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A.I. Breaker

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I'm gonna live and let you die, bitch, 'cause I don't need you!
I think I'll just crouch down over here and stab your knees, dude!
Stabby stab stab, how you like that shit?
I think I'll call you Error, 'cause you're fucking useless!
I'll bet your knees are more sore than a Flint-town whore
And when I'm finished with you, well, maybe I'll score!

An action or a sequence of actions that exploits flaws in the game's artificial intelligence.

Either the programmers didn't consider the possibility of the player doing this, couldn't come up with an effective counter, or there's a bug in the system that makes it perform in ways not intended. Ultimately, even if the Video Game A.I. does always respond in the "best possible" way to an action, it may still become an A.I. Breaker by making the opponent(s) too predictable.

Often the only way to beat a Perfect Play A.I. or SNK Boss, or any computer player that is overly skilled or cheap. Easily leads to Gameplay Derailment or, in some cases, Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing. Not to be confused with Logic Bomb.

If you can break the A.I. at higher difficulties because of a change in mechanics that can be exploited in an unintended way, then it leads to a case of Non-Indicative Difficulty.

Compare Cheese Strategy.


Examples

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    Action Adventure 
  • Older Than the NES with Adventure on the Atari 2600. The bat that steals your items in some game modes can be captured and then released in an empty castle with whatever it is holding at the time. Sometimes it will immediately make a break for the door, but often it will start flying through the rooms of the castle in search of another item to steal. Since the bat will never change direction unless it sees another item it will never attempt to leave. This works even in the Gold castle, which only has one room.
  • Banjo-Tooie: Klungo learns to lead your direction by the second time you fight him, but he only leads based on your speed and direction. Running circles in place will cause him to miss with his thrown potions by a mile.
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night:
    • The Invert ability, which flips the whole world and everything in it except for you upside down, completely and utterly destroys the A.I. of a number of enemies as it seems most of them simply weren't programmed to account for you being up on the roof like that, allowing you to just run past a number of annoying encounters. It even works on a number of bosses, most notably the Demon Carpenter, being so effective that it reduces him from a savage fight for survival to a complete joke who can't even hit you and gives free access to one of the most effective shards in the game and a buttload of experience.
    • Though not to the same level as Invert, the Bunnymorphosis soul that allows you to transform into one of the Lili minor enemies and utilize their entire moveset is rather broken when mastered because practically none of the enemies have any means at all to counter its aerial kicking attacks and will continue to behave as if Miriam were using her standard abilities. Coupled with the ability's surprising boost to attack power, it's the easiest way to utterly cheese Valefar.
  • Castlevania examples:
    • Dracula in Order of Ecclesia will abort whatever attack he's using and raise a wall of flame if you try to use the flight glyph Volaticus to avoid his attacks. This attack can be dodged if you move towards him while flying, so you can make him abort all his much more annoying regular attacks.
    • While most people consider Julius Belmont of Aria of Sorrow to be That One Boss, you can easily beat him by double jumping and kicking him in the head repeatedly if you took the time to get the air kick ability soul from the Kicker Skeleton in the same area. This works on Richter in Portrait of Ruin too — the only moves that would hit you are well telegraphed. Paranoia's first form in Dawn of Sorrow breaks if the player's directly above him, allowing you to bounce up and down on his head while he spins helplessly in place. Dead Crusaders from the same game will not even try to block the kick, allowing you to defeat them easily using the same technique.
    • Similarly, Julius Belmont is also incredibly vulnerable to the handgun weapon for this reason: he simply has no means to retaliate against attacks with that much range because he was never programmed with any kind of tactic to deal with it. It'll take a while, but you can just keep running away shooting while he helplessly chases you whipping at nothing, like a vampire-themed Benny Hill skit.
    • Astarte in Harmony of Despair (and possibly in her original game, Portrait of Ruin) will attack at whatever location you were last at, but thanks to the overall slowness of some of her attacks, the fact that she walks around slowly between attacks, and the other fact that she's human-sized and thus easily jumped over, you can just jump over any of her attacks, stand still until she finishes, jump over her again, and watch her slowly march where you were and attack thin air. You can easily have her facing the wrong way for most of the battle, making her relatively easy to kill since she has no attacks that hit behind her besides her That One Attack Temptation. However, this does tend to bite you in the ass in multiplayer, since there is more than 1 target for her to attack and you can't tell who she's aiming for unless the entire team manages to stay on one side of her.
    • Speaking of Portrait of Ruin, the otherwise powerful Dullahan becomes a joke if you can get one character on each side of him — he'll keep turning from one to the other endlessly. It's hard to set this up, but worth it on the game's higher-difficulty modes.
    • In addition, Dracula's first form in Curse of Darkness can be caught in an infinite combo through use of the weapon Hien. By repeating the weapon's first attack over and over, you can end the battle before he does anything. It stops you from stealing from him, but that form doesn't have anything important anyway.
    • In Circle of the Moon, there's the late game fight against Hugh, another vampire hunter. He has a wide range of attacks which mirror your own, but he'll always attempt a simple sword slash if you stand close enough. So he can be easily defeated by jumping in and out of his sword range and attacking when you land.
  • In Iji, there's multiple examples:
    • Komato Sentinel Proxima's A.I. has a few bugs in it, making it possible to trap it into a non-attacking infinite loop. The creator actually pointed this out in a Youtube video of how to beat it. It may have been intentional, given that Proxima is a robot in-game.
    • The A.I. of a normally overpowered Komato Annihilator can be exploited to have it destroy itself with its enormous firepower in certain areas. If Iji jumps up onto a wall that the Annihilator cannot reach or break down and stays in front of the Annihilator, the A.I.'s typical reaction would be to fire the Shocksplinter or Splintergun at Iji. This causes the weapon's explosions to rebound against the wall and back onto the Annihilator, dealing it Splash Damage. Have the A.I. repeat this several times trying to damage Iji, and eventually it will explode upon running out of health.
  • King's Quest: Mask of Eternity:
    • If you shoot at the skeleton archers from a very large distance, they will never shoot back. It's not just that you're outside their range of fire — it will never occur to them to move closer so that they can shoot you. It is even more idiotic concerning the fact that they will shout at you, but won't shoot.
    • In the Underground Realm of the Gnomes, you can shoot the immobile rock demons from around a corner if you're very careful. If you stand just right, the stones they throw at you will crash against the wall.
  • The Legend of Zelda examples:
    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link:
      • Enemies who chase Link actually read your controller inputs, making it difficult to hop over them as they'll turn around mid-jump and you'll land on them. However, when Link jumps forward he maintains the momentum even if you take your finger off the direction pad. If you get the timing right, you can jump over enemies effortlessly and just keep running, since they'll keep going in the opposite direction until you hit the d-pad again to keep moving.
      • The first Blue Fokka on the "correct" route through the Great Palace has an A.I. hiccup where, by standing a pillar of four blocks (the room it appears in just so happens to make this very easy), ducking, and stabbing as he jumps up to try and hit you, you'll smack him in the head and leave him to keep trying, making it very easy to dispatch it. The second one, however, does not show up in a room where this is possible.
