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Artificial Stupidity: Difference between revisions
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* When presented with a y-junction or off-ramp, the civilian cars in [[Test Drive]] 6 will indecisively swerve left and right until they ultimately crash into the divider. Every car. Every time. If you don't pass civilian cars consistently and efficiently, you'll get caught behind [[Giant Space Flea From Nowhere|an unprovoked 30+ car pileup]].
* The AI cars in many racing games, especially the ''[[Gran Turismo]]'' series, tend to follow a set pattern. Even in the most recent installment that was in [[Development Hell]] for five years.
** This shouldn't be surprising and if you look closely on the more realistic games(like
** In the B-Spec game mode, you take a role as an AI's director on a race. The problem is, your AI can't pull off the car's full potential. Even if you do well on directing the driver, the result of the race can still be bad because the AI is terrible at pressure control and slipstream.
* In ''[[Need for Speed]] Shift 2: Unleashed'', your opponents make no attempt to avoid you if you make a mistake and get in their way. This almost always results in you facing the wrong way and watching everyone pass you or worse, wrecking your car.
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**** 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 [[Support Powers|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:
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* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons Online]]'' allows you to use computer-controlled hirelings that have a tendency to charge off into the distance on their own to attack bad guys. Bad enough, except they tend to run through deadly traps on the way. Or just stupidly stand IN the traps until dead. Particularly annoying when hireling clerics (healers) just stand in the trap attempting to heal themselves rather than move out the way first (and the traps deal way more damage per second than the healing so they just die anyway).
* Hirelings in [[Diablo]] clearly fall into this trope. While the enemy AI is okay, the ally AI is definitely not. Hireling don't seem to understand basic concepts like "I should use that door just a few steps from me instead of trying to walk through the wall", they have the annoying habit of exploring all the whole time in a world where just walking a few metres triggers a new attack of dozens of enemies... And monsters by the Necromancer are even worse, as getting too far from them (and they aren't good AT ALL at following you) makes them disappear.
* Puppetmasters in ''[[Final Fantasy XI]] Online'' will often run afoul of this trope. Their automatons can be configured for various roles, two of which are the Soulsoother and the Spiritreaver.
** Soulsoother will cure status afflictions and heal, in that specific order, which means that it will always remove that weak Poison or Silence (which has no effect on a non-casting job) instead of a 900 HP cure when the player is near death. This same automaton also has an ability to deal damage based on the amount of damage it received, yet any damage worth mentioning is almost always healed by it prior to using said ability with an overkill heal... (unless its cast timer is down at that moment)
** Spiritreaver will mainly cast highly damaging spells, and it attempts to do so intelligently: it can determine up front if a spell will land, and choose a more effective spell if not.. 'effective' being the ability to land a spell unresisted, not the amount of damage dealt. That the target cuts magic damage by 90%, or even absorbs magic damage and gets healed by it, is ignored. When this automaton gets below 75% of maximum MP (due to casting those damage spells), it will replace said spells with MP draining spells if the target has MP, even if these are so ineffective as to COST more MP then they gain. And it will do this until it either gets above 75% MP or it runs out of MP. If it gets damaged in the process, it will alternate HP draining spells with MP draining spells, which are equally ineffective as they share the same resistance mechanism.
=== [[Neverwinter Nights]] ===
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** Let's not forget how your spellcasters would always sling about the various dispelling spells they had prepared at the beginning of a fight. Most of the time this led to you not having a way of getting rid of an enemies buff spells half way through a fight because they'd all already been used.
*** Even worse, they would often dispel any buff spells on the PCs, making it easier for the enemies to kill you.
* Elanee has the frustrating habit of rushing into a battle, sickle a-waving, then once everybody is dead save one poor guy who's about to be mowed down, ''she casts all of her spells, especially the ones the would have been incredibly useful at the beginning of the fight''. And that she also seems hellbent on screwing up the cinematic camera angles by walking out of sight or being a huge freaking bear.
** None of the NPCs seem to realize that traps are ''dangerous things'' to be ''avoided''. Neeskha will happily start disarming a trap, spot an enemy, and run straight over the trap to attack it.
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*** A2 also has some pretty desperate, yet dumb monsters. Chocobos, for example, will sometimes use Choco Cure or Choco Barrier on their allies if they are next to them, but are willing to use these skills even if you are in its range, thus you get the free buffs or heals. Some monsters like Antlions have attacks that are elemental based and can cause a debuff. They will use these abilities on their allies if they can absorb the element, but don't care if they are hit with the debuff.
**** The chocobo thing is sometmes used in the original FFT to farm EXP- two allied characters drive a regular chocobo into a corner, and attack it enough to lower its HP without ever killing it. The chocobo keeps using Choco Cure to heal itself, thus healing the allied characters from any damage it may have caused them, allowing this system to potentially go on forever, upping the EXP of the characters with every attack.
** The original ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' has this in places as well...
*** The worst is one battle with a particularly suicidal guest character. If she is KO'd, you lose. Your opponents are a high level swordsman (who ''always'' gets first turn, with which he ''always'' takes half the guest's HP), and two assassin type characters who can both kill any character instantly with 100% accuracy. So, naturally, the guest character will often be found rushing right into the middle of them instead of running the hell away. Unless your characters are particularly speedy, you can, and probably will, lose the battle [[Luck-Based Mission|before you even get a turn.]]
**** Depending on how many save slots you feel like using, odds are you'll've also trapped yourself in the area so you can't go out an grind up some more levels.
*** A less damaging but still valid example comes from a battle where the character you have to protect is statistically average, but has a single special ability that's [[Game Breaker|so powerful there'd be no reason to ever use anything else]]. Naturally, he ''doesn't'' do the smart thing and use it every turn.
** One solution for stupid allies: willingly immobilize them so that they don't rush blindly towards the enemy and do something stupid.
