Artificial Stupidity - Television Tropes & Idioms

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 an unprovoked 30+ car pileup.
The AI cars in many racing games, especially the Gran Turismo series, tend to follow a set pattern.

This trope was deliberately invoked for the PC puzzle game Sheep, where you play a herder driving a flock of sheep around various obstacles, and you had to compensate for the flock's tendency to go in the wrong directions and frequent suicidal stupidity. The game even lists this artificial stupidity as a feature.
Although it's understandable given the insane number of things you can work with, the AI in Scribblenauts will stick to its guns regardless of whether it makes sense or not. This leads to amusing situations like a group of witches accidentally transforming one another into frogs while fighting an enemy, and then the survivors eating their frog-ified sisters.
As much as I love Stones Masters, it belongs here. Once the player's opponents get the "Dispel" spell (which removes attack and defense bonuses), the opponents will use it regardless of whether or not it will have any effect.

Parodied in Sam & Max: Bright Side of the Moon. A quartet of sentient obsolete computers are attempting to devise the most advanced AI ever, and you have to play Tic-Tac-Toe against one of them. The AI is just about as sharp as advertised, except for one problem: it actively plays to lose rather than win, so convincing the computers that their AI really is invincible by losing to it takes some doing.
Bible Adventures was bad enough by itself. In the David and Goliath game, though, the enemy can knock itself out with the acorns that YOU are supposed to throw at it

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.
- One word: Royals. Enemies that do 3 damage, get one-rounded, and have low hit on them go suicidal on them. It's stupid.
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 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.
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 with 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 really tough unit can soak up fire while everyone else blows up the turret.
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.
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
As long as we're talking Starcraft, consider 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.
The Nintendo Wars games are usually pretty reliable, but the first Advance Wars game overestimated the importance of supplies in the game (they're only essential in 100-turn epics where there's a high rate of attrition, air units or artillery at choke points). The AI would attack APCs almost exclusively, ignoring nearby units that would ream them in retaliation, or even the infantry capturing their HQ that will win the game next turn.
- On particularly dodgy maps where an AI Colin is essentially handed an I Win button, he's been known to use his basic power, which gives him a 50% money boost...when his money is already at maximum. Black Hole Rising can only handle cash up to 999999.
The PC version of the classic boardgame Axis & Allies routinely makes utterly brain-dead moves, especially in purchasing units. Any AI running the United Kingdom, for example, will routinely spend almost all of its resources on submarines, turn after turn, even if the Germans possess absolutely no ships to attack.
In Front Mission 3's AI always goes after whichever unit you put down first on the map; you can leave your first placed unit at the start point and venture out with your other three, and the AI will go crazy trying to kill your first unit. Oops.
Black And White 2 introduced army fighting to the series, but what with all the other complexities of the game the AI suffered a little - it was possible, faced with a vast opposing horde, to send your Creature to attack them, then have it run away into the countryside. The entire enemy force would give chase, leaving your own soldiers free to sack their cities.
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.
- 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 Super Robots. 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 goood 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 offchance that one of their allied units would be hit. Makes many a boss easier.
In the Total War games, the computer doesn't seem to grasp that positioning its troops within range of your archers or turrets is a Bad Idea.
- This was mostly fixed in one patch for Rome: Total War, although the AI still fares badly against artillery or lots of missiles. However, the Rome and Medieval AI are notoriously awful - in Rome, sticking a couple phalanxes (pike walls that are virtually invinciple from the front to non-phalanx units) at the edge of a bridge will result in the AI suicide-charging them. The battle AI also doesn't see a need to protect its flanks and is usually unfazed by the player taking his cavalry around the AI's back. Before Medieval II, enemy generals also enjoyed suicide-charging ahead of their armies. The AI logic must have been something like, 'I want a strong unit to charge. The general is the strongest unit. Therefore the general must charge.' What An Idiot.
  - The campaign map AI is similarly problematic. In the original RTW it was prone to declaring war on the player even when in a much weaker position, and completely refusing all and any offers of peace even as it was being beaten black and blue. Sometimes it even declared war by using a vastly inferior force to attack a large army of yours. The incidence of this happening was decreased by later patches, but it still happens.
  - After much play, the AI is known to simply determine its enemies based on either trade routes or adjacent provinces, with some special coded wars set to happen. Of course, this results in the AI declaring war on its closest allies even if they are vastly more powerful once they have too many close provinces.It also means that you have no chacne to maintain peace, ever, because you're always the mortal enemy of *somebody*.
  - Another favourite 'trick' of the AI was to decide to stab you in the back and then totally throw away the advantage of surprise by just attacking a ship or two rather than going for a general assault.
- In Empire: Total War the battle AI is somewhat improved, but the campaign AI in the unpatched version was unable to transport troops by ship. In a game that includes three continents, and dozens of islands. Thus the UK is invinciple to non-player enemies, for example.
Age Of Empires A Is 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.
- The second Age Of Empires game rather improved the AI. Then in the expansion they made it stupider again, apparently feeling they'd gone too far.
In the WW 2 RTS Company of Heroes, the AI is exceptionally dumb,sending basic units against tanks,sending infantary against machinegun emplacements without even flanking,and never upgrading-While you have tanks that could kill even the most advanced infantary with nothing ven close to a sweat,the AI will still be sending out the basic unit with the basic gun.
Units in Battalion Wars and its sequel aren't that smart—of course, this may be to make sure manual control is more efficient. A glaring case, however, is the Battlestation in the final mission of Battalion Wars 2, as if it's AI controlled, it seems to have to be like two meters away from the Mining Spider before starting to attack it. According to a friend, it turns out the Battlestation attacks the guns that fire the weak lasers—something that the Heavy Tanks can fortunately take care of to save time—but you can't lock onto the guns yourself. Best part? You also get Fighters, which are far harder to control than the Battlestation which shouldn't require so much intelligence to use at all, but under player control, the Fighters can total the enemy air force that threatens anything else.
The battlefield AI in Dominions 3 is not that smart, which is a problem since you can only control your units for the first 5 turns. It's very frustrating to watch your mages summon weak units one at a time on the complete opposite side of the battlefield from the fight, when a nice battle evocation would totally turn the tide. The worst I've seen is when a mage, surrounded by bodyguards, cast Fire Shield (a ring of fire surrounds you), killing his bodyguards, then died to an enemy charge. At least the AI on the computer side is equally stupid.
In Dune 2, 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 2, 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.
Free Civ's computer players are extremely stubborn with "their" territory - build a city on any square they consider to be "theirs," and they'll raze the city - without any diplomacy scene or change in relationship. In fact, if you then attack one of their cities, they'll blame you for starting the war.
The various X-Com games suffered from this as well... 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. Did I mention that 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...
Bungie's Myth games are generally considered to have a decent AI, with one exception: ranged units do not check if friendly units are near their targets. So if you fail to micromanage your dwarves, they will gleefully chuck grenades into the middle of the melee.
The AI in Planet M.U.L.E. has some interesting trains of thought, particularly with respect to buying and selling:
- Land auction starting at $120? don't bother. Land auction starting at $350? MUST HAVE!
- Crystals selling for $70? SELL EVERYTHING! (for reference, it sells for $100 on average)
- Do I have Smithore? SELL IT!
- Aw, does that player not have enough energy? is the store empty? well, tough, I'm gonna hoard my energy even though I'll lose more to spoiling than I would selling it to the player.
  - Did another player sell ONE UNIT OF ENERGY? SELL DOWN TO +1 SURPLUS!
- Do I have no surplus? BUY UP TO +1 SURPLUS!
- Compounding the issue (and inducing fridge logic) is that occasionally, players will gain money off of "Artificial Dumbness investments".
- This is all particularly egregious when the original 1983 game's computer players were quite capable.
Dungeon Keeper. Snuggledell. The enemy keeper frequently believes that he can win using only a level 1 fly and a level 1 imp.