      • Most of the tougher enemies, like Iron Knuckles and Fokkas, are simply unable to defend against a jumping crouch stab. Because the game reads your inputs, it's up to RNG if an enemy will block your attack. However, if you duck, then jump and attack, the game reads your input as ducking and blocks low even though you're attacking high by jumping. And if the RNG says that the enemy should "miss" the block and block high, then timing your attack properly means that your sword will bounce off the high shield and still be extended to hit low as you land. The A.I. simply does not know how to counter this, and realistically can't. Learning how to pull off a jumping crouch stab is easy, but mastering it means you'll never miss an attack against what are generally the most frustrating enemies in the game.
      • The end boss, Link's Shadow, is among the hardest bosses in the NES era... unless you stand on the far left, duck, and just sit there stabbing over and over. The boss's A.I. will make it repeatedly walk right into your sword, leading to an easy victory. Most ROM hacks add lava or some other deadly hazard on the leftmost tile to disallow this. Incidentally, the original FDS version did not have this; it was caused by an RNG bug common in FDS to NES ports.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The boss of the seventh dungeon is normally very difficult, but if you enter the fight with the L-2 sword and either a Piece of Power or the Red Tunic (in DX), you can kill it while it's in its (fairly easy) first phase, because it doesn't enter the (much more difficult) second phase until it's been hit three times — and with the powered-up L-2 sword, three times is all you need. The Fire Rod from the eighth dungeon (which can be reached early via a specific invincibility trick, or by grabbing the Mirror Shield from the seventh dungeon, then exiting) will also end the battle in the first phase.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The Water Temple may be a difficult dungeon, but both its bosses are extremely vulnerable to specific tactics:
      • Dark Link can't handle the Broken Giant's Knife, as he defends against it as if it were the full unbroken blade. Just hold forward and thrust, and you'll absolutely murder Dark Link in no time. Biggoron's Sword is just as effective, since it's too large for him to block or deflect. Failing this, if you have one of the earlier releases of the game (later versions have him run out of range when you cast it), you can bring Din's Fire and a couple green potions, which he also can't defend against, to deal with him effortlessly. He doesn't like the Megaton Hammer either.
      • Morpha can be easily beaten by simply standing in a corner between the wall spikes, and waiting for it to reach out to attack you. Turns out it just barely misses, with enough room to shoot your Longshot at the nucleus inside it, trap it in the corner, and hack away until the boss is dead.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask gives us Igos Du Ikana, a strong contender for one of the trickiest bosses in the series' entire run. That said, you can land a guaranteed hit on him with the bow and arrow by letting him draw close and then stepping into a beam of light so he runs away and leaves his back completely exposed. By repeating this (and running your fool ass off when his head comes off), you can take him down without him even getting the opportunity to swing his sword.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has the optional Dark Link fights of varying level. At high levels, Dark Link gets close to perfect play, but can't handle the boomerang's return trip.
  • Metroid examples:
    • Super Metroid: If you force the Golden Torizo against the wall of the room you fight it in and move close enough to it, then it will stay in place and all of its attacks will miss you.
    • In Metroid Fusion, any chase sequences with the SA-X can be turned into a study of how poorly programmed the game actually is simply by hiding in a Morph Ball passage and watching the SA-X jump around, clearly confused at how to respond to this.
    • In Metroid Prime, Elite Pirates have to face you straight-on once before they start attacking. If you strafe around them, they'll just keep turning, making them easy to kill. (Just don't bump into anything or try to change direction.) This also works on the Phazon Elite and even on Omega Pirate, though in his case it's only possible for the first armored phase.
    • In Metroid: Zero Mission, several bosses could have been serious trouble in low-percent runs if their A.I. hadn't been cracked wide open. You can safely stand under Ridley forever (just don't rapidfire), Mother Brain's own ledge is the perfect hiding place, the Chozo Test won't use its better attack if you never stop moving, and the Black Pirates can be lured to a spot where you can pick them off at your leisure.
    • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption:
      • The Screw Attack will kill Gandrayda in 6 hits. Hilarious if you let her grab you, because when she disengages, she is at the perfect Screw Attack distance.
      • Omega Ridley is programmed to follow a set pattern with his attacks, but he is also programmed to drop whatever he is doing and jump to the side should you try to attack him with the Screw Attack. Players can exploit this behavior by initiating the Screw Attack when Omega Ridley is charging up a powerful, time-consuming, or hard-to-dodge attack, forcing the A.I. to swap it for an easily dodged Ground Pound.
  • In the NES Licensed Game version of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the duel scenes became laughably easy when you realized that you could stand next to a table and your opponent would swing over your head while repeatedly walking directly into your blade. Sadly not every duel has tables... but the ones that don't have rocks, which are harder to use, but serve the same purpose if you can get in the right position. Ironically, this makes the duel with Little John, about a third of the way into the game, the hardest, because he fights you on a log with no exploitable terrain.
  • In the original Tomb Raider I, non-human enemies all have three behaviors: wandering around which they do when Lara is out of their reach, attacking Lara when she's in reach, and panicking (sprinting around all their accessable areas) when Lara is hitting them with gunfire and she's out of reach. Human enemies are coded to return fire when you are shooting them, with the logic that if they're in your line of sight you must be in theirs, while there are scenarios where an enemy in Lara's line of sight actually can't return fire. While most enemies are easier to take down conventionally, this can be abused to take out Demonic Spiders:
    • Larson in the first encounter can be taken out pretty easily if you run past him, hop over the rocks that block the path that leads to where the T-Rex would be, and stand behind it. Then you can just keep hopping on the spot holding the fire button, landing one or two hits each time you jump, while he is unable to counter-attack — he just doesn't have enough time to aim and fire during the brief window when you're visible, while Lara does, and he lacks the ability to get over the rocks and come after you.
    • The Cowboy can be taken out in a similar fashion if you use the large block you pull out of the way as cover. Run into the room to aggro him and then retreat and climb onto the block. When he comes down the corridor he won't be able to hit you thanks to the low ceiling blocking his line of sight, while you are inexplicably able to hit him: since the game thinks he should be able to hit you, he'll stand there like an arsehole shooting the ceiling while you just stand there draining his health.
    • The Skateboard Kid can be taken down effortlessly if you find the secret in his boss room (look for a pool of water), since it takes you out through a narrow doorway that's up above the arena. Because he moves around so fast he can only hit you when he happens to come down the one path of the boss room that comes directly toward you (and you can just step back to avoid this): since he can't stop moving, every time he rides by in any other direction he can't zero in and land a hit before moving out of range thanks to the narrow doorway, while the rest of the time you're just holding the fire button casually draining his health as he passes you.