** Another example in Final Fantasy Tactics is when one of your party member get KO'd, rest of the allies would rush to revive and cure said member, only for that newly-revived ally to get KO'd by enemy again. The allies basically waste more turns and items on reviving the ally, instead of dealing with the enemy, especially when the enemy can be easily defeated.
** Of course, there are some 'positive' examples. A good example is the Loss Strategy used by people attempting [[Challenge Run|solo challenges]]. You see, many of the later (and thus harder) bosses have the ability to confuse a single party member with 100% success rate, baring equipment granting immunity. Hitting that character will break the confusion, so the computer is programmed to not to attack the character unless they can kill them quickly enough. As such, if you only have one character in a battle, letting them get confused will prevent the boss from attacking them, whereas your character will act randomly, which will result in your character slowly killing the boss, as hitting the boss is the only productive thing they can do.
** In Tactics Adavance, AI-controlled archers will frequently waste their turns shooting at enemy units who have the Block Arrows ability. This isn't limited to enemy archers either. Ally archers, such as Ritz's Viera partner, Shara, will do the same thing.
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** Party members in Fallout 2 choose a target, and stick to it. When the target is unreachable, they stand in place, doing nothing, and getting shot until running away while there was another perfect target right next to them!
** ''[[Fallout]] 3'' still carries that torch -- charging in ahead of your follower often gets you shot in the back ("Can I have a better weapon?" "What, the better ''to kill me with''?") On the other hand, your more perceptive allies will bellow battle cries while you're moving in stealthily, sometimes when they're directly behind you so as to alert the target you're approaching, and sometimes while weaving directly across your line of fire.
*** The AI also carries over the ''Oblivion'' tradition of being unable to climb up rocks. Doesn't mean much if the opponent has a gun, but if they're melee, they'll just run up against the wall or try a non-existent way around to get to you.
*** A final offense is that the AI charges at you in a straight line, meaning that the player can lay down mines on the ground as they fall back and the enemy will cripple itself running over them.
*** Dogmeat in Fallout 3 is a loyal guard dog. So loyal he'll defend you in battles that will obviously kill him nearly instantly. I admire your courage, Dogmeat, but rushing at a Deathclaw while you have no armor and only melee attacks isn't brave. It's totally stupid.
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* ''[[Secret of Mana]]'' suffers from this with your characters. One problem is, since it was meant to be a multiplayer game as well, is that the characters can only move so far before an imaginary wall blocks them. The AI has a tendency to run into the nearest dead end, forcing you to go back to "unhook" that character. Also, it's probably not a good idea to let them attack, even if you set their AI to aggressive.
* ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]: 358/2 Days'' gives us the Invisible, an Ogre-class monster found in the last Agrabah mission. These Heartless have an attack where they disappear, leaving their sword to chase you around the map for a while before reappearing. It's possible to lure the sword past a wall, then roll behind the wall, stand there and let the sword keep trying to fly through the wall towards you until the Invisible reappears and teleports the weapon back to him. It's possible to do this with any of the three or four similar monsters, but it's easiest with the Invisible (one is a fake boss and the other is in Twilight Town, while Invisible's room has one spot perfectly suited to trap the sword).
* The partner AI in the first and second ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]'' games is simply abysmal. On top of their tendency to waste all of their magic and skills instantly the moment a fight starts with anything (Donald is the worst in this department; he'll spend all of his MP in 5 seconds flat if you don't disable his attack spells), they also like to just stand there doing nothing for 2/3rds of any given fight. Their pattern is basically "attack, step back, wait 2 seconds, repeat", meaning they take a boatload of hits from enemies since they basically never guard even if you tell them to. Elemental attackers just fire off random spells, often resulting in them casting spells that do no damage on enemies strong against whatever they randomly chose.
** Of course, it is very important to mention that your main character pretty much does most (if not all) of the work anyways. Despite some allies (Aladdin, Ariel, Peter Pan) having some nice attack abilities that take out a notable chunk of most enemys' HP, you can pretty much wreck their HP in half that time or the boss has so much defense and/or doesn't hold still long enough it's not that useful. (They work best when they make heartless/nobodies stagger and take additional damage from the next hits in the attack; bosses are harder to stagger). They work ''far'' more efficiently in short-battles against a lot of Trash Mobs.
*** Some free advice: Go into their menus. Go up to their special abilities and item options and click them to "Only in emergencies". Suddenly, they become a '''''hell''''' of a lot smarter.
** An enemy example of stupidity is present in Leon/Squall the first time you fight him in the first game. Attacking him head on is risky due to how absurdly high his attack power is for that point in the game, as well how quick his melee attacks are. However, as long you're standing at a higher elevation then him, the only thing he'll do is jump over to you, leaving himself wide open to a combo.
* Donald can be seen as [[Artificial Stupidity]] in ''[[Chain of Memories]]'' when he does stuff like cast Thundaga three times in a row on Larxene (who is immune to Thunder) or healing Sora when he's at full health, it's more comparable to a random number generator doing it.
** In the manga, Larxene tricks Donald into doing this.
* In ''[[X Men Legends]]'', the AI is fairly competent. But they won't dodge, use any shields, and sometimes will just beat down the enemy (even if it's in their best interest to stand back and use their mutant powers). This is really frustrating when they walk off the edge of a bridge to their death.
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** Part of the reason for this is that, unlike most other healers in [[Tales (series)]] games, Estelle has a lot of offensive artes that require her to be in melee range (In contrast to say, [[Tales of the Abyss|Tear]], whose artes are all ranged and her basic attack is ranged, too, so she stays out of the way, or [[Tales of Graces|Cheria]], who has very few melee-ranged artes). Of course you can and probably should have her orders set to "magic only" or "heal", but she -- like all characters -- will still attack if out of [[Mana]].
*** There's also the problem that Estelle refuses to use ailment curing spells like Recover and Dispel. Instead, she opts to spam First Aid on the afflicted party member.
** This also becomes ironic though, when Estelle's first instinct with Rita casting some artes that affect an area to bring the enemies into said area.
