History ArtificialStupidity / SimulationGames

** "Everything is worth what its buyer will pay for it." Besides, your NPC villagers have no concept of a resource or needs system, they're trading with you out of neighborliness.

** The spinoff ''[[VideoGame/Privateer2TheDarkening Privateer 2]]'' had completely incompetent enemy AI. [[WebVideo/TheSpoonyExperiment Spoony]], in [[http://spoonyexperiment.com/2010/03/25/privateer-2-the-darkening-review/ his review]], parked his ship next to an enemy and waited to see how long his unmoving, unacting ship would take to be killed. After half an hour in which the pirate ''once'' managed to wear down the shields, he gave up entirely.

*** It should be noted, though, that Sims 1 Sims will almost always take the path with less doors to get to their destination, even if the destination is on the other side of a door ''right next to them''.

** And let's not forget the sims who whine about being exhausted, then decide there's no better time for a swim.
** Try giving your sims more than one kitchen (especially on different floors) and watch as they dart between the two in order to prepare a single dish. Alternatively, make the only food preparation area available an outside barbecue, and occasionally the AI will have a sim go for a midnight snack - so, having no other option, they will go have a cookout in the middle of the night.

*** Happily, as of Sims 3, the AI has improved immensely, and Sims are entirely capable of handling the basics of living.
*** Well, to some extent. Give a home with two adults and a child only one bed, and anyone left without a bed will complain at those using them. There is no check for the appropriateness of doing so, so the husband may find his wife and daughter sleeping in the only double bed, and order the WIFE out of it.
*** Oh, and Sims 3 sims will happily sit and eat their dinner on the toilet if there isn't a spare chair. Hey, if you can sit on it, it's fair game, right?
** In both the Sims 2 and 3, sims will often, if left to their own devices, leave babies outside on the ground instead of putting them in a crib.
** In ''The Sims 3'', the in-game story progression can lead to this. Often when switching to a family, you may find the entire family at the beach at 10 AM on a Tuesday, despite the fact that all of them should be at work/school.
** Whenever an object catches on fire, a Sim's typical reaction would be to run around the object frantically until they catch fire themselves, as oppose to running away from the object or attempting to put it out. Trying to cancel the action and getting the Sim to safety is almost futile, because they will simply override it and resume running around the object. ''VideoGame/TheSims4'' finally averts this and as soon as a fire breaks out, Sims will automatically run away from it and retreat to a safe distance.
** ''VideoGame/TheSimsMedieval'' lampshades this in its opening cinematic: "People are ''dumb''." Medieval Sims seem to have some of the same stupid traits as their descendants when it comes to pathfinding (they think a Sim is "in the way" when they're trying to get into the Throne Room, even though the Throne Room's doors are twice the size of a Sim) but at least they never start fires when trying to cook.
* Sims are pretty dumb on the macro level as well, as anyone who's ever played ''VideoGame/SimCity 4'' can attest. The stupidest is definitely pathfinding, where for various reasons Sims always take routes in a manner that tends to create absurd traffic jams, particularly at the city limits. The good news is that there is a mod that fix this. On ''VideoGame/SimCity2013'' case, however the modders were never really able to fix this completely.
* The AI in ''VideoGame/{{Gemfire}}'' sometimes gives 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.

* ''VideoGame/RollerCoasterTycoon'' 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.

* Without going into too much detail, let's just say that in ''VideoGame/{{Creatures}} 2'', the Norns that come with the game are morons. 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", based from the fact that the reward values in the Norn's artificial brain are so screwed up that they'll most likely to be eventually sitting around deliriously happy while starving to death in the middle of a forest fire). 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. The modified Norn "Socrates", designed specifically to remember none of its experience of reward or punishment for its actions, essentially ruled by random instinct, ended up prospering much better than it's default cousins, granting insight that allowed the game to be fixed.
** {{Game Mod}}s 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 [[AttentionDeficitOohShiny something shiny right beyond it.]]
* ''VideoGame/SpaceColony'' has the problem that if a characters shift is over they will ignore the job responsibility, even if that is defending the base from aliens or keeping the air supply running.
* For some reason, the title ''VideoGame/{{Pikmin}}'' sure do ''love'' to drown themselves when you try to cross a bridge with them.

