Avenger's an anti-air unit, and its anti-ground attack is a targetting laser that doesn't do any damage whatsoever.
  • Tiberium Wars examples:
    • Stone Walling -- A base can become invincible against the AI with a good mixture of all usable kinds of turrets and aircraft for base defense. Then, after wearing the enemy's ability to attack, send in the aircraft to do bombing missions while selling off the turrets in place of more aircraft.
  • Renegade examples:
    • Suicidal Overconfidence -- The AI generally wasn't the brightest of the bunch. As a result, your rare allies would barely ever follow you to the area after the one you met them in, given that they survived against the respawning enemies while you killed the Officers (thus disabling respawns). The only allies that were able to follow you were Escort Mission targets, which in turn had the tendency to stand between you and the enemies. They also didn't follow you as much as mindlessly charging ahead after you caught up with them at a checkpoint or saved them from enemies.

Supreme Commander

  • In Supreme Commander, since the game has infinite resources, if you heavily fortify your base, the enemy will attack again and again until they are defeated, potentially losing tens of thousands of units--which you can then turn into resources. This is especially notable in some of the campaign missions, where the enemy would repeatedly attack with the same force, even though your base had gone from a tiny outpost to a huge, heavily shielded and fortified behemoth.
  • On island maps, the AI often builds a horde of low-tech land units with no regard to how they're supposed to get to the enemy base. Even on the hardest difficulty settings.
  • Even more annoying is that they'll often build loads of dropships, and then almost never use them.
  • It is also incredibly easy to win in the expansion pack Forged Alliance by getting an endless stream of aircraft built, and having them go straight into patrolling across the majority of the map, denying the AI valuable mass deposits. Note: fighting for, and defending mass deposits was made much more important in the expansion to encourage conflicts and reduce turtling. It is incredibly easy to screw over the AI this way, never giving him a chance to expand, whilst making your own economy unstoppable. Even the supposed "adaptable" AI never really catches onto the endless swarms of aircraft, producing only a token handful of anti-air units.
  • The AI in general is sub-par, even for strategy game AI. By default, it builds almost no Anti-Air, even when being attacked by air units, holds massive amounts of units in reserve (IE: Keeping about 50 tanks out in the middle of nowhere while it's base is being steamrolled) for no reason, waits on building Naval Forces until it has a massive (and useless, especially on ocean-based maps!) land force, and never seems to rely on artillery, tactical missiles, or strategic missiles (nukes) to crack bases, instead sending endless streams of troops that'll never even get a shot off.
    • It's also known to march its Commander (and losing your Commander means you INSTANTLY LOSE) into suicidal attacks, such as straight into defenses, into the middle of high-tier units, and at enemy Commanders. Having the enemy commander basically blow himself up and take your base down with him is incredibly frustrating.
  • The AI doesn't do well with mods that alter the resource system. Two of those are bundled with Forged Alliance: One where resource output is vastly increased (so you only need a few mass extractors and power plants) and one where only the ACU produces resources (but more than usual). They can also be combined. The AI still builds mass extractors all over the map and thereby wastes productive capacity. It also doesn't occur to it to just build a metric crapload of Experimentals ... like you do right now.

StarCraft

  • StarCraft‍'‍s stairwells and narrow passages: small units generally didn't have much trouble, but ordering - say - a group of Dragoons up an elevated area always resulted in a few making it through, a few behind those staying in the way, and all the others deciding the passage was blocked and cheerfully going back and taking the ridiculously long route along the whole elevated area.
  • Goliaths are just as stupid as Dragoons, if not more so. That's because they both use the Hydralisk's pathfinding subroutine, but are physically larger units, will engage and follow enemies as if they are air units, even thought they cant fly, and don't automatically disengage enemy units that they can no longer follow or see.
    • Also, in multiplayer, try a Zerg Rush or similar strategy to knock out one computer opponent early on, but leave one of his buildings alive (preferably a support building that can't produce units) and set up an expansion there. The other computer-controlled enemies will focus almost exclusively on recapturing that base.
  • In a 1v1 against a computer, try sending in a peon to attack their mineral line. Once you get their attention, run. The computer's ENTIRE ECONOMY will chase you all over the map, leaving you free to harvest and build at your leisure. GG
    • Maybe Blizzard's just been too lazy to seriously reprogram their AI, but the Starcraft 2 beta still did this.
    • They improved chokepoint pathfinding in Starcraft 2 to the point where you can/could cheat by ordering a unit into a potential enemy base location under the fog of war -- if it took the long route this meant the main entrance was blocked, in other words, there was a terran player there.
  • The developers themselves admitted to taking shortcuts with the AI. In fact, the only reason they didn't make the game's Campaign Editor more flexible, was to hide the fact that the AI is not programmed to handle major changes to the game, as it operates entirely on assumptions.