* In the ''[[PS 1]]'' version of ''[[Tales of Destiny]]'', the AI would do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING unless you were standing behind them.
* In ''[[Tales of Legendia]]'', the casters seem to run off of an [[AI Roulette]] and their spells seem to be picked by [[Random Number Generator]]. This leads to some annoying instances where Will or Norma will use a fire-aligned spell only to have it absorbed, then after saying "Oh that didn't work", use ''another'' one or even worse, use it ''a second time''. Grune and Shirley at ''least'' have a nice excuse for spamming the same eres attacks because for awhile, Grune doesn't really ''have'' any and Shirley learns hers throughout the character quests.
** Grune however gets rather stupid - during the character quests, for a very long time, she only has one spell: Bloody Howling. It might be the first Dark Eres you have, and given that a lot of enemies in the later parts of the game are weak to it, it's not bad. However, sometime around the last or second-to-last dungeon, she also learns Aqua Laser...which inflicts Sea damage. (Essentially, the equivalent of Holy Damage in this game.) During the Character Quests, you'll have to pretty much turn off all your eres that inflict Curse damage against the curse-aligned bosses because a lot of her spells are sea and curse aligned. (Although plenty of stuff like Absolute and eruption)
* In ''[[Valkyria Chronicles]]'' the computer is unable to predict whether it will be able to fire on one of your units with a given one of it's, it will therefore spend actions moving units backwards and forwards along the same path every turn to no effect. Similarly, they also have an unusual tendency rush troops straight into certain death, possibly for want of any other move.
* In ''[[Tales of Symphonia]],'' Raine runs up to an enemy, as if to attack, and then runs away again. Other times she just decides to cast a spell that takes a long time while standing right next to it. "Don't get in my way!"
** The fighters' pattern of running away after combos is equally incomprehensible and usually just results in the enemy getting a free shot at their backs.
*** This is most likely a holdover from the earlier Tales games, where the simpler mechanics and stupider enemy AI made it so that running away after combos actually WAS effective strategy and indeed necessary to not get killed - enemies tended to fall out of stun just after you made your escape. The semi-auto function in Phantasia and Eternia make the running back and forth action automatic. (They also do this in ''[[Tales of Legendia]]'', which is based off of Eternia's battle system)
** Also, spellcasters in ToS will often fail to retreat before attempting to cast a spell. If they're too close to the enemy, they'll get their spell interrupted, and immediately try to cast it again, getting interrupted every time until they get KO'ed or the enemy is defeated by another party member.
*** Exacerbating this problem is the fact that on many strategy settings, if the spellcasters run out of TP, they'll start running up to the enemy for melee attacks. By itself, this would be reasonable as a successful melee attack restores 1 TP per combo hit, but if they restore sufficient TP, the aforementioned problem kicks in and they start trying to cast a spell standing right next to the enemy. However; plenty of more recent games let the party members use TP-restoring items as needed so that they don't have to run in.
** Colette. Just Colette. She has the potential to be an [[Elite Tweak]] [[Game Breaker]] when player-controlled, yet her AI manages to turn her into a punching bag for the enemies.
** AI controlled characters will often use their [[Deflector Shield|super guard]] when an enemy casts a spell, even when it would be better to move out of the way. Worse, they use it as the spell is ''cast'', so that if the spell has a long animation the effect will run out before the spell hits.
* In ''[[Tales of Phantasia]]'', Mint ''loves'' to use Pow Hammer and then Pow Pow Hammer. Honestly you can't blame her; if she's well protected enough she'll have thrown on Acid rain, buffed Cress and Suzu up, long ago so there's almost nothing to do until somebody gets hurt. Of course, this does tend to get annoying if she starts to cast Pow Pow Hammer when someone's running low on HP...and given that she does this on ''bosses'', too, and that bosses are normally immune to Pow Pow Hammer's stun effect. (It doesn't hurt on melees, though)
* Most [[Roguelike]] games avoid using path-finding algorithms for the monster AI since doing so would make the game very slow, meaning that monsters will head for you in a straight line and then stop as soon as soon as they hit an obstacle. If the obstruction is not a wall but something like deep water or a chasm then you can use distance attacks to kill the monster while it just sits there.
** Also in most [[Roguelike|Roguelikes]] a monster with a distance attack which will harm anything between it and the target (like lightning bolts) will use it even if the attack will harm or even kill allied monsters between it and its target.
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* Dario in ''[[Chrono Cross]]''. A really challenging [[Bonus Boss]]...in a straight fight. He counters every single one of your elements with an element of his own. And therein lies the exploit. He counters most elements with stat debuffs, which would be a severe pain if the counter didn't also ''count as his turn''. So just pelt him with a red, blue, or green element every turn and he'll lower your stats, but never actually attack you.
** The Green Dragon, similarly. His challenge comes from his tendency to cast Carnivore, a powerful green-elemental spell. But he only casts Carnivore if the entire element field is green. So, if you cast a weak non-green spell every time the field becomes fully green, he'll spend most of the fight casting Green Field. Or, hell, bring a dozen Carnivore traps and go to town.
* When playing a ''[[Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures]]'' design, it's a good idea to include a paladin in your party, because only then will you be able to control the NPCs that join your party during the game. Otherwise they'll be controlled by the computer with ridiculous stupidity at times, which is especially destructive with spellcasters. For example, casting area damage spells with blatant disregard for your party members' presence next to the target... or casting "Dispel Magic" at enemies (who don't have any magic buffs on them) for no reason whatsoever.
** Version 1.1 of the game had a [[Game Breaking Bug]] where the NPC magic-users would immediately flee the battlefield at the beginning of every combat.
* ''[[Soul Nomad and The World Eaters]]/Soul Cradle'' had a great example of this while doing room inspections. It seems rare and only in higher levels, but some enemies will just outright kill their own ally without any specific reason by using a skill.