** In Rogue Leader, you also have [[FanNickname Darth Bob the Suicidal TIE Pilot]]. You could be minding your own business and then suddenly BOOM Collision with a TIE fighter out of the blue, and you never saw it coming.
** In Rebel Strike- the third game in the series- enemies tend to fly directly head-on into you to attack you; often willingly placing themselves into your crosshairs. This was likely done to compensate after the AI in Rogue Leader damn near had magic aiming powers and could barely be shaken.
* The ancient ''[[Franchise/StarTrek Star Fleet Battles]]'' simulator ''BEGIN2'' 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 ''Franchise/StarTrek 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 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 "Auto-Build" option on colonies, while useful, often results in your 1 population, mineral poor colony attempting to build the most expensive building (the Star Fortress), which take 50+ turns, before industrial buildings that will help other things build faster.

* The ants in ''VideoGame/{{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 [[strike: log]] drinking straw. In later levels, FakeDifficulty 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 ''VideoGame/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 [[WaveMotionGun 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.

** "Everything is worth what it's buyer will pay for it." Besides, your NPC villagers have no concept of a resource or needs system, they're trading with you out of neighborliness.

* This is the biggest complain people have had about ''VideoGame/FromDust'', where the villagers' pathfinding AI can be a pain in the ass to manage. Most of the time, even the slightest obstacle will cause them to either take a massive detour, or [[MostAnnoyingSound start begging you for help]] while they stand still in bewilderment. Walking straight into streams of lava doesn't help either.
* ''VideoGame/{{Aerobiz}}'': The AI would continue to purchase small counts of outdated, inefficient airliners even after newer, cheaper and more efficient planes are made available. would regularly place the largest, most inefficient airliners in its fleet on low density routes and then leave them there despite losing big bucks and its competition (you) opening the same route with a small, high efficiency airliner and turning a profit.
* ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}'': It was less stupidity of the pilot and more stupidity of the space traffic controller/random event engine, but passenger shuttles would periodically launch from space stations regardless of surrounding traffic. Even if that traffic was you, less than a second away from docking (and yes, incoming and outgoing traffic used the same lane). While the collision wouldn't destroy your ship unless it was already damaged, it ''would'' destroy the shuttle--and hit ''you'' with a massive bounty for criminal activity, to be collected the instant you left the station.

* ''VideoGame/XWing'' had one mission where you were in an A-Wing and charged with immobilizing a frigate. Since your A-Wing doesn't have ion cannons, you had a group of Y-Wings with you. Not only were these Y-Wings piloted by complete schmucks in the area of dogfighting-- they weren't even smart enough to realize that their ion cannons depleted the frigate's shields at a slower rate than their blasters. Since the frigate is CONSTRUCTED FOR STARFIGHTER DEFENSE, this mission usually involved telling your "wingmen" to stand off outside 6 klicks while you soloed and 1) Defeated the entire 36 fighter TIE wing the frigate carried, and 2) Reduced the frigate's shields to zero by flying in and blasting like hell and then bolting out of turbolaser range again and again. This was made even stupider (and more frustrating) by the knowledge that the Y-Wings carried about 30 proton torpedoes-- if they'd used THOSE the frigate's shields would have been reduced by 95%. Grrr!

* In ''VideoGame/TIEFighter'', there's a mission where your TIE Bomber must locate containers with construction materials. The Rebels zip-in and attack both you and the containers. However, the rebels jumping in is triggered by you scanning one specific container, which comes last in the Targeting Computer's list. This can work two ways: either you scan the containers out of order and get ambushed early (leading to swift mission failure) or you wait to scan the container until all of the others have been picked up- so you're free to focus exclusively on the rebels.
** The final level of Battle 7 has you rescuing [[spoiler:Emperor Palpatine]] from an enemy escort shuttle, which you must disable. Sometimes- though rarely- your wingmen will attack this shuttle and fail you the mission- you have to order them to ignore the shuttle.