Command And Conquer

In Command And Conquer you could completely avoid GDI air strikes while playing as NOD 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. This problem persists in even the most recent C&C installments with enemy armies targeting the first opposition force they encounter and fixating on it until it's been defeated. This leads to almost total ignorance of anything else on the field, and will result in the AI sending hundreds or even thousands of units on suicidal runs against heavily fortified positions again and again until he's run out of resources.
- Command And Conquer also had the problem that the AI would not target walls, even if they were built into its base, meaning you could build a chain of cheap sand bags right into the AI's base and then build turrets there or wall up all the exits so their units can't get out.
- An easy way to defeat the AI as NOD is to make them broke. Take a recon bike and attack their harvestor, then retreat. The harvestor is programmed to cease harvesting and attempt to crush the recon bike as though it was an infantry unit, except it will fail to crush the bike. It will stand facing the bike but not be able to run over it. Lure the harvestor back to your base and destroy the harvestor. The AI will then rebuild the harvestor for 1400 and you can repeat the process again and again until it runs out of credits. At this point on, the AI will become a pushover. Without credits, it can't build any more harvestors and will remain broke, which means it can't repair or rebuild any buildings, and any units it loses cannot be replaced. As GDI you can do this by attacking the harvestor with a bazooka and then boarding an APC to escape back to base.
In Command And Conquer: Generals, unless there was an enemy unit nearby, the pathfinding AI 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.
- 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.
In C&C3, any base can become invincible vs. AI with 1.) A fair mixture of all types of turrets or a great number of Sonic/Obelisk/Storm turrets backed by anti infantry turrets and (except in the case of the Storm Tower) AA turrets, and 2.) A large deal of AG and AA flying units (Firehawk, Venom, or Carriers). Generally, in the case of NOD and Scrin, it is also a good idea to also have your "bombers" (a role the Firehawk fulfills in addition to AA for GDI). Generally speaking, building a few turrets early on, rapidly teching to your air units, and then dropping down your "super turrets" is the best order in which to do this.
If the player has two "Harvester" units in Command And Conquer, 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...
- Don't forget, of course, that Tiberium is toxic to most non-vehicles, because they sure will.
The AI in Command And Conquer: Renegade generally wasn't the brightest. 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.

In Runescape, the enemies will attempt to follow a straight line to their target (i.e. you), so it is often possible to stop them in their tracks simply by hiding behind something, even a torch. This may be deliberate, as the only practical method for archers to level up is to get a target on the other side of a table, fence, or similar obstacle, and proceed to turn the target into a pincushion.
- Mages can use the same strategy. Also, your character can also get stuck behind stuff, since you walk by clicking on where you want to go. In other words, you can also get this problem, though the player can guide their character.
In Guild Wars, one of the quests involves a 1 on 1 fight against a Doppelgänger who is modestly stronger than you, and has the exact same skills on his skill bar that you do. The primary (and intended) way to beat him is to invoke his Artificial Stupidity by taking skills useless for a duel, and/or by taking good skills that he will not actually use. For example, it's entirely possible to get the Doppelgänger to sacrifice enough of its health that you need only give him a cherry tap to win.
- The Artificial Stupidity of henchmen in Guild Wars is acknowledged in the end-game area of Prophecies, where Reyna reminisces how she often would use her single-use resurrection, not on a player, but instead on another henchman who would ultimately die trying to resurrect other henchmen.
- It's actually an established tactic as Squishy Wizard to go for cover, because spells from skills can bypass objects but weapon damage cannot. While the pure melee NPCs indeed have a working pathfinding, all others will nuke the wall ad infinitum and can be picked off one by one. Of course, the same goes for your henchmen and minions - with the latter ones being especially frustrating because you cannot order them to stop.
City Of Heroes' enemy AI is usually pretty good, but some of the NPC allies you get on certain missions are appallingly dumb. Fusionette, a recurring NPC, does an unfortunately good imitation of a novice player with her tendency to attack too many enemies at once and get clobbered.
- And in City Of Villains, on the timed "Mayhem Missions", it's often possible to spring a NPC villain from jail for a little extra firepower against the hordes of police and heroes trying to stop you. Which is fine, except they often have an annoying glitch where they stand in front of some easily-destroyed object without attacking. No wonder they were arrested so easily...
- Mastermind pets are incredibly stupid as well.
In La Tale enemies will follow and attack the first player character they see, regardless of threat level or feasibility of actually doing damage. They will ignore anyone else unless they don't get a chance to attack for at least a minute or the character moves out of range. This can be abused while in a party to kill vastly more powerful monsters than you would normally stand a chance against by having one character act as bait, run like hell, and climb a ladder just out of range. The rest of the party can attack the monster with impunity until it finally gets bored and goes after someone else. Rinse and repeat and you can defeat even mobs of high-threat enemies with little risk.
World Of Warcraft has two types of situations where your character is 'used' by the computer: either when fighting/aiding a doppleganger, or when mindcontrolled by certain bosses. Dopplegangers will sometimes use abilities with no cast time, but will almost always fight in melee range and spend most of the time just hitting with their melee weapon. Still a little threatening if the copied player is a Rogue, not so effective if they're a Mage whacking away with their staff. For the latter situation, while mindcontrolled your character uses abilities almost constantly and somewhat randomly, and often makes interesting choices (for instance an AI controlled Paladin using nothing but 'Exorcism' - a mediocre damage spell that usually only works on demons and undead - over and over on a fellow player). One particularly weird case showed the mind-controlled character apparently deciding Screw This Im Outta Here, and using a spell to teleport themselves to a different dimension. One constant is that they tend to use all cooldown abilities. Which due to their other actions is not necessarily dangerous, but does deprive you of them.

Neverwinter Nights

In Neverwinter Nights 2, your character will always, always start the combat by casting the Sanctuary spell. Even if he is a warrior/cleric.
- There is also Qara, who had a habit of aiming area-of-effect spells where they would hurt fellow party members and even herself. While she isn't portrayed as very bright, she shouldn't be that stupid.
- 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 P Cs, making it easier for the enemies to kill you.
Linu back in the original NWN had an unfortunate habit of casting Harm on hostile undead. Which HEALS them. Even worse, this was usually a few rounds into the battle, so it'd wipe out all the damage you'd painstakingly inflicted on it. Throw in her tendency towards burning through her whole day's supply of Turn Undead spells, even though the last THREE attempts did nothing...yeah, it's probably best to depend upon potions for your healing.
- The non-mages aren't a whole lot better. Fighter-types running headlong into encounter after encounter, thus forcing you to abandon what you were doing to join in, makes some amount of sense. However, Neeshka does exactly the same thing even though the sensible thing to do would be to wait until others engage and then sneak attack (where it works) at will.
  - Of course when the fighters attack, they have a nasty tendency to run past perfectly viable targets, and get attack of opportunity-ed, just so they could get to that oh so dangerous archer that shot them in the bum. "Oh you'll pay for that 4 damage bow boy! What? Oh that huge-assed guy that just power attacked me for 36? Nah he's no threat, I won't bother to change my priorities just because he can dish out nine times the damage, that's sissy thinking!"
- Anyone remember the very useless sorcerer Boddyknock? Casting See Invisibilty (REPEATEDLY!!) on clearly *VISIBLE* enemies wasn't of any help at all, while you were in dire need of support.
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 disarrming a trap, spot an enemy, and run straight over the trap to attack it.