** Another good example from the room inspections... two, in fact. Units with a flying leader, such as a Whirwin or Gryphos, will blindly walk over 'visible' minetraps, if that's the room hindrance. Oh, and does the Room Leader have the [[Game Breaker|Anti-matter room?]] The enemy will target them. Even the game hates Anti-matter!
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** This may actually be an issue of disposition rather than power. As you complete quests and earn Fame points, [[NPC|NPCs]] and monsters come to like you more. In extreme cases, they may not be hostile at all, but short of that, if you have a positive reputation, they prefer to attack your zero-reputation horse.
** AI failure can go from annoying to down right disturbing. Annoying when your AI allies keep dying by falling off things and disturbing when an entire army killed each other (While screaming Murder!, Murder!) because they'd hit each other in combat three times. It gets even worse when you bring them back to life and they do it again...
** Allied NPCs can often be notoriously suicidal. Several quests require you to take NPCs through the hazard-filled planes of Oblivion, and it's rare you'll manage to escape back through the Gate with everyone you brought in. Allies (and enemies) will fling themselves off of cliffs into lava or off balconies seventy feet in the air in an attempt to get at an enemy they've spotted on the other side of the chasm. Even at minimal health, NPCs will happily fling themselves into combat, occasionally moving in front of the player character and stopping them from helping them out, only to be cut down within seconds. Escort quests (of which there are thankfully few) are immensely frustrating.
*** Case in point, Viranus Donton, who you joins you on a quest for the Fighters Guild where you need to go into a cave full of ogres, trolls, and a minotaur. Luckily, he's "essential", so the ogres, trolls, and minotaur in the cave can only knock him out temporarily (which you'll almost certainly learn early in the cave when he runs into 3 trolls at the same time).
** Some immersion Failure AI bugs include animals grazing on stone, people trying to plough rocks, extreme rubber necking and others.
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*** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EswSZyjFQv4 There is no excuse for this.]
*** That and how levitation would break the game by letting you scale city walls when citys are separate zones.
* Oblivion at least seems to a direct relationship between player stealth skill level and NPC stupidity, NPC's will get filled full of arrows while making comments like 'it must have been the wind', just leveling a skill approaches [[Game Breaker]] territory, and that's before you start using 100% chameleon....
* Curiously, in some cases the trope is inverted: Some enemies are too ''smart'' to be realistic. For example, in Oblivion you can be standing on top of a wall or a bridge, and eg. fire an arrow towards a rat below you, making it attack you. Now the rat will find a path to your location even if it's a mile-long path going through a complex dungeon, most of it not even directly visible from its current position. Seemingly rats in Oblivion have perfectly memorized the entire dungeon floormap and are able to immediately find the shortest route to your location, no matter how long and contrived it might be.
* ''[[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]]'' has generally superb AI, but the friendly NPCs still like to charge into melee combat against superior opponents, occasionally getting in the way of your own attacks. It's terribly disheartening to accidentally murder your own party member while aiming for a bandit.
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** In Red, Blue and Yellow, this is because the Zeroth Law of the AI is to always use super-effective attacks. It is possible to beat Lance's final Dragonite using, say, a low-level Tentacruel, because the Dragonite will only ever use Agility (presumably because it latches onto the fact that Psychic is super effective against Poison).
*** Flygon looks like a Flying type; it's an easy mistake for anyone who's never seen one to try and Thunderbolt it. However, in-game trainers will do this repeatedly, in Volkner's Electric-type Gym -- the final Gym, where they should know better, in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum.
** After confusing your Pokémon, enemies will continue to pointlessly use attacks such as Confuse Ray.
*** Although they might just be doing it [[Spiteful AI|to make you waste the item used to heal it with at the beginning of the turn]].
** If another Pokémon uses a stat-raising move, and you prevent it from actually raising them, it will simply repeat the stat-raising move. It's particularily effective if your Pokémon knows Snatch, which steals the stat increase.
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** Try giving your sims more than one kitchen (especially on different floors) and watch as they dart between the two in order to prepare a single dish.
*** Happily, as of Sims 3, the AI has improved immensely, and Sims are entirely capable of handling the basics of living.
* Sims are pretty dumb on the macro level as well, as anyone who's ever played ''[[Sim City]] 4'' can attest. The stupidest is definitely pathfinding, where for various reasons Sims always take routes in a manner that tends to create absurd traffic jams, particularly at the city limits.
* The AI in ''[[Gemfire]]'' is just plain bad, sometimes giving up the chance to seize the player base and not attacking with its 5th unit at all. Even worse: they don't seem to be able to grasp the fact that their base is under siege, AND they will set a unit on their base and surround it with fences, thus being an easy target for Archers. Not to mention the computers will try to form an alliance with you right before they're about to die at your hands...only to cut the alliance when it's just you and whoever you're allied with.
* The animals and staff in ''[[Zoo Tycoon]]'' can be unbelievably stupid sometimes. For example, animals will be unable to find food when there are three piles of food right next to them, or zookeepers will not be able to get to poo and clean it up for no reason at all.
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* Without going into too much detail, let's just say that in ''[[Creatures]] 2'', the Norns that come with the game are retards. Thanks to a problem in their digital genetics, this ''gets worse'' after their first real-time hour of life (the so-called "One Hour Stupidity Syndrome"). A player may find that in order to make any progress in the game whatsoever (with getting pickups and exploring and the like) they'll have to micromanage one Norn and spent a distressingly large amount of time luring it into the water so as to pick it up and ''make'' it go where the player wants it to. There's a play style called the "Wolfling Run" where you hatch a bunch of Norns and leave them to their own devices - since the default Norns are outsmarted by buttons and fail to connect hunger with the need to eat, this is an exercise in genocide.
** [[Game Mod|Game Mods]] fixed this in C2, but even in the later games, Creatures still tend to gravitate toward "charming" over "clever." Most all the creatures games feature "wallbonking"--the continued attempts of a Creature to walk through a wall, despite their initial failure to pass through it. They also do things like attempt to eat machinery or ignore food because there's [[Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny|something shiny right beyond it.]]