Super Robot Wars

  • In many of the Super Robot Wars games, the enemy AI for grunts tends to prioritize them toward the "weakest" unit within their attack radius (That, or Shoot the Medic First). However, "weakness" in SRW is relative: the units with the lowest armor and HP tend to be the units that can dodge anything you throw at them with the right pilot. Thus, the computer tends to waste time and ammo trying to hit a unit it simply has no chance of hitting, minus the intervention of the Random Number God.
    • Conversely, in some games they go for units with the higher HP. While that means they prioritize battleships (And if one falls it's a game over), it also means ignoring half-dead units and going after that healthy Super Robot who will take Scratch Damage and kill them on the counterattack.
  • The automatic combat setup for your units isn't too smart either. Small, crunchy units with Defense Support will gladly jump in to soak hits for massive, heavily-armored SuperRobots. Also, the automatic attack selection will pick the weakest attack the robot has that will destroy the enemy. This occasionally leads to a Gundam deciding to use its limited-ammo Vulcan over its completely free Beam Saber, or GaoGaiGar using energy on Broken Magnum when it could walk up and hit the enemy. Finally, recent games that have pilots automatically elect to dodge or defend when the oncoming attack would destroy them, but the evasion threshold for some pilots is oddly low - Real units have been known to try to reduce their chance to be hit from 5% to 3% rather than take a counterattack. All of these, mercifully, can be overridden by the player.
  • A good instance of Artificial Stupidity comes from the enemies with their MAP attacks. Normally a MAP would hit every enemy in its radius, but an enemy will refrain from using it on the off chance that one of their allied units would be hit. Makes many a boss easier. Except bosses with Friendly Fireproof MAP attacks (At least you get some of those too).

X-Com

The various X-COM games suffered from this as well...

  • The original X-COM and its sequel, Terror From the Deep, were turn-based, so it was only natural that your troops would just watch while the aliens shot at them (if the aliens were shooting it probably wasn't your turn). Characters did have a "Reaction" stat, which gave them a chance to shoot if an enemy moved in their line of sight when it wasn't their turn, but humans Reaction score tended to start so low that shooting 1 in every 4 times they see an alien is akin to lightning reflexes. They did, however, have the problem with characters - on either side - not taking the blast radius of their weapons into account when shooting. You never gave a rocket launcher to someone with a high Reaction score, or snuck up on an alien with a heavy weapon (aliens, in general, having much higher Reaction scores than humans).
  • Aliens manage to grenade themselves with depressing regularity. Is there not some alien sergeant shouting "When Mr Pin has been removed, Mr Grenade is not your freind"?
    • Aliens in UFO Alien Invasion usually don't blow up their own butts by miscalculating the damage radius... they kill themselves by grenades bouncing off the scenery after a risky throw - which happens about once in every mission when they have grenades at all.
  • X-com troopers are little better, opting for Reaction Fire even if a friendly is in/near the line of fire. They also stop tracking an alien who walks behind a thin column and then start aiming for a reaction shot anew.
  • Panicking civilians will happily run into the middle of a fire fight, then run round in circles in some sort of weird suicide attempt
    • In UFO Alien Invasion civilians are sane enough to run away from threats they see (if not from sounds) and occasionally manage to actually save themselves.
  • Apocalypse was new to real-time, reactive AI, so the following scenario is not at all unlikely: five troops kneeling (to present a smaller target) in an area filled with bookshelves. One of them is being attacked by a worm, and they just sit there and watch, including the one being attacked. The sixth one is trying to shoot it... while on the other side of a bookshelf. His rifle ran out of ammunition so he switched to his rocket launcher. And he was right up against a bookshelf. They actually got more intelligent when their brains were sucked out and replaced with green alien goo. In that same game, two were attacked and converted, switched to incendiary ammunition, spread out and accurately started a ring of fires in and around the other four who responded in a thoughtful and calm manner by shooting each other in the heads. Not even in the remote direction of the enemies.