* Playing the Combat Simulator in ''VideoGame/XWingAlliance'' can be a nightmare. When you destroy an enemy ship, it will immediately respawn... [[RammingAlwaysWorks and smack right into you]]. If you flown an unshielded ship, you're good as dead and your score will take a huge drop. Moral of the story, disable respawning.
* In all ''VideoGame/MechWarrior'' simulation games this is the only reason the player can win most matches that aren't against [[SuicidalOverconfidence much weaker opponents]]. While you do strategic attacks against specific parts of enemy Mechs to reduce their threat rating in the shortest amount of time and consuming the least heat possible, they'll randomly spray you with often-poorly-chosen weapons at a much slower rate of fire than their heatsinks should allow. This was most obvious in ''[=MechWarrior=] 2'', where enemies would spend most of their time walking about while looking at you and only occasionally letting a couple shots loose; fortunately, later games in the series have made it less obvious (though still difficult to ignore).

* 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 AnnoyingArrows, is very deadly indeed.

** In situations like this, it's recommended you simply [[ShootTheDog lock them in their rooms and leave them to starve.]] It's not pleasant, but it gets the job done.

* 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...
** Which is why it is a good idea to use blind dwarfs as operator for siege weapons.
* 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. (Fixed, at least for the most part.)

** In previous versions a (now resolved) bug could result in mayors ordering themselves beaten for failing to satisfy their own mandates.
* In an example of IfYouDieICallYourStuff taken to the extreme, the infamous ''{{LetsPlay/Boatmurdered}}'' LetsPlay features dwarves rushing to loot the possessions of their fallen comrades ''in the middle of an elephant invasion'' and get trampled to death, only for additional dwarves to rush for their loot...(Arguably fixed, as players can set objects of dead dwarves to be automatically forbidden when they die.)
** Dwarves have been known to steal the clothes from a comrade who burned to death. While said clothes are still on fire. I lost a whole fortress to that one.(Again, arguably fixed.)
** "[[IncendiaryExponent Being on fire sure makes you thirsty for a good beer]]."

* Since the ability to target specific body parts was implemented there have been many cases of units fruitlessly punching, kicking, or biting their enemy instead of using their weapons because they randomly get some moves (involving a random kind of attack and body part) very high chances of connecting without factoring in if it could even do any damage.

** It counts as subversion as it is an implemented, deliberate stupidity. However, dwarves--even with no medical experience--should be able to tell that A) their lungs were not in immediate medical need, B) they just had a cut that need patching, and C) lungs are vital for patient survival. That still goes too far, even for inexperience.
* Dwarf tries to "attend meeting" with siege operator, stands on ballista set to "fire at will," gets injured

* Building destroyers will always seek out buildings to topple above all else. It doesn't matter if there's twenty steel-clad dwarves chopping away at their limbs. It doesn't matter if there's a giant gauntlet of foes they could be taking swings at. It doesn't matter if they're undercover and should be acting friendly and not commit any hostilities. It doesn't matter if they're ''actually friendly'' and the structures they want to demolish belong to an ally or even ''their own civilization''. They will not fight the compulsion to knock everything down. The Building Destroyer tags should therefore be handled carefully, because intelligent creatures that can join forts and have them will bring no end of chaos until you tire out and murder them.

* Your mech wingmates in SteelBattalion can barely navigate the map, though, when they manage to keep up with you, they can be useful cannon fodder.

* Vampires will try and frame another dwarf for the death of someone they just drained dry. Problem is, their parameters for picking someone to take the rap are a little odd, ending with them accusing babies or even livestock of murder. (Fixed.)

** ''VideoGame/EliteDangerous'': When it comes to avoiding collisions, the AI tends to be less than stellar, which can generally lead to [[HilarityEnsues lulz]] (or a free kill, since death by {{ramming|AlwaysWorks}} doesn't incur a bounty on the killer) in most cases. The patch notes for version 1.1 also noted fixes concerning AsteroidMiners mining nothing.