In Disgaea 2, it is very easy to kill some enemies without them reacting simply by pelting them with spells from outside their range, because even if you can hit them most enemies don't move unless they can attack that turn.
- One of the AI's biggest flaws (at least in the first Disgaea) was that they will always go after the weakest character, instead of the most dangerous.
  - But they Shoot The Medic First whenever possible. So the easiest way to quickly level a new recruit up to par is by sending them through an old mission with a high-level Cleric leading the way (and drawing all attacks). Works best when you're leveling spellcasters though.
- In the first Disgaea, the computer often friendly fires on its own units when using spells, even when the option not to is available. And on other occasions it will cast healing spells on your own units as well.
- Another quirk in the Disgaea games is that the enemy will go after neutral characters first. In the first game, this was only Item World innocents, but in the 2nd this included Chests. If a chest was on an Invincibility panel, they'd spend all their time trying to kill the chest! This made it really easy to kill them.
- In Summoner, this is almost essential to win in some random encounters. Simply lay down a wall of fire and observe as the AI monsters barbecue to death, staring serenely at the horizon...
In Shining Force, there are many cases where an enemy will move to a certain spot, then never move from it. Such enemies can be easily defeated by simply hitting them with ranged attacks, even if they'd only have to move one square to trounce the attacking character(s). This was alleviated in the second game.
In The World Ends With You, if you have your partners on auto-play, they will always select the middle path of their combo branches. Now, this is all right for Shiki, because her method for gaining Fusion Stars (the Zenner Cards) is completely random. But for Joshua and especially Beat, this can make getting Fusion Stars impossible if you don't take control of them every few seconds, rendering auto-play a liability.
- Not to mention the fact that they never block.
  - ... and (initially) computer-controlled Joshua has the survival skills of a fucking brick. A brick with no will to live who regrets nothing.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and A2 feature some examples of this. Yes, in A2 the people you're escorting almost never just rushes into combat (except when you're escorting overconfident pricks, which makes sense), which is nice... but enemies and friendly combatants alike make some of the stupidest decisions. Examples? Physically attacking a unit with Strike Back (which allows it to parry and counter any normal attack), or trying to cause a status effect to a unit which is openly immune to it, or go after the little supporting character while your Dragoons are ripping the enemy a new one... are some of the most usual ones.
- Status immunities aren't the only things that the AI disregards... like inflicting silence on non-magic users. Why. Why do you do something like this?
  - 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 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 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 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.
In Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, the AI doesn't check whether you have units in your allies' cities and so will launch absolutely stupid surprise attacks against you, by attacking a city that you don't own but do have units in.
Final Fantasy VI : Dragon's Neck Coliseum. You bet a rare item and send one of your characters in against one monster. You cannot control that character, and whereas the monsters will be as stupid as they always are (using moves against a character immune to that particular type), several of your characters have moves in which they sacrifice themselves for the good of the team, by giving them buffs and health and such. They can use these moves in the Coliseum, handing you an instant loss for no benefit and the loss of your (sometimes one-of-a-kind) item. Save Scumming is highly advised.
Fallout will probably go down in history as the game where the main threat to your health was your party members... what with them repeatedly shooting you in the back with automatic weapons. The sequel tried to alleviate it by adding commands so you give them tactical instructions, but you should still never give your henchmen anything with a burst mode.
- Also, the friend/foe recognition was just... odd. A stray shot hitting someone who was non-hostile would convince your followers they were viable targets. For example, the quest to guard Grisham's brahmin against wild dogs: Vic takes aim on one dog, and wings a brahmin by mistake. The rest of your party immediately ignore the dogs and attack the cattle instead. The ones you lose a hundred bucks for each cow lost. Thanks a bunch, guys. Why do I keep you around?
- 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 existant 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.
Fallout 3 fixed many annoying things from Oblivion, but there are still some issues. After the game release, there were reports that Megaton citizens had been reportedly turning up dead. Was it unscripted murder? No, THEY FELL OFF THE WALKWAYS.
- There's also the habit of followers and enemies to shoot at walls in the direction of targets NONSTOP, WITHOUT MOVING.
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. And never, ever, EVER give them Ether or Elixir-type items. They'll go through them like candy the way they burn through their MP. It's often not even safe to trust them with potion-type items, since they go through THOSE like candy too the way they die so quickly...
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.
- Some very specific mutant powers of some AI controlled party members won't trigger whenever you spam the "call for help" button, forcing you to make some party member switchings back and forth.
Persona 3 (the others too, probably) had some issues with what your AI teammates would or wouldn't do. One particularly loathsome example is their reaction to barrier spells. If an enemy casts a barrier that blocks all physical attacks, your allies will refuse to attack it head on, forcing the player to do it themselves to get rid of it. However, an enemy near the end casts a special barrier that goes away over time instead and attacking it usually means dropping dead on the spot, but unlike before your party doesn't stop attacking. You almost have to physically restrain your party to avoid them killing themselves.
- "Almost" my foot. Major Yayz for the Tactics Menu.
  - Persona 3 actually had some surprisingly intelligent combat algorithms governing your party members- if you scanned an enemy for its elemental strengths and weaknesses your characters would NEVER use a useless attack on that enemy again, and even if you didn't or the enemy was immune to scan (most bosses in Tartarus) they'd learn their lesson after a single failed attack. On the other hand, they were completely oblivious to the nuances of strategy (most obviously that making enemies lose turns is a good thing, causing them to attack enemies who were already knocked down and causing them to stand up again. Mastery of the combat system in Persona 3 was determined by how well you could use the strategy system to railroad their Artificial Stupidity into achieveing the desired goals without screwing up too badly. Fortunately Persona 4 gave you the option of controlling your entire party manually.
  - The AI will opt to knock down enemies, but only if you give the order.
  - Though even the Tactics Menu is hardly perfect. If you tell a character to heal/support, they will not cure poison on a character if said character is at less than perfect health. They will not heal anyone else, either, even if the poisoned character is at 499/500 hp and another party member is at 1/500. Nor will the character attempt to attack an enemy when there are any injured party members, even if someone is missing only a sliver of health and a monster with a one hit party kill ability has a single hit point left.
Estelle's AI in Tales Of Vesperia is almost universally considered lackluster.
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.
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.
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 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.
- In some of the variants where monsters can use magical items the monsters will prefer to use weak magical items over their more powerful innate magic, like demon lords in Nethack which choose a Wand of Striking over their much more powerful infernal magics.
- In variants where monsters can flee from their opponent they never analyze their opponent's strength at the start of the fight and decide to flee if the opponent seems too strong, but rather wait until they're almost dead to flee.
Quest 64 has some of the worst AI ever seen, to the point that bosses become easier and enemies don't even use all their available attacks.
Vagrant Story has the unique condition where its anti-casting technique, Silence, is canceled in the event that a spell of any kind hits you. Similarly, you can afflict most spellcasting enemies in the game with Paralyze, which prevents physical attacks. If you Silence yourself - or let them Silence you - and then Paralyze them, they will more or less stand there and let you kill them, as they're programmed to not under any circumstances break your Silence effect by hitting you with another spell. Similarly, many enemies will refuse to engage you until they've cast all possible enhancements on themselves, and by countering their enhancement spells they'll do nothing but try and cast them, over and over, while you get in free attack after free attack.
Because of Vandal Hearts 2's unique turn-based system - where moving each friendly unit is accompanied by the AI opponent moving one of theirs simultaneously - a considerable portion of the strategy involves outsmarting the predictableAI, such as moving a character to attack an empty region safe in the knowledge that the computer will move an enemy unit straight into it.
In the 5th and final chapter of Dragon Quest IV, all party members except The Hero are AI-controlled. The AI has multiple settings: the basic mode, an all-out offense mode, a defense-oriented mode, a no magic mode, etc. They all have one thing in common: the AI is deeply stupid. It's commonplace for the AI to have everybody gang up on a single enemy even if one of them alone can kill it that turn, resulting in everyone else attacking the now-empty spot in the enemy group's roster. Or cast spells against an enemy who has magical protection in place to bounce them back at you. Or cast that same spell on the party right before the healer casts her own healing spell (with exactly the results you might expect). Worst of all, there's no option to turn off the AI control! At least, not in the original NES version. In the Playstation and Nintendo DS remakes, that flaw is rectified.
Not a bug, but definitely a stupid element in World of Warcraft: some escort quests. Upon accepting the quest, the NPC will start walking VERY SLOWLY towards safety. You'd think they'd hurry to get out of the evil whatever-infested town: they DON'T. Sometimes, the escorted mob doesn't even notice you're fighting something, and will just calmly keep on walking, leaving you behind. Another facedesk possibility: if you aggro a monster before it attacks the escorted mob, said mob will run to you and help you, which is good. However, as soon as the battle is over, he will RUN BACK to the spot from which he aggroed the monster, and resume walking slowly. Hard to describe, because it's so damn stupid.
Your party members in Rogue Galaxy have no idea what they are doing. While they won't use MP-cost special abilities without your specific request (unless you have them set that way), and do have the brains to use charge attacks when needed to break enemy shields, the rest of their AI is locked onto Attack Attack Attack. They have never heard of neither blocking attacks nor getting out of the way. The only setting on which they block is the one that prevents them from doing anything else.
Monster Hunter has the monsters set up like Mooks that will beat the crap out of each other because they're too close to one another to get at you, or you're on a ledge, or something similar. Sure, it's easily explained by the monsters in question being only up to the level of intelligence of wild animals, but it makes things easier for you if you use patience and proper positioning, plus it's just fun to watch.
"Arcanum" Arcanum Arcanum Arcanum. Your fellow party members make it a point of ignoring your orders the very next combat encounter, apparantly eager for that summoned Fire Elemental to slaughter them. Magic users will willingly render themselves unconscious by healing technological characters, upon whom their magic has not effect. They also like to stand in doorways, and otherwise cause more damage than the enemy. If any game makes a successful argument for full party control during combat, it is this one.