* [[Space Colony]] has the problem that if a characters shift is over they will ignore the job responsibility, even if that is defending the base from aliens or keeping the air supply running.
* For some reason, the title [[Pikmin]] sure do ''love'' to drown themselves when you try to cross a bridge with them.
** It's noted that without before Olimar came to the planet, the Pikmin were basically a sentient food supply for the herbivorous creatures inhabiting the planet, and that Olimar's efforts in organizing them have helped them to survive once Olimar is gone. In other words, the game [[Justified Trope|justifies]] the stupidity, as the Pikmin were literally a walking food supply before Olimar came around.
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* In ''F/A-18 Hornet'', your wingman is pretty much useless, and the planes you have to [[Escort Mission|escort]] aren't much smarter.
* This is the biggest complain people have had about ''[[From Dust]]'', where the villagers' pathfinding AI can be a pain in the ass to manage. Most of the time, even the slightest obstacle will cause them to either take a massive detour, or [[Most Annoying Sound|start begging you for help]] while they stand still in bewilderment. Walking straight into streams of lava doesn't help either.
* ''[[Aerobiz]]'': The AI would continue to purchase small counts of outdated, inefficient airliners even after newer, cheaper and more efficient planes are made available. would regularly place the largest, most inefficient airliners in its fleet on low density routes and then leave them there despite losing big bucks and its competition (you) opening the same route with a small, high efficiency airliner and turning a profit.
* ''[[Elite]]'': it was less stupidity of the pilot and more stupidity of the space traffic controller/random event engine, but passenger shuttles would periodically launch from space stations regardless of surrounding traffic. Even if that traffic was you, less than a second away from docking (and yes, incoming and outgoing traffic used the same lane). While the collision wouldn't destroy your ship unless it was already damaged, it ''would'' destroy the shuttle--and hit ''you'' with a massive bounty for criminal activity, to be collected the instant you left the station.
* The AI allies in ''[[Tom Clancy]]'s [[HAWX]]'' are incredibly reluctant to actually use their missiles on targets you've sent them after, and they refuse to use guns if they still have access to said missiles, which overall cripples them horribly. About the only time they approach usefulness is in missions where, for plot purposes, everyone on your side is restricted to guns-only, which is the point where they shred everything.
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=== [[X Wing]] ===
* X-Wing had one mission where you were in an A-Wing and charged with immobilizing a frigate. Since your A-Wing doesn't have ion cannons, you had a group of Y-Wings with you. Not only were these Y-Wings piloted by complete schmucks in the area of dogfighting-- they weren't even smart enough to realize that their ion cannons depleted the frigate's shields at a slower rate than their blasters. Since the frigate is CONSTRUCTED FOR STARFIGHTER DEFENSE, this mission usually involved telling your "wingmen" to stand off outside 6 klicks while you soloed and 1) Defeated the entire 36 fighter TIE wing the frigate carried, and 2) Reduced the frigate's shields to zero by flying in and blasting like hell and then bolting out of turbolaser range again and again. This was made even stupider (and more frustrating) by the knowledge that the Y-Wings carried about 30 proton torpedoes-- if they'd used THOSE the frigate's shields would have been reduced by 95%. Grrr!
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** People in this game do not take well to friendly fire. Normally, this is bad for you, because if you shoot a friend a few times they will turn on you and kill you. However, if you dodge between enemies, they will sometimes get overzealous and shoot each other! This can be hilariously exploited to [http://www.it-he.org/deus3.htm drive everyone in UNATCO insane] (2/3rds of the way down the page), or it can be used to get [http://dungeon-games.com/blog/?p=68 Nicolette to single-handedly kill a pair of MJ12 commandos.]
* The most viable way to avoid the enemies in ''[[System Shock 2]]'' wasn't sneaking but ... jumping on the nearest table or otherwise elevated position because the AI only checked the floor for targets. While this can be [[Hand Wave|handwaved]] with performance reasons considering all the objects on the tables this can be quite immersion breaking in a [[Survival Horror]] game with [[Breakable Weapons]] and scarce ammo.
* In ''[[Doom]] 3'', any monsters without a projectile attack (i.e. zombies, Pinkies, or Wraiths) had absolutely no idea what to do if the player jumped on a table out of their reach. So they'd just run in circles around the table while moaning their hearts out.
* The enemy soldiers in ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]]'' are completely unable to deal with your cloaking device, making the damn thing a [[Game Breaker]]. You can uncloak, shoot an enemy in the head, and recloak, and all the enemy's buddies will just stare blankly at the spot you were standing just a few seconds ago. The expansion pack ''Crysis Warhead'' fixes this by making the A.I. fire blindly and/or throw grenades at your last known position, although you can still [[Leet Speak|pwn]] everything in the game by simply moving a few feet to the left after recloaking.
** The artificial stupidity in ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]]'' does not end there. In some situations enemies will outright ignore you even if you stand right in front of them (like they were unable to change their plans in the mid of getting somewhere). Truck and boat pilots will outright ignore you even if you hop on their head. Enemies will sometimes kill themselves eg. by running to the middle of a minefield or drowning themselves. If two enemies are talking to each other, you can sometimes sneakily kill one from the distance, and the other will be blissfully ignorant about anything and keep going on like nothing had happened.
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** AI survivors will blindly stare at a witch and slowly walk around her even though she is being aggroed. This can be extremely annoying in Hard Rain, where the entire level is filled with witches.
** They also will never LEARN the concept of "Fire = Hot" and will gladly attempt to run through a fire to get to you. Problem is, they do know to run back when damaged by a level hazard (such as fire or the spitter's goo) so they will just run back and forth into the fire until either it is gone or they got incapped if there's no other way around, instead of just waiting for the fire to disappear. They are also oblivious to a Spitter's acid pool and will stay in the puddle until they start taking damage instead of running out of it as soon as the acid begins to form on the ground or other surface. To see this in action, have the bots behind you and have a Spitter acid pool behind you too. The bots will charge blindly into the acid and then backpedal once they take damage from it.