* In all ''MechWarrior'' simulation games this is the only reason the player can win most matches that aren't against [[SuicidalOverconfidence much weaker opponents]]. While you do strategic attacks against specific parts of enemy Mechs to reduce their threat rating in the shortest amount of time and consuming the least heat possible, they'll randomly spray you with often-poorly-chosen weapons at a much slower rate of fire than their heatsinks should allow. This was most obvious in ''MechWarrior 2'', where enemies would spend most of their time walking about while looking at you and only occasionally letting a couple shots loose; fortunately, later games in the series have made it less obvious (though still difficult to ignore).

* And talking of Chris Sawyer... the AI in ''TransportTycoon'' was legendarily incompetent at the art of building railroads, frequently levelling entire mountain ranges ([[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard and suffering no ill effects]]), and often spiralling stations several times over while trying to get the ends of a line to meet up. Reportedly, this was due to a compromise between processing time and AI lookahead. Having the AI build from both ends at once, effectively meaning both are aiming for an unpredictably moving target, probably didn't help either.
** Fixed in Open TTD (fan made sequel)

* In an example of IfYouDieICallYourStuff taken to the extreme, the infamous ''{{Boatmurdered}}'' LetsPlay features dwarves rushing to loot the possessions of their fallen comrades ''in the middle of an elephant invasion'' and get trampled to death, only for additional dwarves to rush for their loot...(Arguably fixed, as players can set objects of dead dwarves to be automatically forbidden when they die.)

* Prior to the Adventure Mode overhaul, you could receive quests to slaughter demons who had risen from the depths of the Earth and taken control of a civilization. Your quest-giver's civilization, usually. Doing the deed would make said civilization your enemy, including the one who had given you the quest in the first place. One better, the involvement of your companions or the demon attacking other peasants may well start a "loyalty cascade" where everyone starts killing everyone for killing anyone.

* [[http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=34188.0 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."

** The spinoff ''Privateer 2'' had completely incompetent enemy AI. [[WebVideo/TheSpoonyExperiment Spoony]], in [[http://spoonyexperiment.com/2010/03/25/privateer-2-the-darkening-review/ his review]], parked his ship next to an enemy and waited to see how long his unmoving, unacting ship would take to be killed. After half an hour in which the pirate ''once'' managed to wear down the shields, he gave up entirely.

** Playing the Combat Simulator in ''VideoGame/XWingAlliance'' can be a nightmare. When you destroy an enemy ship, it will immediately respawn... [[RammingAlwaysWorks and smack right into you]]. If you flown an unshielded ship, you're good as dead and your score will take a huge drop. Moral of the story, disable respawning.

* This is the biggest complain people have had about ''FromDust'', where the villagers' pathfinding AI can be a pain in the ass to manage. Most of the time, even the slightest obstacle will cause them to either take a massive detour, or [[MostAnnoyingSound start begging you for help]] while they stand still in bewilderment. Walking straight into streams of lava doesn't help either.

* Without going into too much detail, let's just say that in ''{{Creatures}} 2'', the Norns that come with the game are morons. 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", based from the fact that the reward values in the Norn's artificial brain are so screwed up that they'll most likely to be eventually sitting around deliriously happy while starving to death in the middle of a forest fire). 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. The modified Norn "Socrates", designed specifically to remember none of its experience of reward or punishment for its actions, essentially ruled by random instinct, ended up prospering much better than it's default cousins, granting insight that allowed the game to be fixed.

** It's noted that without before Olimar came to the planet, the Pikmin were basically a sentient food supply for the herbivorous creatures inhabiting the planet, and that Olimar's efforts in organizing them have helped them to survive once Olimar is gone. In other words, the game [[JustifiedTrope justifies]] the stupidity, as the Pikmin were literally a walking food supply before Olimar came around.

* ''StarWars: [[ComicBook/XWingSeries 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, [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard are cheating bastards]].