    • Doorways are your best friend when fighting Flying Mutants if you get the timing right. Stand in the doorway and fire on it until it flies toward you, then back up far enough away (about three hops) and stop firing. The mutant will reach the wall above the doorway, enter it's wander behavior, and begin flying a loop around its room away from the door. Then you just have to run to the doorway and open fire again. The timing's a little finicky, but you'll get a lot of practice and mileage out of it in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
    • A patient player with a good sense of timing can utterly cheese the Final Boss by running close to the lower-right corner, firing on it with your weapon of choice (the shotgun's not quick enough for this), and holstering the weapon and hopping off the side to hang on the ledge when the beast reaches the halfway point. With Lara off of its platform it enters its wander phase which makes it turn around, move away, and pound its fists if Lara is close enough. Climb up, open fire, and repeat when it reaches the halfway point again. Ideally you don't want it to get close enough to pound its fists.
  • The Final Boss of The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang can be manipulated into getting stuck at the side of the throne on the top of the arena while the player stands on the other side of the throne throwing boomerang hats and easily dodging his very powerful attacks.

    Action Game 
  • A.I. units in the online game Bearbarians tend to jump up in fairly similar locations each time. By taking the enemy flag but not dropping it off, picking this point to defend, and attacking whenever you see an opponent jumping up, you can stack up massive amounts of bonus damage due to the combo rules, enabling you to carve through hundreds of opponents with almost ridiculous ease before you get bored, reach the level-up you were aiming for, or see your left hand drop off. Your allies can't take the flag off you, and will be free to deal with any opponent to evade your brutal 1000+ raw damage swings.
  • Dante in Devil May Cry 4 is That One Boss for a lot of players and is considered a Perfect Play A.I.. One of the reasons for this is if you try to shoot him, he will knock your bullet away with a bullet of his own. However, while he's shooting your bullets, he's vulnerable to attack. Get him into a shooting match and you can make him eat your Devil Bringer, even on the highest difficulty.
    • You can also jump on top of the altar in the room. He'll repeatedly walk right up to it and try to jump to the top, letting you just spam Devil Bringer over and over as he repeatedly gets back up and jumps right back into your attack. He won't land a single hit on you.
    • For all his perfect reaction time and judgement while on the defensive, Dante also turns out to have some pretty horrible judgement about the best ways to attack. The computer is NOT actually a cheating bastard this time, and Dante has the same recovery frame animations that a player has when controlling him. Therefore, an easy way to beat this otherwise nightmarish enemy is to simply hover around the very edge of his attack range, coaxing him into a combo that he will almost certainly miss, and then retaliating with a a combo of your own just as his is winding down. It seems obvious, until you realize that DMC4 is usually a game that is heavily, heavily biased towards an incredibly aggressive playstyle.
  • The Final Boss of Fester's Quest can be completely foiled by merely standing in the bottom right corner. Its cannons can't reach you, and its other shot will go far too wide and simply fling itself off screen, allowing you to tear it to pieces using Seeker Missiles with zero retaliation.
  • Tiki in Fire Emblem Warriors, and not in a good way. Her entire shtick is using Awakening to turn into a much more powerful dragon form; without it, she's a rather weak physical unit soft-countered by basically everything. The A.I. never uses Awakening, or even accumulates charge, so if the player switches away from controlling her she's only going to move around and lose health, and deploying her in an A.I.-only slot is an outright liability since she does nothing an Archer couldn't do better. The only perk is that all this applies when she's an A.I.-controlled enemy unit too.
  • Ghostbusters: The Video Game has a particularly frustrating scene where you must use your capture stream to throw possessed stone angel statues into a magical gate. This is a very difficult task, as the angels are fast and have a powerful attack, while the capture stream slam is very hard to aim well. But, if you stand right in front of the gate and strafe left and right, the angels will crash into it while trying to charge you and complete it for you.
  • In Green's second fight in Gunstar Super Heroes, by shooting him while he's on the ground, and then turning around and shooting him when he tries to dash behind you, it's very easy to get him stuck in an endless loop of dashes if you can get the timing down just right.
  • Ardeth Bay is an early boss in The Mummy Returns for Imhotep, though he's unbeatable and you simply need to distract him long enough to let the train start rolling out of Cairo. Turns out Imhotep can perform front kicks faster than Bay can recover from the impact, allowing the player to simply spam kick him in the face until he's backed into a corner and completely harmless.
  • In Strider for the NES, the final boss jumps around and kills you pretty easily, but if you charge up a plasma arrow, he'll just stand around and wait patiently until you fire it at him.

    Action RPG 
  • In the second Gothic game, it is possible to reach the besieged fortress at a level too low to fight the hordes of orcs camped around it. These can and will eviscerate the nameless hero in a handful of hits. However, there is an Invisible Wall at the start of the log leading up into the fortress which blocks enemies only, presumably to prevent the NPCs from being attacked. Neither the orcs nor other monsters realize the existence of this fence and it is possible to cluster the entire population of the map at the foot of the log for some easy Level Grinding while The Hero remains just out of sword's reach.
  • In Grim Dawn, using a combination of camera rotations and zooming can confuse the A.I. This became a favorite exploit in the Shattered Realms infinite dungeon where the player face multiple bosses at once. Properly done, this will lure one boss at a time, making the fight less difficult. This exploit will obviously be patched.
  • The Wii-version of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 has all the enemies, including the boss, home in on the character you're controlling. Considering that you can block infinitely, and that your allies will do some damage while you block, you can beat some of the bosses by taping down the block button and waiting for a while (though it does take a while to do that).
  • Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon has this gem. ProtoMan's A.I. insists on doing almost nothing but spamming Fighter Sword, but only from the center-right row. An Area Grab makes him entirely useless in combat.
    "How. How does this happen. 3 fuckups for somehow screwing up an A.I. that's essentially been the same for the past 3 games without something like this going wrong."
  • The Souls series and its spinoffs/successors (Demon's Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, and Creator-Driven Successor Bloodborne) have plenty of these blind spots in the artificial intelligence that negate some of the more challenging aspects (and there are plenty of challenging aspects in these games).
    • The A.I. really doesn't know what to do against archers at long range. As long as you are outside of an enemy's "aggro range" you can pepper it with arrows until it dies... and the enemy will never move, and never attack, unless they possess ranged attacks of their own. Normally mitigated by the fact that the "aggro range" is normally larger than the effective range of a bow, this can be mitigated by rings that either make your character harder to detect (in Demon's Souls) or increase your bow's effective range (in Dark Souls). The A.I. also has somewhat bad pathfinding over these ranges, so even if your character is in aggro range, the enemy that you hit is just as likely to run off a cliff or get stuck on the terrain as he is to reach you. Of course, when the player is hit with arrows sometimes they'll freak out and run off a cliff too while trying to figure out where it's coming from and roll out of the way, so it's pretty balanced.
    • Similarly, it's entirely possible — albeit very difficult — to defeat certain bosses without even going through the fog gates. Since they're not considered "activated", the bosses will just stand there while you pepper them until they die.
    • Enemies throughout the Souls games, particularly larger ones, often have serious issues with doorways. Luring them into narrow halls or doors can get them stuck and form traffic jams while they helplessly go through their attack animations, allowing players to pick them off at leisure. This can be an exceedingly helpful tactic to thin out dangerous areas or pick off Demonic Spiders.
    • Bloodborne has an in-game version of this trope with Shaman Bone Blades, which cause the enemy A.I. to become hostile to each other and attack other enemies around them. Except that this also works on boss A.I. too, leading to some... very interesting effects on some fights.