** The Bots are actually quite intelligent when you're nearby, being practically aimbots. However, once you are a good distance away, they will forgo all other common sense and try to keep up with you, including but not limited to: Forgetting to Shoot, forgetting to use a bridge, forgetting they're being chased by a tank, and forgetting pounced/snagged comrades.
** On the other hand, AI infected are actually extremely intelligent. They will actively hide from your view until they've prepared to attack, Spitters will run and attempt to die in choke points, and will use a combination attack (such as a Charger plowing through people before a boomer comes and slimes everyone, or a Hunter will pounce and a spitter will spit on him to deal extra damage and deny others from simply punting the hunter off) against the Survivors.
*** The Special Infected do have a few quirks, though. For instance, while they often do hide, their hiding places don't always cover them all the way. You'll sometimes find a Hunter or Boomer trying to hide behind a lamp post. Another thing is, Hunters and Jockeys ''will'' pounce on survivors in the middle of a non-overwhelmed group, resulting in attacks that can be measured in hundredths of seconds before they're killed. Also, the Jockeys have no concept of ambush, [[Leeroy Jenkins|running straight into quadruple gunfire if it means getting closer to a human]].
** AI survivors also ''love'' to shoot through human teammates and throw off their aim, especially if said humans are trying to make precision shots with the hunting rifle or sniper rifle. The only positive here is that AI survivors are incapable of harming teammates.
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*** All enemy units are basically forced by the AI into a single, identical game-plan. The implications of this vary; usually it just means that the AI ignores things such as the Engineer's ability to supply health and ammo to himself and his comrades, and sometimes it means Han Solo is prone to taking a seat behind a turret at Mos Eisley, shouting "[[Never Tell Me the Odds]]" as you casually shoot him in the back.
** If you fly the Transport into an enemy ship in space battles and land it, you can respawn from it. Good luck, though, as an AI teammate will always spawn at it, and then get it and crash it into a wall. There goes your spawn point!
** The enemy AI in the game have no problem betraying their own teammates while they try to shoot you.
** If you are a Jedi or any class with rockets, you will end up betraying teammates because when you try to kill the enemy, the AI on your team will stand right beside them.
*** Similarly, if you are a clone commander, stay far away from allies. They are only too happy to wander in front of your chaingun and die.
** It bears mentioning that bots will virtually ''never'' try to lock on with a rocket launcher, instead firing blindly and sending rockets flying off across the map (or into their own troops). Tanks are virtually impermeable to all rocket-launcher-based attacks because of this, though they seem to have a little more accuracy shooting down snowspeeders. The one thing that they ''will'' attempt to lock onto are the (almost) invincible AT-TE and AT-ST command vehicles.
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** It also bears mentioning that the entry for [[Artificial Stupidity]] on [[Star Wars Battlefront]] had all its examples removed and replaced with simply "a lot", because it was probably ''one-sixth'' of the page itself.
*** And that's not counting the (un-deleted) entries for other tropes that relate to [[Artificial Stupidity]], like [[Leeroy Jenkins]], [[Suicidal Overconfidence]], and [[Too Dumb to Live]]. Seriously, it wouldn't be ''[[Star Wars Battlefront|Battlefront]]'' without dumb AI.
** One of the most hilariously stupid AI actions in the game comes with the ability to perform evasive maneuvers in any flying vehicle. All too frequently, you'll see a [[Fragile Speedster|scout fighter]] make a flawless bombing run against a [[Nigh Invulnerable|capital starship]] while miraculously dodging huge amounts of [[Beam Spam|flak]], pull up and begin to fly away... then for no discernable reason, do a barrel roll and turn 180 degrees, sending themselves [[Hilarity Ensues|full throttle into the enemy ship.]] This is actually possible to exploit by firing a missile at a fighter flying directly ''away'' from its parent ship; the fighter will loop backwards to break the lock and power straight into the huge star cruiser right behind it.
** Another enjoyable space-related action is placing [[BFB|time bombs]] on ships just before they take off. Rather than taking the sensible course of action by getting out and ''running the hell away'', the pilots will happily zoom off into outer space, dying in a flaming ball of ship debris shortly after they leave the hanger.
** Judging by their habit of jumping in front of firing units, AI units believe themselves to be [[Friendly Fireproof]]. They aren't.
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* ''[[GoldenEye 007 (1997 video game)|Golden Eye 1997]]'' has decent enemy AI. However, enemies will only shoot at you if you are on the same elevation as you or close to it, so if you are a bit too low to them or too far up, they will move closer to you in order to get a better shot, even though there is nothing blocking their firing sight. This also gets worse if you park yourself on a stairwell since the AI will not even bother to shoot at you, even if you are less than a foot away. Because of this exploit, it can lead to an [[Anticlimax Boss]] against Xenia, where you can shoot parallel to the bridge as she crosses it and she won't attack until she gets across the bridge and you can kill her before that happens.
** The way AI works in this game is this: If the CPU can walk in a straight line towards you, it can see and shoot you. The inverse is also true. This can work to your advantage or to the CPU's, depending on the situation. If you stand just behind a rail, you can shoot holes in him and he'll have to come around to get you, but if there's a big hill that you can't even see over, they can shoot right through it and hit you.
** Another way in which they're stupid is if one comes after you, but doesn't see you after a few seconds, it will forget about you, stop chasing you and stand perfectly still indefinitely until you get his attention.
** Yet another way, there are some CPUs that are programmed never to move unless they see you. This means if you stand somewhere he can't see you (like behind a rail), you can shoot him all you want and he'll be oblivious to your presence.
* The ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R.]]'' series is generally very good when it comes to AI, however that do make some cracking blunders, such as killing themselves with their own grenades and blowing themselves up by targeting [[Exploding Barrels|flammable barrels]].