Fire Emblem

The AI in Fire Emblem games tend to have very poor decision making skills. Archers will often go straight after mages, which are often the only units that can counterattack from that distance, and they can even do this if they need to be one square from your Lord to do so. Other enemies will see a line of five soldiers and will ALL choose to swarm either the one riding the dragon or the heavily armored one who doesn't take damage. And the bosses have this weird concept that the best way to fight the heroes is to stand perfectly still in their room until you're within range, even while the heroes start filing in around them.
- In an early stage in Radiant Dawn you are forced into using only two units: the Squishy Wizard Micaiah and the Black Knight. Since the enemies are there specifically to KILL Micaiah and the Black Knight is there specifically to PROTECT her, you'd think they'd send their oddly large force at her at once. Nope, they go two or three at a time and hack at the first living thing they see.
- Even more fun is that enemies will always, always go straight for a unit that has no weapon equipped, as they (obviously) can't counterattack (or if laguz, not very well). You can easily get Micaiah to level 20 without a problem on that map by parking the Black Knight somewhere with his sword unequipped and letting the enemies flail pointlessly at him while Micaiah whittles them down from afar.
- This has applications beyond power-levelling. Many Fire Emblem veterans know that the best way to save a mission that's going pear-shaped is to unequip your strongest character's weapon. Picture this: the enemy has three swordmasters standing next to a mission sensitive character, who has only a few HP left. In order to win the map, the enemy need only attack with a single unit. Yet if you move an armoured unit up and unequip their weapon, any enemy unit within range will immediately abandon their attack on the almost-dead Lord and attack the armoured unit instead, even if they can't damage it.
- This is nicely averted with bosses who seem to stand still on the throne. So you carelessly move your Squishy Wizard up, planning to attack next round when the boss runs right up and kills your exposed wimps. Oops.
- Radiant Dawn emphasizes "no counterattacks!" above all else. Archers will shoot your heavily armored (but melee only) knight while ignoring the priest holding a weak light magic tome.
  - They're so dumb that they would go for the knight if the priest was using a fucking staff.

The Elder Scrolls

In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion enemies seem to prioritize weaker foes. This means that a character can cast a summon spell and watch while the enemies ignore him completely while he flings fireballs at them. But it also means that bandits and monsters will ignore the player and attack your horse even when you're wailing on them with your sword. Why do these people hate horses so much?
- This may actually be an issue of disposition rather than power. As you complete quests and earn Fame points, 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 worst 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.
- Some immersion Failure AI bugs include animals grazing on stone, people trying to plough rocks, extreme rubber necking and others.
This was actually an improvement on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Allied NPC's would cast exploding spells at enemies who were in melee with the player (thus killing the player), flying enemies would get stuck in tree branches, neutral animals would happily walk into pools of flowing lava, neutral NPC's would walk into a wall and refuse to stop, just walking in place with their face planted against it, and hostile NPC's would run in circles because the player character was standing on a boulder.
- In both Oblivion and Morrowind, if you stand in an area which an enemy without ranged attacks can't reach, they won't run away or pick up the bow from that archer you just killed. No, the only rational option is to get as close as possible and run back and forth a bit while taking fireball after fireball in the face. This was the reason levitation spells were removed after Morrowind.
  - 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....