    Beat 'Em Up 
  • The A.I. in Golden Axe doesn't take holes in the floor into account, which means it is easy to trick any computer opponent from walking or jumping into the game's many Bottomless Pits.
  • Streets of Rage:
    • The Dual Boss at the fifth level (Onihime & Yasha/Mona & Lisa) is Nintendo Hard, but a flaw in their A.I. makes them extremely easy. Turning your back towards them and performing a back attack when one of the twins gets close to you never fails because the twins' A.I. is programmed to always follow you. They will never deviate from their path, allowing you to constantly spam your back attack without taking a single hit.
    • When the twins return for the Boss Rush right before the final boss, they'll jump away from any attack you throw at them, except your back attack — they prioritize attempting to suplex your character from behind. Since this attack knocks them over, they will get stuck in a pattern quickly.
  • In the NES version of River City Ransom, platforms in general. In many areas, there were platforms that Alex and Ryan could jump on top of (walls, vending machines, railings) that the computer simply couldn't handle at all. All a player would need to do would be to jump on top of them, and the computer would simply cluster right below the player. All a player would have to do is hop down, attack once or twice, then get back up. Repeat until the whole gang was cleared from the screen. The gangs in the GBA version finally learned how to jump themselves.

    Card Battle Game 
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • In some of the games that use different rules rather than being an accurate representation of the card game, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories and Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, an opponent will always attack a monster you set face down. Even if you have a trap down to catch their attack. Even if your monster has an instant-death type advantage over the opponent's monster. In most cases, they'll even flip their own cards face up in order to do so, regardless of if they are decent attackers or not.
    • Card game-sim A.I.s have countless weaknesses of their own — most importantly, they will continue to use their A.I.-hardcoded strategy, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. For instance, Zombie decks are based on sending lots of Zombies to the Graveyard and then reviving them, and they'll continue to do this even if you have Macro Cosmos (which banishes monsters sent to the Graveyard and renders them unusable).

    Eastern RPG 
  • In The 7th Saga, whenever you fight Lejes he will prioritize lowering your defense over any other action. Simply keep restoring it with the Star Rune or a defence spell/item, wait for him to miss his spell, then attack.
  • There's a Superboss in Chrono Cross who is, if you fight him normally, incredibly hard. He has a bunch of extremely powerful Black-element attacks, and any time you try to use a spell or skill against him, he immediately counters with an opposite-element reaction. The problem? Countering uses his turn. He becomes pathetically easy once you realize that all you have to do is have one person equip the armor that absorbs Black and spam White spells, and the other two spam Red: he'll keep blasting the first one with a devastating Black-element attack which now heals them, and hitting the other two with a debuff that reduces their evasion rate but doesn't actually cause any damage. This is particularly handy because it lets you get Serge's Infinity -1 Sword way before you're supposed to.
  • Disgaea:
    • At least in the DS port of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, there is a simple, if time-consuming method to defeat some monsters, especially low movement ones like the zombie king in the Cave of Ordeals. If you end your turn with all of your units out of reach from most melee-based enemies, they'll sit there doing nothing. One powerful spear technique, Avalanche, deals a lot of damage and then sends you flying backwards quite a long way. You can then set up a chain throw to clear the spearman and everyone else out of there. So long as the monster behaves like this, you can run in and Avalanche to escape as long as you like, and the monster will be none the wiser. This doesn't always work because some monsters behave differently — it's probably not going to work on a fast monster, but it's really handy when it does, allowing you to handily defeat enemies you otherwise couldn't without Level Grinding.
    • In Disgaea 2, you can block enemy units with Geo-Symbols, because they never attack them. It is especially useful in the Item World, and even more when you use it against pirates, who can have levels around five or six times those of your best units. With this strategy, you can basically throw all you have at them, while they stay in the same spot, allowing you to kill them, slowly but surely, and even better: safely.
    • Disgaea 5 can repeat the above strategy with Item Symbols, which are normally destroyed by the player to charge the Bonus Gauge. Through careful lifting and throwing, you can trap pirates and even Proto Darkdeath away from the party. (Proto Darkdeath is smart enough to use his ranged attacks and can destroy some of the symbols if you're close enough; ironically this makes his Giant variant somewhat easier to deal with, as despite its stats and Evilities it's in a permanent Giant status, locking off his usual moves in favor of Giant Press, an AoE skill that hits for only two squares around him.)
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy V:
      • The boss Catastrophe uses earthquake attacks against your party, and as such is programmed to cast the Float-negating spell Gravity 100 if any of your party members are floating. But Gravity 100 can be reflected; cast Float on a single party member and equip him with a Reflect Ring before the fight starts and he will simply cast Gravity 100 turn after turn, making him harmless.
      • The boss in the same room as Catastrophe, Azulmagia, acts like a Blue Mage in that he will "learn" any blue magic that you hit him with and attempt to use it on you. Even if the spell would be completely useless, like L3 Flare (which he is able to be hit by) against a team with none eligible for L3 Flare. Even if the attack is Selfdestruct.
      • A few bosses can have their scripts broken by Berserking them (a common usage is to Berserk Omniscient to prevent his Reset counter and final Flare attacknote ). This was even worse in the SNES version where the Berserk from the Blessed Kiss mix would always affect the target, and thus led to such hilarity as completely skipping Neo Exdeath by berserking the tree form.
    • Final Fantasy VIII: In the first fight against Edea you can summon Carbuncle (who casts Reflect on your entire party), and Edea will spend her next three turns casting Dispel on each of your party members to remove their Reflect. This gives you plenty of time to summon Carbuncle again and have your other two characters attack. Repeat until you win. Note, however, that she wises up to this tactic in the second battle.
    • Final Fantasy X:
      • If you have a high-speed player in the Blitzball minigame (an overleveled Brother works pretty well, because high Passing and Endurance really help), you can simply pass them the ball, then have them swim around the sphere pool accumulating a sort of comet's tail made of enemy players who are following their preprogrammed instructions to go for anyone with the ball who gets too close. Once the enemy team is irreparably out of position, you then pass the ball to one of your strikers and have them go for the now very lonely goalie.
      • Sometimes you can sit behind your own goalie with the ball, and the enemy A.I. will never come to attack, letting you while you simply wait out the clock and win once you have even a single point lead. It doesn't always work, though. It's taken further when you realise that you can have two characters constantly passing point-blank to each other behind your goalie, accumulating EXP for every pass... and those passes eat time on the clock too. The Player Is a Cheating Bastard.
      • Defender X is programmed to attack Tidus with a Percent Damage Attack if he uses Provoke. Moreover, Provoke costs nothing to use. Have Tidus use Provoke and the battle becomes impossible to lose. Provoke lasts until Tidus switches out, which you will never need to do, as its damage rounds down so it cannot kill, even if you are reduced to 1 HP.
    • Enemies in Final Fantasy XII will use status-inflicting moves even if the target(s) is vulnerable to them. This is most exploitable when fighting Elementals and Entites, who are programmed to respond to the player casting magick by using Silence or Silencega. Simply equip your mages with Rose Corsages (which give immunity to Silence) and the Elemental/Entite will waste many of its turns pointlessly trying to silence them.