Other Real Time Strategy games

  • In the Stronghold series, the easiest way to defeat a computer-controlled opponentis to take out their water wells and set their fortress on fire.Since the shape and arrangement of the enemy castle is predetermined, whenever a building is destroyed they would build it again on the exact same spot, while it was still on fire, and repeat until either the fire somehow died out or the enemy ran out of resources and gold.All of whis while all their soldiers and civilians die, without the enemy even thinking of moving them away.
  • In Star Trek Armada the AI will continually send ships through a chokepoint even if you've got dozens of ships filling it full of bombs going off constantly. Thus racking up hundreds or thousands of kills. The AI will do it until it runs out of resources, or if they have infinite resources, until you get bored enough to kill them.
  • In the Star Trek: Starfleet Command series, the AI is all over the map with idiocy, especially ally AI. They won't follow orders, they refuse to move in close to enemies, they don't fire at enemies or only fire certain weapons, they cloak and decloak randomly. In the third game, if you're playing a difficult mission or one that takes a while to beat (such as Starbase Assault or Planetary Assault), it's almost a guarantee that one of your wingmen will self-destruct for no reason at all, even if it never took a hit during the battle.
  • Age of Mythology island maps have produced a whole spread of dumbass moves the AI does automatically. As in, Norse opponents turn all their resource collectors into Heroes of Ragnarok without bothering to produce enough transports to attack. At this point, the nicest thing you can do is attack.
  • On the first skirmish-mode map in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (called something like "Abandon All Hope"). The AI just doesn't seem to understand such things as "putting troops on the island in the middle will let them fire rocket launchers straight at the enemy command centre". And in any map, they don't get their turrets to fire at different targets, so an ethereal Necron wraith or a rally tough unit can soak up fire while everyone else blows up the turret.
  • A rather bizarre example occurs in Dawn of War 2. The enemies usually have enough sense to run away from a thrown satchel charge before it explodes. However, having detected a remote-controlled bomb (which is much more powerful then a satchel), they start shooting and hacking at it...while standing literally on top of it. Ludicrous Gibs ensue.
    • It also became infamous for "humping the magic buttons" multiplayer - claiming resource points is prioritized, and AI will sooner die than leave a magic button un-humped. Which practically means that either both teams will run in circles re-claiming the magic buttons, or they run toward one and start the Battle Royale, followed by long mopping up.
  • In Total Annihilation, the AI apparently does not understand the concept that land-based units can't cross water, and will make anti-nuke launchers without making the missiles for them to launch.
    • Also if you manage to choke only exit from enemy base with dragon teeth AI will build stuff until all space is filled with useless crap so that nothing can move anymore.
    • The AI's entire pattern is simply to build random things and send them to attack the nearest enemy unit. User mods somewhat improve it by tweaking the odds of building each unit, but mostly they just cheat horribly to make up for it.
    • The AI in the following game, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, did the same. Since units increased in power every time they had a kill, and since the enemy would never attack walls, botttleneck death-zones of guard towers would reach nigh-impregnable status.
  • Dungeon Keeper:
    • Monsters who could not find a path to the treasure room to get paid, or could not find a path back to their lair, or a "helpful" AI that would put monsters across locked doors (that you shut to keep the monsters where you wanted them), etc.
    • Snuggledell. The enemy keeper frequently believes that he can win using only a level 1 fly and a level 1 imp.
  • Age of Empires I AI players are very inflexible. In one scenario with a King Lion right beside a computer player's town center, the computer player kept making its villagers try to build a house, ignoring the lion, until it ran itself out of food.
    • In another scenario where you start out on a tiny little island with two houses, some villagers, a scout and a transport, and you need to travel to the resource-laden mainland to set up your civilization, the A Is never leave their island. Makes it a ridiculously easy game to win.
    • Age of Empires II improved the AI. Then in the expansion they made it stupider again, apparently feeling they'd gone too far.
    • Although even in 2 they left a major blind spot in the AI. Computer controlled soldiers were programmed to not attack gates, only walls. So all you had to do was construct all your fortifications out of gates, and they'd never come close. Or if you wanted to really rub the AI's nose in its own idiocy, when it has its entire economy and/or production facilities behind walls, simply build one of your gates directly in front of its, and it will never be able to leave its own town.
  • In the World War II RTS Company of Heroes, the AI is exceptionally dumb, sending basic units against tanks, sending infantry against machinegun emplacements without even flanking, and never upgrading. While you have tanks that could kill even the most advanced infantry with nothing even close to a sweat, the AI will still be sending out the basic unit with the basic gun.