In the X (especially Terran Conflict) series of games, the Autopilot on all the ships loves to smash itself into the nearest asteroid at max speed, or veer into the path of 4 km long destroyers. Then you turn on the Time accelerator to make the slow autopilot dock faster. It Got Worse
In the Wing Commander games, you can use asteroid fields to help pare down unfavorable odds, by leading the enemy through them. The AI is, in general, really dumb about avoiding those floating bits of astrogeography, and will gladly suicide on them.
- Also in Wing Commander, especially in the earlier ones, the player's wingmen were a little too enthusiastic about shooting down the enemy; i.e. : they would cheerfully ignore that the player was in the way...
Sims tend to get stuck at a doorway, unable to decide who goes through first for several minutes. In the original game, this bug used to strand entire groups of Sims at the top of staircases. Sims have been known to starve to death because they couldn't take turns.
- Ironically, Sims actually do have good pathfinding when it comes to things less complicated than, urm... doorways. Try building a maze, for example, and the pizza boy will walk right through.
- Sims are, however, known for such suicidal stunts as, when both hungry and tired, waking up to go eat, then passing out from exhaustion, waking up because they're too hungry to sleep, then passing out because they're too exhausted to eat, in a vicious cycle that generally ends in sim ghosts.
- Sims will also drop a baby on the floor in front of the refrigerator, then complain that they can't get to the refrigerator to get the baby a bottle...
- And let's not forget the sims who whine about being exhausted, then decide there's no better time for a swim.
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.
Roller Coaster Tycoon was particularly bad with this. First of all, unless you destroy the paths at strategic places, every Guest in the game will go wandering off miles beyond any sign of civilization and then complain that they are "lost". Interestingly, they cannot walk ten feet on an unpaved surface, meaning that if you create a path with two dead ends, the Guests will just walk back and forth until the end of time. The Handymen Staff were pretty bad too. Though all you wanted them to do generally was sweep up puke, if you left the command on for them to mow lawns, they will wander off spending hours mowing the endless acres of your theme park while your Guests swim in rivers of their own vomit. And mowing lawns is pointless anyway, because there's a glitch in the game that solves it with ease. If you just touch a piece of land with the landscaping tool, even without actually doing anything, the weeds will disappear. Luckily the sequel just turned the Mow Lawns command off.
- The "No Entry" signs in the expansions solved the problem of guests running off in the first game, but still doesn't keep them from getting lost. Guests will claim to be lost while pacing in front of the exit.
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 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 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 titular Pikmin sure do love to drown themselves when you try to cross a bridge with them.
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the N64 does this big-time. Your allies are completely, absolutely useless. All they do is fly around, sometimes in circles, leaving the player to do the work of an entire squadron himself. Of course, the enemy is not much better. TIE Bombers especially suffer from this: they always fly in a straight line and never even attempt evasive maneuvers, making it ridiculously easy to shoot them down. On the other hand, the TIE Interceptors in Moff Seerdon's Revenge, who shoot at angles their cannons can't hit any other time, are cheating bastards.
- It doesn't get any better in the sequel, Rogue Leader (suggested alternative: Rogue Suggester), wherein any command given to your squad is usually interpreted by them as "Fly very slowly near the turbolasers". They also delight in using lasers against enemies vulnerable only to special player-only weapons, or shooting up the unbreakable walls between them and their target instead of flying around to the other wide-open side.
The ancient Star Fleet Battles simulator BEGIN 2 has surprisingly good AI. Except for the Romulans. These guys will set off their self-destructs occasionally for no obvious reason, often destroying other ships (friendly and enemy) nearby. As the Romulans can also cloak this makes fighting them like going for a walk in a minefield.
The AI controlled ships in Star Trek Klingon Academy suffered from a total lack of spatial awareness. This meant that if you were battling the enemy near an asteroid field, all you had to do was fly into the middle of the field and sit back as the enemy ship(s) plowed into every asteroid nearby and most likely ended up destroying themselves.
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.
- The original idea was that you'd be limited in the amount of micromanagement you could do per turn – you basically played as the ruler of an empire with a horrible bureaucracy. That turned out not to be much fun.
The ants in Bugdom will throw their spears, then run to fetch them. If you can get them to throw a spear through something, they will just sit there, running against a ~~log~~ drinking straw. In later levels, Fake Difficulty comes into play as the ants gain the ability to return from the dead as invulnerable ghosts, still thirsting for your blood, as a way of counteracting this kind of thing.
The propensity of AI-controlled ships in the FreeSpace series to crash into other ships that are in the way has become a running gag among fans. Other idiotic things the AI loves to do include continuing straight on an attack run even though the player is behind them and firing, flying directly into beam cannons, firing beam cannons at enemy capital ships even if friendly units are in the way and will be annihilated, and firing torpedoes from the longest possible range, making them easy to intercept and shoot down before impact.

Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress. Strangely enough, part of the game's charm has to do with the fact that your dwarfs are utter idiots. However, they make some choices that lead to... odd happenings. For example, if an executioner doesn't have a weapon to kill a prisoner with, they don't let that bother them, and kill the prisoner anyway. By biting them to death.
- Similarly, hunters who run out of bolts will gladly bludgeon the animals to death. And if they somehow lose the crossbow, they will gladly (and oddly successfully) wrestle muskoxen and elephants to the ground.
- Then, there's sieges. The most common kind, goblin sieges, may leave players overconfident because the average goblin siege charges right into your traps and lets themselves get slaughtered. Eventually you face human sieges where they, well, do a proper siege. They sit right outside of your crossbow range and wait for your dwarves to run out of food and water and/or tantrum and start slaughtering each other. Any attempt to foray is met with a withering storm of bolts and arrows which, because DF averts Annoying Arrows, is very deadly indeed.
- "Being on fire sure makes you thirsty for a good beer."
- An odd combination of stupidities leads to hilarious results: "Ignis promptly starts to spar and get a punctured lung. Instead of being a good wounded dwarf and staying in bed, he promptly walks around the fortress falling unconscious, refusing any medical care whatsoever. This I could tolerate because it meant the idiot would be dead soon and no one would care. After traveling to my royal dining hall in just under a year, he proceeds to grab a plump helmet stew from my nearby food stockpile. He then promptly falls unconscious again and drops his food in the hallway. The stew proceeds to rot and create a gigantic amount of miasma and there is nothing my dwarves can do about it since the stew is owned by Ignis. After waking up half a season later, Ignis, seeing his stew has rotted, proceeds to the stockpile once again to grab some cat biscuits. You can see where I am going with this."
  - In situations like this, it's recommended you simply lock them in their rooms and leave them to starve. It's not pleasant, but it gets the job done.
- When there's a siege or other such hazard present on the surface, you can order your dwarves to "stay underground" to keep them safe. The way the dwarf AI does this is to continually check "am I aboveground?" and if so, cancel whatever task they were doing. The jobless dwarf will then pick a new task from the list of available tasks... which is often the very task they just cancelled. The result is known as the "entrance dance", where a huge crowd of dwarfs winds up clustered around the entrance constantly jumping back and forth through it and announcing cancelled jobs. Most players will have to design their fortress with an outdoor courtyard of some sort to keep these idiots safe.
- Siege engines such as ballistae are operated by civilian crews, not military dwarves. That means that if you order your civilians to hide inside while your military fends off a siege, and the ballistae are outdoors, they'll abandon their posts. They'll also abandon their posts and flee if they _see_ a hostile enemy. Doesn't matter if the enemy is across a moat and through an impenetrable fortified wall, and that they're currently manning a contraption that can slaughter them all in a single shot...
- When dwarfs are digging trenches or building walls they have a universal preference for which side of the wall or trench they stand on while doing their work. For example, they prefer standing on the west side of the tile if that space is available. So one must be careful about how you set up your construction orders or the dwarfs can wall themselves up and eventually die of starvation or thirst.

Pokemon

In any given Pokemon game, some rival trainers will repeatedly use attacks like "Sand Attack" and "Harden" long after they become useless. At least wild Pokemon have the excuse that they're using an AI Roulette.
- The trainers who team up with you in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum for Double Battles are almost always unbelievably stupid. I mean...Helping Hand? Seriously? Come on, Marley, Arcanine's got to have something better than that...
- Ground-Type Pokemon use Mud Sport. Thank you for reducing the effectiveness of a type you're already immune to.
- A fun example is Recover. Oh no! My Kadabra/Starmie/Blissey/whatever has just taken 51% of its life in one shot! I'm faster, I can Recover it back. Cue this for another 20 turns or until you crit/vary your strategy.
- In the original Red, Blue and Yellow games, 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 beats 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 the Electric gym — the final gym, where they should know better, in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum.
- After confusing your Pokemon, enemies will continue to pointlessly use attacks such as Confuse Ray.
  - Although they might just be doing it 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.
Magikarp are useless even with Tackle, which they learn at level 15. However, I have fought main level 16 Magikarps that continue to choose Splash. A minor bit of damage is surely better than a move that does absolutely nothing? Even worse, I've faced Gyrados that use Splash.
In R/B/Y, you could sweep through the Celadon Gym with puny Level 5 Grass/Poison Pokemon, because the aforementioned "Zeroth Law" forces every Pokemon in this Grass gym to use Poisonpowder, which your Pokemon is immune to due to being part Poison. Strangely, this isn't the case with the ensuing gym, which uses pure POISON Pokemon.
In the "Pokémon trading card game" game for the Gameboy, the AI, even at its highest level doesn't understand a stall deck, and will only retreat to dispell status effects or to save important Pokémon with Pokémon powers.
- Murray, the Psychic Gym Leader of the game has a deck that has the trappings of a stall deck, with one major flaw. His deck contains mostly Chansey, a card with a ridiculous amount of hit points and a move that allows it to negate any damage done to it, and Alakazam, a card with the ability to transfer damage points from one card to another, meaning that even if you manage to hurt Chansey, the damage would probably just vanish. Sounds good, except that the major flaw is the deck also contains the Professor Oak card, a card that will make the user discard their hand and then draw seven cards from their deck. This results in Murray often losing by stalling 'himself' out.