    • Final Fantasy Brave Exvius has several A.I. foes that will repeatedly attempt to place buffs or debuffs if they aren't active. In particular, Hyoh of the Delta Star in season 2 will go into his buff rotation if they're not active. Considering how ridiculously easy it is to have abilities that can dispel said buffs (to the point that a player would have to actively avoid them), this means that fights with Hyoh are mostly spent with one character dispelling him and the rest of the party piling on damage. Hyoh's rematches eventually tend to throw in an attack or two even on rounds he spends buffing, but he still tends to fall prey to this strategy.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • In Kingdom Hearts, Possessed Riku can be very difficult. However, with the correct strategy, one can trap him in a loop where he never gets to use his desperation move, removing most of the difficulty.
    • In the Final Mix version, Superboss Unknown (a.k.a. Xemnas) is normally extremely difficult, but there's an easy way to get him stuck in a loop. Not only is Gravity the one spell type he's not immune to, it also stuns him for a ridiculously long time if it lands. Stun him with it, get in a combo while trying to blow him back to the centre of the arena, jump slightly back while casting Gravity, and jump over the electric balls to reach him and repeat the whole process. He can break out of it for his final phase spinning laser attack and his fourth-wall-breaking command menu attack, but the former is rare and can be Cure-spammed through and he's too polite to use the latter while a summon is visiting, which ever so coincidentally also stops Donald and Goofy from interfering with your combo. Summon Genie and Bambi, tell them to do absolutely nothing and loop the combo until you win.
    • In Kingdom Hearts II, Luxord will refuse to attack after triggering his ultimate attack's Reaction Command (the one where he surrounds Sora with a wall of cards) until Sora moves. If you have a good lead in Time after he uses it, you can just stand there and wait for his Time to run out without being threatened.
    • In the Final Mix version, it's possible to A.I.-loop Roxas with a certain strategy, though it requires very strict timing and only works up to when he uses Keyblade Release for the first time. Equip the Rumbling Rose Keyblade, Finishing Plus, two Combo Pluses and Guard Break. When the battle starts, Guard his initial attack, then combo into Guard Break. After he lands, do another combo into Guard Break. He'll counter with Aerial Spin Swing, so cast Reflega to block it, then immediately follow with another Guard Break. Let Roxas land again, combo into Guard Break, Reflega, and repeat. It's not a foolproof strategy, since Roxas has a few times during the battle where he's programmed to retaliate when his HP reaches a certain point, but if you can react to those counters, you can keep him in a loop until he either uses Keyblade Release or you win.
    • Also in KHII, the A.I. will target the centre of your Gummi ship. However, your Gummi ship uses the hitbox of its actual design. As such, a Gummi ship with a giant hole in the middle can cruise through a lot of the ship levels because the enemy will be firing at a point on the ship that doesn't actually contain any ship.
    • When fighting Vanitas's Lingering Spirit in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, going behind the large rocks in the battlefield will cause him to try to run through them to you without attacking. As long as you keep him there, you can cherry tap him to death with Strike Raid and its variants without retaliation since they go through the rocks, or heal yourself with potions.
  • The Legend of Dragoon has the boss fight against Lloyd in Disc 3. Thanks to his Dragon Buster sword, he has an attack that can instantly kill a character who is in their Dragoon form. However, by this point in the game it's possible to have two Talisman accessories, which makes the wearer immune to instant-kill attacks. If a Talisman-wearing character goes into their Dragoon form, Lloyd will spend most of his turns trying to kill them instead of fighting you normally.
  • Persona:
    • Persona 3: World Balance and The Reaper.
      • World Balance, so tough that some people believe it somehow has an adaptive A.I. However, if you put up a Magic Mirror, World Balance throws a tantrum and starts spamming the Almighty Area of Effect spell Megidolaon at you. While this may seem like a bad thing, by this point in the game you should be high enough level that your party can just barely survive the damage from a Megidolaon, which, like other Almighty spells, cannot hit weaknesses or gain Critical Hits. So, all you do is set your party to "Full Assault" tactics, counter-spam Mediarahan (full party heal) with the main character, and wear him down steadily. The Reaper reacts similarly to Magic Mirrors and can be taken down in the same way, though it will take a stronger party.
      • Neither boss quite knows what to do when faced with a party that has no weaknesses but also doesn't have enough immunities to warrant Megidolaon. They'll use their standard attacks without noticing that they don't work on half the party.
    • Persona 5 has only one mission ranked S for difficulty, and it's at the bottom of the 66-floor dungeon. While one would think this fight would be hard, the A.I. only attacks once per turn as opposed to twice like most bosses. And, it will always use Tarukaja, the Attack Up spell, if he doesn't already have boosted offense. By using Dekaja on him to dispel the attack boost at every possible opportunity, he'll never attack.
  • Pokémon:
    • Pokémon Red and Blue:
      • The A.I. the game uses for trainer battles prioritizes using attacks with a super-effective typing against your Pokémon, regardless of whether the move actually does damage. Coupled with Trainer Pokémon never running out of PP, this means it's trivial to get what should be competent Trainers stuck in a loop of doing no damage. This can easily be seen by sending out a Poison-type against Lance's Dragonite, which has the Psychic move Agility at its disposal. Since Psychic is strong against Poison, the A.I. will spam Agility even though it only raises the user's Speed. This behavior can also cause a softlock for the player; Lorelei has a Dewgong that knows Rest, a Psychic-type move that fully heals the user at the cost of putting it to sleep for two turns. If your last Mon is weak to Psychic and can't beat the Dewgong before it wakes up, it will just use Rest again, and again, and again...
      • The A.I. can also get stuck using attacks that are super-effective against one of a Pokémon's types, but have their increased effectiveness canceled out by the other type. Take, for example, Poisonpowder. Super effective against Grass, but does nothing to Poison-types. Did you know that every single Pokémon in the Celadon Gym has Poisonpowder? A Level 5 Bulbasaur can get through the entire Gym without taking damage because the Trainers will only use Poisonpowder, which Bulbasaur is immune to. And, thanks to the blatant lack of Poison moves in the first generation, that's the only Poison move any of them know; the only other options are Poison Sting and Sludge, which none of them can learn, and Acid, which none of them know.
    • In Pokémon Stadium 2, Gym Leader Chuck is programmed to lead with the move DynamicPunch and then use the best possible move after it hits. If you use a Ghost-type Pokémon, which are immune to the move, Chuck will continue to use DynamicPunch, giving you 5 free turns to KO each of his Pokémon. This even works in Round 2!
    • Similarly, Bruno of the Elite Four in HeartGold and SoulSilver will start with Counter, a move that does twice as much damage to its opponent as its user received that turn. If the user took no damage, Counter does nothing. Bruno will continue using Counter even if your Pokémon does nothing but boost itself, allowing you to fully set up and sweep his whole team.