    • It will normally only resort to this tactic if it's been cut off from fuel supplies and so can't produce better units. A much larger problem is its total inability to understand when it's best to breach obstacles rather then bypass them. This lets you funnel them into killzones if you block off an important bridge or other area with barbed wire and tank traps.
      • In fact, the AI can be so stupid at times that it will randomly mass every last one of its units on a destructable bridge if the game goes on for long enough, without even needing to place obstacles to encourage it.
    • Evident on a smaller scale when squad AI has a consistent habit of running out of cover to shoot, despite being ordered to stand behind a perfectly good wall.
      • Reversed for the sniper, who always ran to the nearest cover (and never needs to) when told to take the shot. Fixed in latest patch.
  • In Dune II, you can stop the AI's attacks on your base by building four sections of wall at just the right spot. The AI units that arrive to attack can't manage to find a way around it, and just sit there. As long as no player units approach, they sit still, and the enemy doesn't send out more attackers.
    • In another mission, the AI suddenly sends out a group of soldiers into an empty corner of the map for no reason at all, and they remain there, not moving, until the end of the mission.
      • Far more obviously in Dune II, the enemy will keep throwing units at your base defense turrets uselessly even as your actual troops are in the process of leveling their base.
  • The AI on any level below hard in Rise of Nations is either extremely suicidal, extremely overconfident, or any combination thereof. Often, the AI nations will demand tribute of you and attack you if you refuse, never mind the fact that your military is making use of tanks, aircraft, and long-range missiles while they just discovered how to make gunpowder.
  • Warzone 2100 has a very thoroughly implemented individual unit AI that micromanages an impressive number of tasks, such as peeling off from formation for repairs past a certain damage threshold and then returning as soon as repairs were complete, or driving around other units instead of into them. The AI is stone dumb. These features will, at best, frequently reduce a competent player to a snarling, hissing wreck. Vital units will peel off for repairs and decide that the best way to a nearby repair station is attempting to drive through an enemy wall of hardcrete and cannon towers, and units in formation will swerve randomly and drunkenly to attempt to avoid driving into the dozen other units, despite all supposedly going in the same direction at the same pace, causing an entire-army pileup in a perfectly empty field.
    • Also, The enemy AI would, in skirmish games, continue to build Mini pod rocket viper wheels (AKA Freaking joke) while you have lazers and Nexus bodies. In short, the enemy makes really sucky tanks, while you have the really powerfull. Curb-stomp ensues.
  • Warcraft:
    • In Warcraft II, the AI tends to get stuck in whatever blocks their path.
      • Be it trees, rocks, buildings, the AI is a complete idiot
      • An explanation of how stupid the AI is
        • That's not even close to how bad the AI can be. It is entirely possible to win sea-based maps that are 5 or 6 comps vs 1 player by putting a tanker on top of the closest patch of oil and just leaving it there. The computer will not build a warship to destroy yours. They will not go to another patch. If they aren't specialized to produce air units, they will just send a bunch of tankers to sit around yours for the whole map, which results in them never getting oil for transports or more warships.
    • Warcraft III: While the AI does well most of the time, selecting a random hero at the setup of the game can really screw them up, as they will spend the rest of the game with a hero they don't use, in turn skipping the extremely important "get gold and experience from creeps" phase. Other times, they may decide to stop evolving their main building at level two, leaving them with only two heroes, no high-tier units and only the second level of upgrades. Finally, in perhaps the most literal interpretation of this trope, Night Elf computers sometimes manage to wall themselves inside their own base with no way of leaving (except by killing or uprooting a building, which they never do, or by killing trees, which they can't do except by accident).
  • Cossacks: European Wars: The AI of both your own units and the computers in the skirmish mood were never particular smart. The enemy AI was obsessed with building cheap units (Like mortars and mercenaries) and only using hit and run tactics. He would also quite happily spend hours using grapeshot against buildings, when it was specifically designed for infantry.
  • Enemy AI in MechCommander 2 would always focus on the first target to aggro them and ignore everything else. This made it incredibly easy to beat much of the game; send a fast mech in to get their attention and then pull it back to the other side of your squad, and the AI would charge blindly after your 30 ton scout mech and not fire a shot at the 100 ton assault mechs you have laying into them. Salvage, scout, repeat.
  • Unit pathfinding in RHDE is very primitive due to memory limits, and units get hung up on corners unless the player moves the unit to a doorway and then moves it further from there. Perhaps this is why units can't be told to move more than about seven spaces at once.
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