AI in Shadow Ops: Red Mercury weren't the brightest bulbs in the shed. Enemy AI would run right out into the open, even past the player's AI teammates, just to shoot at the player. Teammates fared no better as they would ignore said enemies completely.
Your squad in Brothers In Arms tends to stand in the open a few feet from cover, apparently prefering to let jerry ventilate them.
In Deus Ex, and a number of similar games, the AI is usually pretty good...but will ignore the dead or unconscious body of an ally unless he was killed within sight of it.
- One of the designers of Deus Ex said the AI had to be reined in a bit because players were rounding corners and getting shot in the head by entrenched guards, which obviously put a damper on the fun.
- Another fun fact: enemies on patrol always turn left. Which, in essence, means you're up against the cloned army of a Mirror Universe's Derek Zoolander
- 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 drive everyone in UNATCO insane (2/3rds of the way down the page), or it can be used to get 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 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 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 pwn everything in the game by simply moving a few feet to the left after recloaking.
- The guys with laser pointers are a different story though - when they hit you with the laser, they'll fire even though you are cloaked. And I don't know about you, but those I played against (the max difficulty) were quite competent even without them if you got too close. Recloaking worked when sniping and over medium distances, but in short range... They can see you if you move, the cloaks efficiency depends a lot on the environment etc.
- The artificial stupidity in 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.
In the original Half-Life, if you have a security guard following you during the segment with the trains, they will have absolutely no second thoughts about stepping onto an electrified rail line and instantly killing themselves if it is the only route to get to you on the opposite side of the tracks. And sometimes even if it's not.
While most AI in Half-Life 2 is pretty damn good (on both sides), many of your allies don't seem to understand the concepts of "I'm blocking Freeman's way" or "maybe I shouldn't stand in the narrow hallway".
- And then there's this. "If I can't see you..."
  - There's a similar glitch in the Sentry AI in Team Fortress 2. If there is an overhead obstruction and you can see the sentry's tripod, it won't see you unless you crouch to see the rest of it.
- Your squadmates don't seem to understand that stealth and evasion are sometimes important. They will run headlong into sniper fire every time without a moment's hesitation, and upon encountering a strider, the black guy you join up with toward the end of "Follow Freeman" started shooting at it with his submachine gun, drawing its attention to both him and the equally ill-armed player.
- Oh, and in Episode One you have to escort several waves of them safely past increasingly thick Combine fire. If they were just smart enough to run full tilt along the predetermined path, they'd probably all make it, but it wouldn't be a proper Escort Mission without suicidal NPCs, would it...
The AI survivors in Left 4 Dead can be like this. They usually wait a few seconds before actually deciding to catch up with the player and if you get attacked by any special infected other than a Tank, they may prioritize shooting regular zombies instead of trying to free you.
- Made worse in Survival and VS mode, where the modes have a melee attack cooldown effect and the computer keeps trying to melee zombies off them when they have to recharge. Most likely a programming oversight by Valve and has yet to be fixed.
- AI survivors also will sometimes fail to realize when you're lying on the ground right next to them, incapacitated, and just stand around and let you die if you are on ground that is slightly higher or lower than they are.
- Sometimes the special infected may not be stuck, but will try to attack you from a position where you will never get hit and will keep doing it if you don't move.
- On a more optimistic note: you can make the AI survivors act slightly less stupid if you use the macros to order them to advance. This doesn't fix anything else, but at least they aren't a room behind you all the time.
- Left 4 Dead 2 seems to be much worse with survivor AI now compared to the first game. The AI will now usually leave you to die if you are strangled by a Smoker 2 feet away from them if there are common infected near them and even if you are perfectly several feet away from the AI in a straight line and are being pounded by a Charger, don't expect the AI to start shooting until they are at least in half the the range from them to you.
The Dark Sims in Perfect Dark know exactly where you are and will usually hit you when you're moving. The Meat Sims in Perfect Dark are lucky if they hit you when you're standing still. Unfortunately, "always hit" and "shoot to miss" mean "with bullets that hit almost instantly": rockets are slower. This means you'll run away from the Dark Sims' shots and into the Meat Sims'.
Far Cry Vengeance has some pretty bad enemy AI. You can run up behind them making lots of noise and they won't hear you. You can stand right in front of them and let them shoot you and their accuracy is so bad that it takes a long time. You can even THROW GRENADES AT THEIR BACK and they won't turn around.
Halo series has marines that are downright stupid at times. In the first game they had no concept of stealth, making otherwise very easy rooms of sleeping grunts annoying when they ran guns blazing, waking up the aliens. It Got Worse in the second two games when the marines learned how to drive. Drivers would run you smack into walls, leaving you completely vulnerable to tank fire. Gunners aren't much better, and seem to be conserving ammo on a turret with unlimited amunition.
- Conversely, the enemies exhibit Artificial Brilliance on Legendary difficulty, especially in the third game.
In the first Time Splitters game, AI had a nasty habit of running in circles till you shot it. Annoying when the enemy does it, downright infuriating when your team mates do it.
Wolfenstein (2009) has all the classic artificial stupidity bugs. Most notably, the enemy players will not react to you at all unless you are within a certain distance of them (at which point they will know where you are with unfailing accuracy) meaning that, once you've got the sniper scope, you can snipe groups from a distance and watch as the Germans show absolutely no reaction to their comrades' heads exploding.
In the Star Wars: Battlefront games, you will sometimes see such things as allied soldiers running directly into a wall repeatedly, or shooting at one for no apparent reason. The reason behind this is that the AI is programmed to move or shoot directly at enemy A Is, and seems to forget to account for intervening terrain. It gets worse on tiered battlefields, where your soldiers will cluster in an empty hallway because there's an enemy in the level directly beneath them.
- The addition of space combat in the sequel also adds new chances for stupidity. The standard AI tactic to avoid being shot down by human players is to crash into their own capital ship, for instance.
  - In the case of space combat, AI seems to be programmed to take to ships first. If you invade the enemy ship to destroy their various components from the inside, your biggest threat is dodging bullets as the enemy AI makes its way to their ships.
- The main way of increasing difficulty levels in the first game is to deduct 50 points from your allies' IQs. Defending objectives? That's for squares! Although the funniest happens regardless of difficulty setting - if you are flying, say, a Republic Gunship and give the "everybody out" command before you land, your allies will cheerfully jump out of the gunship, ignoring fine details like not possessing a parachute or jetpack, and the height being enough to break their necks. You then have kills deducted for every stupid clone you have thus weeded out.
Painkiller's AI wasn't exactly what you'd call Mensa material to begin with, but the Obvious Beta expansion Painkiller Resurrection takes this trope Up To Eleven, where enemies who can't deal with the erratic level design get hung up constantly on corners, curbs and other random bits of scenery as they try to charge the player.
In Strife, when you converse with the rebel soldiers while they stand around as NP Cs, they sometimes warn you not to stand too close to the enemy's "Crusader" robots, due to said unit's short-range but highly damaging flamethrower. When these same rebels see active duty on certain levels, however, their AI causes them to attempt to close to melee range on their enemies, including Crusaders, resulting in many of them going to their fiery death like lambs to a slaughter. This is despite the fact that the rebel soldiers have no special melee attack; their only attack is to fire an assault rifle which works reasonably well from a distance.