    • Prior to Generation IV, computer players (unlike human players) almost never switch out their Pokémon, even if the matchup is extremely unfavorable for them. If you use Trick to give them a Choice item and lock them into using a single move, then you can switch to a Pokémon that resists that move and setup to your heart's desire. Amazingly, the computer won't switch even if they're forced to Struggle.
      • Even in Gen V, A.I. Trainers still switch out so rarely that for one to do so is an event in itself. They're gained the sense to switch out if a Choice item is forcing them to use an ineffective move, but you can now break them in a different way by having a Durant use Entrainment to pass the Truant ability onto them, or utilizing Skill Swap. This forces them to only act every other turn, which can be abused by any Pokémon with a stat boosting move and Protect to keep them from taking damage on the turns where their opponent can attack. Once again, this tactic could easily be countered by simply switching Pokémon, but they won't, presumably because they're still capable of choosing moves that could hurt you, if not for Protect. That said, a Double Battle plus Skill Swap removing Truant from Slaking still equals big trouble. Truant is meant as a balancing factor since Slaking is stronger than many Purposely Overpowered Olympus Mons. Therefore, Truant would much rather be on anything else — and the A.I. has been aware of this since Generation III.
    • In the fifth generation, Zoroark's Illusion ability is a stumper for the A.I. It always believes that a disguised Zoroark is really whatever it is disguised as, and the disguise is only broken when Zoroark takes damage. Since Zoroark is outright immune to Psychic moves, they won't cause the illusion to drop, so if Zoroark is disguised as something Psychic-weak and the opponent has a Psychic attack, it will pointlessly try to Psychic Zoroark, never catching on that it doesn't work, allowing Zoroark to buff itself to insane stats. This trick still works in later games.
      • This is particularly noteworthy in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon during your climactic final slowdown with the story's central legendary Pokémon. It's way more powerful than anything else you'll encounter until the credits, and can easily steamroll an unprepared team. However, the legendary's most threatening move is a Psychic-type attack, and you can get a Zorua early in the first island which will happily No-Sell it every round.
    • The sixth generation, more precisely Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, gives us Primal Groudon. Being Fire and Ground type, it has double weakness to Water. It also happens to have an ability Desolate Land, which completely negates water attacks. Despite that, your enemies will keep spamming Water-type attacks to no effect whatsoever. Over and over. It stays so even in next generation, where Archie's Kyogre will keep spamming Hydro Pump on it.
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon:
      • The A.I. is unaware that Minior, with its rock casing intact, is immune to non-volatile status conditions.note  As a result, even high-level computer players will try to use non-damaging status moves like Thunder Wave, Hypnosis, or Toxic over and over on Minior without having any effect. Even computer players at the Battle Tree will do this, which is supposed to be the A.I. at its smartest, though it will switch after two turns of nothing. Outside of the Battle Tree, though, the A.I. will never stop trying the move for as long as it's available.
      • Dexio is programmed to have his Alolan Raichu set up Reflect and Light Screen, then use his attacks. If you have a Pokémon that knows Brick Break (which breaks both shields at once), you can stop him from doing any damage to you at all.
    • In Pokémon Sword and Shield, the computer players don't seem to have accounted for Levitate, an Ability that grants invulnerability to Ground-type moves. If the computer player is using a Pokémon that knows a Ground-type move, and you use a Pokémon with Levitate who's otherwise weak to Ground, the computer player will keep using Ground-type moves over and over for as long as their Pokémon remains in play.
  • Melee combat in Rondo of Swords is based around the Foe-Tossing Charge, so enemy melee units typically don't move until you're close enough that they can charge you. However, they can't end their turn in an occupied square, and they can't double back on their own path. If you put a unit just close enough that they should be able to charge it, then put three more units in the three adjacent squares they'd charge past your nearest unit to reach, they'll get confused and move to the one open square adjacent to your nearest unit — which not only prevents them from damaging that unit, but allows your four nearby units to gang up on them on the following turn. (Note that this does not apply if the enemy unit has a significantly shorter movement range than your nearest unit — they'll try to flee instead.) And if you use an archer or magic user from the right range, the enemy won't move at all under normal circumstances. Of course, the game's still Nintendo Hard.
  • Shin Megami Tensei:
    • Several MegaTen bosses are programmed to use Dekaja or Dekunda when you're fully buffed or they're fully debuffed. Emphasis on fully: if you stack only 3 layers of buffs or debuffs, they'll never cancel them and you can go to town.
    • The infamous Demi-fiend Superboss of Digital Devil Saga has an exploit. His Demons are programmed to use Dekaja/kunda whenever possible, and also to use Recarmdra after 30 moves (sacrificing themselves and fully healing the Demi-fiend)... but Dekaja/kunda don't count toward these moves. If you wait until he summons Pixie, then use a single buff or debuff every turn, Pixie can use up all her MP on Status-Buff Dispel moves and not have enough for Recarmdra, leaving her as dead-weight and letting you stack full debuffs on the Demi-fiend. This isn't foolproof, as the Demi-fiend's crits (he'll get a lot of them) can throw off Pixie's turns, but it's generally considered the most effective way to win.
  • Super Robot Wars:
    • Various MAP attacks aren't fun, since they either amount to powerful Spheres of Destruction or Wave-Motion Guns. In either case, the accuracy means most of your units will get hit, and most of those will die after one or two shots. However, if the attack would hit even one other enemy unit, they won't use them.
    • Another way to work around these is to move four characters who know Alert and have the Regen 10 SP skill surround the MAP able enemy and move all other units out of the MAP's attack range. Since MAPs are all ammo-based, a patient player can wait for it to eventually use up these moves and then move in.
    • In some games, the A.I. will use their MAPWs indiscriminately. most notably in A and OG2.
  • Tales Series:
    • Tales of Destiny 2: Barbatos 3's A.I. is designed to only be weak to spells, but will cast a fast cast counterspell if you try to cast spells to damage him midway through the fight. Normally this would make the battle a grind, but it's possible to begin casting a spell, cancel it, and then run away from his spell's area of effect. With two players one player can distract him by canceling spells and running away while the other either whales on him with impunity while he tries to hit player one with spells or casts spells of their own to kill him quickly.
    • Tales of Vesperia: Judith's main gimmick is aerial combat as well as dashing all around the battlefield from above. The AI just cannot respond to this meaning Judith can run circles around them. However, unlike other examples of this trope, this does require a lot of effort and practice on the player's part. Judith will need to learn a lot of skills that will let her chain together arte(s) midair, and the player will need to be able to watch Judith's animations so they can time them right. But when executed well? Judith will fly all around the battlefield and even flying enemies will be knocked to the ground or juggled by her.

    Fighting Game 
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy:
    • The A.I. can't dodge Shantotto's Bio correctly, so it often ends up getting hit or dodging into either a stage hazard or another one of her attacks. The A.I. will just randomly spam dodges whenever one of her air spells is anywhere near them, unless bio is also near them at which point they don't dodge and get hit by both of them.
    • Also, when you start charging an attack outside of their reach, the A.I. gets really confused and doesn't know what to do, even if it's not damaging. Strange enough, they look even more confused if it's not damaging — try EX-Charge with Gabranth a few meters away and look at that enemy running in small circles and blocking every other second.