** One very common mistake (and often the only reason you're able to take them down in higher difficulty levels) is using cover from irregular-shaped objects or structures of the wrong size, which often leads to an entire squad of Replicas either with their bodies half-exposed or hitting their own cover while trying to shoot from their positions. And they don't always move when injured, meaning you can kill a Replica by gunning it from afar with the RPL, ''and he will not move to protect himself properly''. That's not to mention the fact that they don't take explosive props into account at all - a perfect strategy to deal with groups is to lure them into a place you've cleared and let a barrel/extinguisher/fuse box behind. When they come, shoot the prop. [[Total Party Kill|Instant squad kill]].
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* In ''[[Soldier of Fortune]] II'', you have to escort Dr. Ivanovich near the end of the second level. He tends to follow you into the line of fire like a sheep to the slaughter, resulting in [[Game Over]] for you.
* [[Conkers Bad Fur Day]] had multiplayer AI that, although can be justifiably made stupid (the lowest level is "inbred"), other times can become this even on their highest levels ("Einstien"). Due to the lack of [[Friendly Fireproof|protection from any and all attacks fired]] (even your own), there are many cases [[A Is]] will take advantage of this ''even if they are part of your team''. Sometimes this comes from them not taking the time to see what's immediately in front of them before opening fire (such as firing at you because the enemy was directly behind you, as if they expected the bullets to fly through you into them. They don't.), and other times shooting any and every friggin thing that moves, including you (common when armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers). Other times, <s> when they're not all the more happy to turn on each other</s>, there can be times the [[A Is]], both your friends and foes alike, will stand around doing nothing (besides jumping, perhaps) <s> often conveniently out of your line of sight just to give the illusion that they're off doing something important</s> or trapping themselves in a corner until you either shoot or kill one or both of them (this tends to be common the less [[A Is]] you have running around on the map). Depending on the mini-game, the [[A Is]] will also be focused more on shooting things (with actually ''aiming'' at anything being an afterthought) than the goal they're supposed to accomplish (such as how the weasels in Heist will focus more on killing each other than the money bags, and the only time the money matters is by making whoever's holding it Public Enemy Number 1, or how War!Colors will have the troops more focused on sniping at each other than either sides really caring to grab each other's flags). On the otherhand, it also works in your favor at times, where your foes can do the same thing to their own teammates, and even commit stupicide trying to kill you (the common scenario involving you being in an area you're invulnerable or not entirely in range of an attack, leading to your foe, armed with a grenade launcher or bomb to fire at you, only to obliterate themselves by being too close to their own blast, while, at worse, knock you up on the air and stun you for a while).
* ''[[Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45]]'' has AI combat engineers that set timed explosives in the middle of groups of frendlies, given the games realism, this tends to be messy
* In the first installment of ''[[Quake]]'', ogres always fire their greanades horizontally -- so if you stand on a ledge above them, they end up blowing up themselves.
* Psychos in ''[[Borderlands]]'' will often pull out and arm a grenade when low on health, charging at players [[For Massive Damage]]. They will even do so if there's no way that they'll actually reach the players before the grenade goes off.
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** In Melee, if you play on Hyrule Temple and select any number of Kirbys as your opponent, you could effortlessly trick them into turning to rocks directly above the hole that goes down to the lower levels of the stage, in which case they would slide all the way down the slopes and into the pit.
** Even a ''level 9 CPU Marth'' can act extremely stupid in Melee. Select him as an opponent and play on the Jungle Japes stage. Knock him off the stage once, and while he's respawing, quickly get onto the platform at the far right of the stage. Your opponent should jump toward you each time he respawns, only to perform his up+B special away from you, killing himself.
** In Brawl, the AI will always perform an air dodge immediately after being struck in air, or being hit into the air, oblivious to the fact that there's a brief window of vulnerability as one ends. It's quite easy to juggle them to death by simply timing your attacks.
** In Melee, some [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever|giant characters]] you go up against in one-player mode (specifically Yoshi) may start the match off by leaping off the edge of their platform into a [[Bottomless Pit]], ending the fight in less than 5 seconds. It happens in Brawl too, but less often and usually a little later into the fight. Metal characters also suffer sometimes; they drop faster but the AI doesn't always acknowledge that.
* In one ''[[Street Fighter]]'' game, the AI character of Balrog would react to many moves by trying to jump over them and punch you. E. Honda's hundred hand slap would cause him to keep jumping into it until he was dead.
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* The guards in ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'' will sometimes throw you off a high ledge, then jump down after you. You can survive the resulting falling damage. They can't. In ''2'' you often lose thieves to the idiots trying to keep up with Ezio and jumping from too high or failing jumps.
** The Multiplayer Tutorial AI dummy in ''[[Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood|Assassin's Creed Brotherhood]]'' won't care if the player approaches him in an unusual manner, and will only jog away from the player if a chase is activated, never sprinting.
* ''[[Grand Theft Auto San Andreas]]'' features pretty solid AI in most cases, but it breaks down in some areas. On the freeway, the AI can't seem to handle the speed at which it drives, resulting in a lot of accidents, even with no player intervention. If the player stays put long enough, massive pileups and riots inevitably occur and don't end until the player leaves the area.
** Civilian drivers are actually dumb cars-on-rails until nudged, shot, or otherwise "awakened", at which point they become truly AI controlled and subject to proper physics (almost certainly for performance). In places, the map's "rails" seem to be set up wrong, and vehicles either accelerate or turn well beyond their actual capabilities, or outright spawn facing the wrong way then tween into place. Freeway pileups are usually a result of "rail" and "true" vehicles interacting badly.
*** A similar sort of thing seems to happen in areas with particularly steep hills, especially San Fierro. [[Good Bad Bugs|And it. Is. Hilarious.]]
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* In ''[[Grand Theft Auto]] 3'', random emergency vehicles will sometimes speed up the drive to the mafia don's house, slam headfirst into his garage door and continue to grind against it until their vehicles explode.