In the computer fighting game Big Bang Beat: 1st Impression, you have an energy meter which depletes as you attack, and disables most of your attacks when it drops low enough. You can recharge this meter using the classic SNK "stand still and hold down a button" method: However, you have to HOLD the button to charge. The computer, which IS limited by this bar as well, tends to TAP the button, meaning they charge with at best a tenth of the speed you do, and most of the time fail to charge at all. Thus, you can usually win any fight by turtling until the opponent's bar runs out, and then bashing him to pieces as he futilely tries to recharge.
Several recent WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW games exhibit problems during specialty matches, most notably the Elimination Chamber — rather than fight normally, computer-controlled opponents will instead spend much of the match climbing up and down the chain rigging and corner chambers. Sometimes, rather than climb down, opponents will instead hurl their bodies off the chambers with diving attacks that almost always miss, inflicting upon them damage more grievous than the player-controlled character can effectively dole out. However, they do make up for this somewhat by constantly breaking pin attempts — despite the fact that the Elimination Chamber is an elimination-style match and the computer, at least in theory, benefits from the elimination of other competitors just as much as the player does. Meanwhile, AI characters in the Royal Rumble mode have been known to eliminate themselves from the match by jumping onto an opponent outside the ring.
Despite being an SNK Boss on the last floor of the Tower of Souls, Algol in Soul Calibur IV has an exploitable AI: he tends to perform a low slash followed by a leaping low slash when he knocks your character down. If you happen to be lying on the edge of the arena, odds are he'll leap to his doom.
The Fighting Game Maker, MUGEN, being accessible to amateurs and highly popular, has AIs that fall everywhere on the scale. On the one hand, you have ones that make the official SNK Bosses look easy; on the other, somewhere out there, there's a Zero character with an AI so badly written, it will actually crash the game.
Killer Instinct Gold features an odd version including Glacius's Liquidize move: Oh higher difficulty matches most enemies read your moves and perform specific moves to keep you from starting combos. If you are all the way across the screen, Liquidize briefly, and simply remain still afterward, almost all opponents walk towards you until they are in range to do their specific counter-maneuver for Liquid Uppercut. No matter the opponent, their chosen move is always countered by Cold Shoulder, Rock-Paper-Scissors style. As long at it goes into a simple combo, they will rarely be able to do anything else. This actually gets EASIER to do the farther you go and the harder the setting.
In the old Ranma1/2 fighting game Super Hard Battle, final boss Herb invariably responds to projectiles by jumping over them and towards the opponent. Therefore, defeating him is as simple matter as using a projectile, hitting him with an anti-air attack (knocking him back to almost the exact spot where he started), and repeating.
The AI in Jump! Ultimate Stars for the DS is the worst fighting AI short of MUGEN. The AI is so bad that most players recommend that people DO NOT BUY THE GAME if they don't have access to Wi-Fi. The AI will kill itself more often than you can kill it! The AI in JUS will jump to their death repeatedly in just about any stage with a pit in it, even after they've just respawned!
- Let's not forget status effects. Auto-Run and Burn will cause the AI to do nothing but run straight ahead (even into a pit or wall) and Confusion makes them do the same thing but in reverse. Blind, Guard Seal and Movement Seal (which only seals your directional movement and jumping, not attacking or blocking) will cause the AI to do nothing but stand still, not even blocking.
- Then there's their attacks. In a game with 50+ playable characters and over 200 Support characters, it seems that the best strategy the AI can come up with on any difficulty is to randomly mash the "touch" attack, launch Support characters at random intervals (even where it would be completely stupid to do so, like setting down a healing support when they're standing right next to you, and not picking it up) and repeatedly throw out projectiles and Specials with no regard to distance or actual effectiveness.
- The game can also fall into The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard territory on Hard mode, where the AI will automatically block the second you touch any attack buttons. It still can't kill you, and still kills itself repeatedly, though.
Your partner AI in the Super Smash Bros has the intelligence of a garden slug on rhino dookey while the enemy AI are vicious pitbulls. Unfair, ain't it?
- In Melee there was something called the "flipper dance": when fighting a single computer opponent, pick a stage with decent sized flat base and no movement affecting gimmicks, such as Final Destination, take a flipper and just throw it straight so that it lands at walking height between you and the opponent and just stand still a few feet behind it. The enemy will slowly walk towards you, then, right before hitting the flipper, will dodge roll backwards, then start walking towards you again, rinse and repeat until the flipper expires. It never gets old to watch the computer completely forget it can jump.
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.
Rise of the Robots was touted in a pre-release trailer for the game as the first fighting game where the enemy adapts to your fighting style and changes its tactics based on how you come at it. This, however, is a lie, as every single opponent, up to and including the final boss, can be defeated simply by moving forward and kicking it into a corner.