    • In addition, if you put it into a Bravery Trap while in Chase, it will never dodge. Since the A.I. will rarely dodge Chase attacks to their Bravery if you have enough to one=shot them already, it's very easy to send them into a trap to guarantee that they won't dodge the hit to their health.
    • A rather specific one makes the hardest level Chaos comically easy. Attempting an HP Attack (which are usually slow, heavy attacks) right at the start of the fight will cause Chaos to ALWAYS respond with a quick forward swipe that is guaranteed to hit and interrupt your poor character before their attack can launch. Which backfires hilariously when your starting move is an instantaneous counter Delta Attack, as Exdeath. As the A.I. is absurdly aggressive (and thus predictable), Chaos will launch himself right into Exdeath's counter with amusing results, without fail. And you can do this each of the three rounds you take on Chaos in any encounter. (Bonus points if you have enough Brave to finish Chaos in one hit — Exdeath can drop the god of discord in three seconds with one button.)
    • Dissidia 012 takes this even further with Yuna's Mega Flare. Just watch as the pinned enemy eats a face full of purple lasers, unable to do a damned thing.
    • Also added in 012 was "EX Revenge", which triggers instead of EX Mode if you tried to activate it while being hit. Why this is relevant is Gabranth. Gabranth's only real HP Attacks (which end EX Revenge) are while he's in EX Mode, otherwise he can only use EX Charge. So forcing an A.I. Gabranth into EX Revenge will cause it to rapid-fire EX Charge (which is best used as a constant "attack") when it would be more effective for it to use Brave Attacks to try and Break you.
    • Feral Chaos, normally an SNK Boss. It's not uncommon for him to wipe out almost your entire party. And yet, he falls easily enough against Kuja, raining Ultima spells while gliding at the very top of the arena.
      • He can also be destroyed by Golbez constantly spamming Night Glow, due to the attack starting with a shield that deflects Feral Chaos' attacks, followed by a damaging move that smacks him straight into the ceiling.
      • An even easier method involves using Lightning's Scourge attack in midair. Scourge slams Feral Chaos to the ground, and if you're above him, he'll retaliate with a fast but easy to dodge upper attack to bring him to your level. You can then Scourge him back down again, allowing you to easily whittle down his Bravery. Once you're actually ready to do damage, instead of Scourge, you quickly switch to Ravager and use Army of One, which he doesn't even try to block. It can take a long time, but it's an almost guaranteed win.
      • Fittingly enough, using Feral Chaos against the computer makes most battles a piece of cake despite the heavy handicaps imposed on him: the AI doesn't have any real idea on how to dodge Via Dolorosa, which is a pair of rapidly-moving flame pillars that are aimed at the enemy, meaning that they'll almost always get hit by the second pillar after dodging the first one.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • In Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit, several of the hardest challenges can be overcome by spamming Vegeta's Final Flash super move... Apparently, the A.I. considers it a "super beam" attack, and duly sidesteps it — only, the Final Flash is actually an Area of Effect cone, meaning that they step straight into it (instead of blocking, which would greatly reduce the damage). And because the A.I. considers dodging to be better than blocking, the higher the level of the A.I. is, the more likely it is to fall for this...
    • In Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, almost all A.I. opponents will become completely helpless if you stay directly above them at blast range, allowing you to bombard them with ki attacks at will. Most characters' shots can't hit straight up at all and the few that can won't get too many hits in compared to you shooting down (although, some characters can't shoot down all that well, either). The A.I. is too stupid to fly up to you or run farther away to aim.
    • Dragon Ball Legends used to have a tactic known as the float-step combo, which is easily performed by briefly dropping your combo, thus forcibly triggering an effect or allowing your cards time to reload, before continuing on the Cycle of Hurting. It worked wonders for offline Brutal Bonus Levels, due to the A.I. not being able to respond most of the time, thus making so that even non-optimal units can clear stages like Zenkai Ultimate Space-Time Rush or the Battle Gauntlets. Unfortunately, the developers caught on to this exploit, as Version 4.7.0 patched the A.I. so that they will immedietely vanish step out of the way if you attempt to pull this trick... which normally results in YOU getting beaten down instead.
  • In Eternal Champions, Xavier's spinning staff move is a pseudo-projectile with a large hitbox and excellent range, knocks down on hit, and is one of the few normals in the game that damages even on block. Most of the A.I. opponents in the game can't even get close enough to hit Xavier when he's spamming the move, and will likely lose to chip damage before they even get a hit in.
  • In Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, the A.I. will not waggle its virtual stick to get out of stagger. With correct timing this allows you to repeat certain attacks (Ky's forward HS, for example) almost indefinitely, when a human opponent would be able to break out easily. Also, the computer will almost never block Slayer's charging punch, even after you've used it a dozen times in a row.
  • The A.I. in Kensei: Sacred Fist is programmed to always counterattack as it's rising from a knockdown, regardless of how close or far the player is standing. It's remarkably easy to exploit this by simply standing out of range of the attack and knocking them down again before they can recover, repeated until they stop getting back up.
  • In Killer Instinct, you can easily beat Fulgore by dashing in, stopping right before you're in range, and jumping back. Repeat this for long enough, and Fulgore will try and uppercut you, leaving him open for an attack. You can do this for the entire match and he won't stop.
  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Gears of Destiny, Zafira of all people is an A.I. Breaker if you just keep pressing the Circle button without holding it once.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Some of the early versions of the first game had a bug where you could simply continually walk backwards and sweep the opponent whenever he got too close, and win every match this way until you get to Goro. The later arcade versions, as well as the home versions, fixed this. Also, Shang Tsung can be easily defeated by crouching and kicking out whenever he approaches.
    • Mortal Kombat II:
      • Every A.I.-controlled opponent up to Kintaro can be defeated by allowing them to walk just into throw distance (or avoiding any projectile attacks sent the player's way beforehand), jumping backward, and then round-house or forward jump-kicking them when they inevitably jump forward. This trick was not altered in the home console or PC versions, but it only works when playing on Player 1 side; it doesn't work when playing as Player 2.
      • Shao Kahn can be defeated in two ways: some characters (though not all) can repeatedly jump kick forward until Kahn is pushed against the corner, then jump all the way back to the other side of the arena and repeat. All characters can repeatedly jump over Kahn and kick him when coming down. With either tactic he'll block most of the attacks, but even blocked attacks take some health so this trick allows players to slowly whittle him down to nothing with relative ease.
      • An even easier method is to retreat into the corner and block low. 99% of the time, Kahn will perform his shoulder charge, which you will block, leaving him wide open to an uppercut which will damage him more than the damage you take from blocking his shoulder charge. The other 1% of the time he will taunt you, in which case you throw a projectile at his stupid face then go back to low blocking. Doing this will result in a guaranteed victory, which is a welcome relief after Kintaro.