** Everyone in Liberty City (apart from Claude) seems absolutely incapable of aiming a rocket launcher in any direction but ''down''. And they actually seem to be aware of this, since if a pedestrian were to have a rocket launcher on them, they would run up to their target, and fire the rocket at the ground, killing both the target and themselves in the process. By ''San Andreas'', this has been corrected so that pedestrians can fire rocket launchers at what is in front of them. *[[Oh Crap|gulp]]*
* In ''[[Transformers (film)|Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen]]: The Game'', the enemies often have Ungodly Dodge abilities. However, this is often counteracted by their tendency to stand near gas tanks and then blow them up.
** And that's not the end of it: in the rare occasion that you have backup with you, it will blindly charge into battle and be destroyed, thus leaving you to complete the mission by yourself, one hundred times more efficiently than if they were around to help.
* ''[[Resident Evil 5]]'' shows that we may have reached [[The Singularity]]. Its [[AI Is a Crapshoot]]. Sometimes it's great, picking off enemies with relative efficiency with reasonable choices in weapons. Other times, if you're laying claymore mines to set up a dastardly trap while fighting a big boss, the AI will quietly follow in your footsteps picking them up.
** Sheva's AI reaches the pinnacle of stupidity in the first battle with Wesker. First she stands still and gets badly injured (or ''killed'' on the higher difficulties), then runs off to hide, then TRIES TO FIGHT {{spoiler|Jill}} ALONE and, as a result, dies. If she's lucky enough to survive, then she'll ''try to link up with you'', leaving her side of the fight unfinished and bringing a very dangerous combatant with her to help Wesker. You ''cannot'' complete this fight solo without hiding.
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* A discussion of the AI stupidity in ''[[Madden NFL]]'' would take all night, but one that deserves mention is that the AI has serious trouble with quarterbacks doing rollouts. If the AI is tasked with guarding the receiver and the QB rolls to his side, the AI defender will often come up to play the QB and then get indecisive, leaving both the pass ''and'' the run wide open.
* In ''[[Backyard Sports|Backyard Baseball]]'', if there is a person on third base, the fielders automatically throw to home. Usually it is an outfielder that does this, and almost always a run is still scored.
* For some reason the AI in ''FIFA 2000'' (and its spin-off, ''The FA Premier League Stars'') was ''totally'' incapable of dealing with set-pieces correctly. This meant that whenever you got a free kick, half of the time the computer team didn't even bother setting up the wall, and when it did the wall tended to be completely out of position. Corner-kicks were even worse, as your own players weren't marked correctly and the opposing goalkeeper was far too slow to react, meaning that so long that you were able to get plenty of corners, you could ratchet up huge scorelines even on the hardest difficulty settings.
* ''Mario Basketball 3-on-3''. You control one character at a time. Your two teammates do nothing while you desparately try to avoid getting the ball stolen. The ball falls right next to them? They ''still'' do nothing.
* In Pro Cycling Manager 2011, when a breakaway occurs, a team start chasing a group containing their own riders like it was one of their worst rivals. Pack takes them back in. New breakaway, some different riders, one from before mentioned team is in. Same team takes up the chase and wins. New breakaway, same teams, minus the one chasing before takes part. The team chasing before has stopped, because they weren't destroying it for their own team anymore.
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*** To give you the idea of how dumb he is, his second strongest monster is [[Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage|Kanan The Swordmistress]], a normal monster with 1400 ATK and 1400 DEF. He summons none of his monsters in defense mode, letting you just keep knocking them down. His entire strategy is to draw ''one'' monster, Cyber Stein, which has the ability to summon a fusion monster. This is the only way you can lose to him, cause if he does this, he'll summon ''Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon''.
** In many of the earlier games, such as ''Eternal Duelist Soul'', at harder levels, the AI essentially knew the ATK and DEF of any of your facedown monsters, and would make its decisions whether or not to attack based on that. Some of the "good" duelists like Yami Yugi go at you with cards that technically can destroy yours in battle...and then leaves them right open to a strong counterattack when the player is able to capitalize on the fact that they left a monster with 1000-1100 ATK in attack mode at the end of their turn. [[Attack! Attack! Attack!]] meets [[Artificial Stupidity]] here.
** The AI in ''Tag Force 2'' is considered one of the worst examples of this in a ''Yu-Gi-Oh'' game, to the point where it seems like the game [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|is actively trying to sabotage your efforts]] when you play a tag duel.
*** For instance you might have a monster that can't be destroyed in battle while it's in attack position, and a trap that stops all damage you take as long as you have a monster out, effectively making you invincible while that trap is out, as long as you ''don't'' switch that one monster to defense position. Your partner will switch her to defense position as soon as your opponent plays a monster with more attack then her.
*** The best example came from a ''Tag Force 4'' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PshGl7E2NG0 video], when the AI used [http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Prideful_Roar Prideful Roar] against [http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Clear_Vice_Dragon Clear Vice Dragon]. The AI paid 2800 Life, took more than double that in damage, and promptly lost.
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** One particularly notable example of how bad the wingmen's AI is in All Range Mode is in the Star Wolf dogfights in [[Star Fox 64]]. Each Star Wolf pilot is programmed to target a specific member of your squadron. Each wingman will constantly plead for you to help him by shooting down the Star Wolf member who's on his tail. Once you do, he will blissfully fly around in a circle minding his own business and make no effort to help you as the remaining Star Wolf members continue to rip you and your other wingmen to shreds.
** To be fair on that one, your wingmen destroying one of the Star Wolf pilots would screw you out of fair chunk of points, since things they destroy aren't counted toward the point total. Why they couldn't just let the things they do count isn't totally clear, but it's still better to have them do nothing than do something that hurts you.
* The buses in ''[[The Simpsons Road Rage]]'' constantly crash into anything in sight without any provoking them, typically you.
* {{spoiler|Wheatley, also known as the Intelligence Dampening Sphere}} in ''[[Portal 2]]'' is a deliberate [[In-Universe]] example, described by GLaDOS as "the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived", and "the moron they built to make me an idiot".
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