Enter The Matrix has three driving levels. If you play as Niobe, you get to be the driver while Ghost takes shots at the enemy vehicles, and if you're playing as Ghost you get to be the gunner while Niobe drives through the level. The problem? Apparently the AI-controlled Niobe completely flunked out of driving school, because she can't go five seconds without crashing into something and more than likely getting stuck (this is most aggravating in the final driving level, where you're trying to escape from the Twins, who are following after and shooting at you, and are also completely invincible.)
The Force Unleashed was supposed to be renowned for its implemention of Euphoria, an engine that would give A.I a sense of self-preservation. For example, if you try to throw an object at a character in game, they may sometimes leap out the way. Hold one up with the Force and dangle them over a ledge? They may try to grab the ledge. So shouldn't this make them smart, not stupid? Just one problem. You would think that if one came into contact with someone who could lift up a TIE fighter mentally, without breaking a sweat and throw it at you, the only self-preservation instinct kicking in should be to ''run like hell."
- If that were the case, the game would certainly be boring. Not to mention that it would speak very poorly of Imperial training and discipline if they just ran from danger instead of trying to kill them. Also keep in mind that Order 66 proved that keen (or even spam) shooting can take out Force users.
In Saint's Row 2, pedestrians will often jump to one side if they think they player will drive over them. However, at least as often as not, they throw themselves headlong onto the street, where they're likely to get run over by another NPC driver, or by the player if he was only barely on the sidewalk or if he was only taking a brief detour onto the sidewalk.
- There are also certain roads that cabs seem to have... trouble with. More specifically, they become, to borrow Yahtzee's phrase, 'pants-on-head retarded'. The cabs tend to spawn at the end of a long, straight road... then turn around and start driving off in a random direction, taking the longest possible route to get to you. If they don't just explode. Or sometimes they'll spawn, but, for some reason, immediately shift into 'normal' NPC cabs which you can steal, rather than ride in. Also fits as a Good Bad Bug.
- Airplane pilots seem to be a panicky lot in SR 2, too. Shoot them once (with any gun) on the runway (which is the only place to really find NPC airplanes), and they'll immediately veer off the runway and crash into the closest bit of scenery, usually exploding in a giant fireball.
Space Pirates, in the stealth section of Metroid: Zero Mission, will raise an alarm and mercilessly chase you if they spot you. However, you can cause them to call off the alarm if you can keep them from spotting you for a short period of time (or going to a prescripted area to shake the heat). This is despite the fact that you are the one solely responsible for the destruction of their leader not three hours ago and you are now unarmored and vulnerable. It's also worth noting that the shots they fire at you will kill each other if you can line them up right.
- In Metroid Fusion, the SA-X is occasionally unable to figure out how to shoot you if you aren't running away full-tilt.
In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, you eventually encounter a human boss who can use any power used against him, but it is automatically overridden by any new power. That's fine, and obviously the best way to beat him is to use a stupid power against him. The trouble is that he never clues into the fact that his new power is ridiculous (he does, after all, have a knife he could be using), such as lashing out with a Cave Troll's tongue attack that doesn't extend past his dramatically outstretched arm.
- Use the Student Witch attack on him, so that he spends the remainder of the battle trying to throw cats at you.
The enemy AI in the Armored Core games, especially on the PS 1 and PS 2, are capable of truly staggering feats of incompetence. Choose to fight AC's in the right arena and they will:
A) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter.
B) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall.
C) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall and somehow killing themselves.
D) All of the above
- They have also been witnessed boosting out of the combat area for no reason, giving the player the victory by default. As you can imagine, there are myriad ways of rapidly climbing the arena ranks by exploiting the stupidity of its inhabitants. But the real problems start when From Software, rather than attempting to program better AI, decided to compensate for the computers' stupidity by giving the AI controlled ACs capabilities that far exceed what is possible, or sane, and in Armored Core 2 even equipped the AI with parts that didn't exist.
In the stealth sections of Batman Arkham Asylum, the Mooks rarely ever bother to look up. It's a little bit more frequent in the harder difficulty levels, but still.
- And then there's also this.
  - They also have no periphral vision whatsoever, except for the insane inmates who have a perfect line of sight.
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.
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 they 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.
In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the guards provide a fairly solid challenge without going to brutal measures to catch the player (difficulty dependant of course). However, patrolling guards when not faced with a left turn, will ALWAYS turn to the right including when they are simply turning around. This effectivly means that the player can stand next to a patrolling guard and not be seen, providing he always stands on the guards left side.
In Dead Rising, it's not uncommon for Frank to be escorting a couple of survivors and, even though you've given weapons to as many of them as you can, for them to stand there calling for help while they're being eaten alive by zombies and doing absolutely nothing to defend themselves. This can be especially frustrating if you're handling a survivor that can't carry a weapon or if you yourself are in the middle of being attacked. This is even MORE frustrating if you were attacked while trying to help the idiot and you all die because said idiot will not even push the zombies (all the survivors are capable of pushing).
In Gears Of War, Locusts (the main enemy in the game) are supposed to dynamically move around and take cover in response to your team's position. However, nine times out of ten, they will, in a pitched firefight, leap over the cover to reach a better place, leaving them horribly open for an explosive headshot.
- In the sequel this was fixed, but the AI has even more pitiful failings; enemies will run straight into security lasers, clearly-visible proxy mines, a sentry turret's line of sight, etc.
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.
Dante from Devil May Cry 4 may be a tough-ish boss, but you can get into a shooting match with him until you're close enough to use the Devil Bringer on him. Then do it again and again. Plus, considering the combo videos out there, and not even the very best ones, if he was fighting close to his humanly-possible potential your life would be much, much shorter.

In Super Swing Golf PangYa, lower-tier opponents will make the most blatantly idiotic shots.
A discussion of the AI stupidity in John Madden Football 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 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 Party 8 has King Boo’s Haunted Hideaway, which is a randomly-generated map that changes each time you play it. The AI seems to not plan ahead at path forks, and it will choose a path even if it knows the next fork on that side has one path leading to a dead end and a Whomp blocking the other, and that it doesn't have enough coins to pay the Whomp's toll.
- Basically, when the computer in Mario Party isn't being a cheating bastard, they have an IQ of -8. They will buy items for easy access to the Star, even if the cost of the item puts them below the coins needed for the Star. All the freakin' time.
- Hell, it's possible to win several Mario Party 2 minigames without even doing anything.

Video games for Yu-Gi-Oh! have a particularly poor track record in this area. While some of the games' idiotic moves can be justified by the fact that the AI couldn't possibly know the identity of your facedown cards, and that the kind of analysis that would allow a player to even make the right guesses can be really difficult even for human players, some of the cases are a little more obviously Artificial Stupidity.
- Then you have Mokuba, for whom this trope is invoked intentionally. What a digital dummy!
- 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 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.
- Stardust Accelerator manages to avert this. The game traded the relatively fast pace of the computer to allow it to actually think about what to do. After drawing a card, the computer will take a few seconds to strategize and test all outcomes, like you would do if you had gotten a new card.
- In Dark Duel Stories, the A Is have a bad habit of offering high-ATK monsters as tributes to summon something just as strong or even weaker, example: Offering "Jirai Gumo"(2200ATK/100DEF; it is interesting to note that this is the strongest LV 4 monster in the game, plus he is stripped of his detrimental effect) as a tribute to Tribute Summon "Catapult Turtle" (1000ATK/2000DEF). Might I also add the AI will also tribute monsters which have been equipped with two spell cards without hesitating, so if he powered up his "Tripwire Beast" to 2200ATK/2300DEF and also had Mountain activated, increasing the original ATK/DEF by 30% to a grand total of 2560ATK/2690DEF, it's not unsurprising for the AI to tribute it for a weaker monster such as "Morinphen", a LV 5 monster with poor stats (1550ATK/1300DEF).
  - The AI also likes to use monsters who have lower ATK then DEF to attack, as long as the ATK is at least half the DEF. Sometimes, Yami Yugi will use "Megamorph" (which acts like a universal Equip card, increasing a monster's ATK and DEF by 500) on Mystical Elf just so that he can attack...with 1300 ATK.
Until very recently, this has plagued computerised Go engines (especially when compared with computerised Chess engines), with them being trounced by professional Go players even when given 25 stone advantages... The latest Go AI can win with a 9 stone advantage, and has been stated that it's up to good amateur levels.
- In Go the problem space is much larger. While both go and chess have a finite number of moves per turn, determining the possible moves in chess is a matter of thinking of each piece and seeing where they can land and if it's open, whereas in go it's not a matter of "which of these 32 pieces can move where?" so much as "which of these 300-odd spots should pieces go on?", which doesn't just make calculation slower and more memory intensive, but also makes the heuristics harder to work on, too.
A classic computer game that has gone by many names over the years relies on this trope. In the original version, you had to run from robots, although modern versions have used zombies, vampires, Eldritch Abominations... basically, whatever. Anyway, you and the robots both move one square per turn (like a chess king), and robots will chase you down. You have no weapon, but the robots will attack and annihilate each other before they ever turn on you! Thus, you have to rely on robots' tendency to kill each other before they kill you.
- It's even been done with Daleks.
The Windows program Mission Maker has extremely primitive AI. Make a character 'Seek and Destroy' the player, then get another character between them. The hostile character, instead of moving around, will kill the other character to get to the player.
The classic arcade game Berzerk allows you to make enemies crash into each other to kill each other. Or if you're lucky and clever, into the edges of walls.
Exploiting the Artificial Stupidity of the guards in Lode Runner is very useful, with some levels relying on it. For instance, you can position yourself on a ladder so they climb upwards when you're directly below them.

The Droid Army in the Star Wars prequel may well qualify, possibly even canonically. While droids like R2-D2 are very bright thanks to years of "living" awake without Restraining Bolts for their intelligences, the droids in the army are poor shots, slow to respond, and in the recent Clone Wars animated movie even downright dumb. This is somewhat canonical in that as military droids their AI and hardware is cheaply mass produced and limited in it's potential to learn (very odd considering a PS3/XBox360 have more than enough processing power to beat the crap out of human players), though it may just be a small price to pay to avoid them revolting.

In the first annual Loebner Prize contest to find the most humanlike chatbot, the winner won in part because it could imitate human typing errors. One runner-up also got its high score by pretending to be a paranoid autistic seven-year-old.

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