    • Mortal Kombat 3 (and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and Mortal Kombat Trilogy by extension):
      • The "hypnotic walk" glitch. If you are about jump distance from the A.I., start to walk backwards and forwards alternately for a few steps. This causes the A.I. to copy your pattern, and as long as you keep it up, the A.I. will not do anything else. This allows players to beat the Perfect Play A.I.: once they managed to land a hit, they could exploit this glitch and continue to dazzle the A.I. until time runs out. This yields tedious but easy wins. Of course, landing a hit on a Perfect Play A.I. is tricky in the first place...
      • Sheeva players can spam her teleport stomp against Shao Kahn or Motaro, who will begin blocking the move at the earliest opportunity (any CPU controlled playable character would walk/run off the stomp and punish with a combo). Since the stomp also places Sheeva on a safe spot after its conclusion, it can be repeated ad nauseam until they die of chip damage.
      • Rain players in the CD version of Trilogy can hit the A.I. with a Mind Control Orb into Lightning Bolt combo without fail. Repeat with another Orb into Bolt or Super Roundhouse. For bosses, Mind Control Orb into a High Kick. Even on the hardest difficulty.
    • Mortal Kombat 9, too, has methods to break the A.I.:
      • By using characters that can teleport, the player can easily figure out the A.I.'s patterns and fool them into attacking thin air. This is very useful in the final battle of Story Mode (Raiden vs. Shao Kahn): When you teleport as Kahn is about to attack (or in the process of attacking, depending on how good your timing is), you'll reappear behind him, while he's open for a free hit. After he's hit, he'll immediately try to attack you head-on most of the time; just teleport behind him again and strike him before he can turn. It's a slow and steady win.
      • Stryker has a nifty trick against Shao Kahn. All you do is back up against the wall and start shooting. If you continuously spam Stryker's gun, you'll keep Kahn on the other side of the screen, unable to get near you. As a bonus, spamming special attacks fills your Special gauge rather quickly; you can work this into the strategy by using the enhanced version of the gun move, in which Stryker fires four shots with two guns very fast, amplifying the damage.
      • Ermac's teleport punch works pretty well too. It can be done in midair (thus helping you avoid the Shokans' ground-pounding), is a nifty combo opener, and also helps avoid that nasty flying hammer.
      • A sure-fire method to take out the Shokans easily with any character: keep jumping backwards to give yourself some breathing room (it also helps you to see the fireballs coming). More often than not, they will try to hit you with a Teleport Stomp. That's your cue to perform any normal aerial attack, but your timing must be good enough that you can hit them on their way down. At the very worst, if you're not cornered, they will miss you, but you can flying kick them out of the Stomp even at the corner of the stage. Picking up someone who has a projectile is even better — you can hit them while they stop to cheer for themselves, scoring you free hits in the process.
  • Naruto:
    • In Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations, Itachi gained a new move, Clone Jutsu: Super Explosion. What it does is create a clone of Itachi that walks forward veeeeeery sloooooowly and explodes when touched or attacked. A human player can easily just sidestep it, but for some reason the A.I. falls for it every time and walks, or even dashes right into it. This makes getting through Itachi's story laughably easy.
    • In the Naruto Ultimate Ninja Heroes games for PSP, the recommended tactic is to use the backwards doubletap, tricking the A.I. to rush forward to catch up to you, during which is he vulnerable to a forward doubletap rush leading into a combo he will be unable to counter out of. Rinse and repeat through the insane difficulty story mode.
  • All the robots in One Must Fall have strategies that the computer always seems to fall for. Perhaps the most mind-numbing one is to just keep using the Nova's crouching sweep kick. The computer never blocks it and will just walk into it over and over again. Likewise, the computer doesn't know how to dodge the Shadow Grab. And possibly the first one that every player learns is fierce low kick right off the start of the fight, which pretty much no computer opponent will ever stop. It also has serious problems with the Jaguar's overhead throw.
  • Skullgirls:
    • In early versions, the A.I. would simply futz around while you were in the air. For single jumps this isn't a problem, but given that a lot of characters have double jumps or air dashes (or in some cases both) you could get free seconds to think or set up moves. Even worse, Painwheel has an extended flight ability, during which they would not know what to do. This has since been patched out.
    • The computer is really bad at dealing with overhead attacks (that's any standing attack that specifically must be blocked high, whereas most can be blocked high or low). There aren't that many of these in the game, but even on higher difficulties those characters that have them will find the computer rarely blocks them successfully. This means that it's always worth doing all three hits of Eliza's heavy punch combo, even if the first two are straight-up blocked. The heavy version of Fukua's Forever A Clone special is an overhead with a range of up to half the screen — against characters without spammable projectiles or fast dash attacks, this may as well be a forcefield.
    • While Filia is normally That One Boss for Fukua's Arcade Mode due to buffed health and A.I. that's always on the hardest difficulty, said A.I. has serious trouble countering Fukua's Inevitable Snuggle grapple. And since it has super armor you can safely run up to Filia and use it first thing. Timing it as she gets up from the last one leads to an inevitable loop that leads to her eventual defeat.
  • Soul Series:
    • Anti-A.I. moves in Soulcalibur III are moves the A.I. rarely blocks or dodges, allowing the player to be the one to Mortal Kombat walk over the A.I. for once. Two of the easier to perform are Xianghua's Great Wall and Iron Sword/Strife's A+ B. Because The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard itself, this is completely fair.
    • The Thief/Chester's bomb throw, B+K, can be charged and rolled. If you charge and roll the bombs, the enemy will more likely than not block it, because charged bombs have guard stagger this will cause the enemy to be forced into a stagger animation that not even the computer can get out of, quickly roll another charged one to land a hit and knock them down, then do it again, as the CPU can't skip the period between getting up and blocking low. Another easy one is Staff/Hualin's front A+B, if you do it right then you can knock the enemy down and then keep pointing at them as they get up, as they will guard but the attack breaks the guards.
    • Another reliable move in the third game is Kilik's Biting Phoenix (or Seong Mi-na's Fang Barrage). The A.I. almost always fails to block either the first two jabs or the final jab.
    • A really neat trick in Soulcalibur IV involves the final, topmost floor of the Tower of Lost Souls, where you face a severely souped-up version of the game's final boss... who can, however, easily be defeated by letting him knock you over, and then roll yourself on the floor so you're between him and the edge. He'll then do a jump over you — straight off the edge of the tower, plunging to his death. By far the fastest way to make money in the game...
      • Sadly, this was later patched. However, throwing is once again an anti-A.I. move (it worked well in the second game), and thankfully it works against him. You see, no matter how high an opponent's defense is (theoretically, the final boss's defense is as high as it will go), throws always deal full damage. Plus, the computer doesn't grapple break as often as it did in the third game.
    • Also in Soulcalibur IV, using Yoshimitsu's Bullet Cutter attack will break the A.I. The Bullet Cutter can be held, which will turn it from a normal attack into an unblockable attack. The response of the A.I. will be to block until it reaches its unblockable state, then try to attack. By releasing it shortly after it becomes unblockable and then quickly starting it up again, it's possible (and usually quite easy) to beat even the hardest-level A.I. without them landing a scratch on you.
  • Street Fighter:
    • Street Fighter II:
      • Guile has an exploitable glitch, especially by Ryu or Ken. Do a Shoryuken at the right distance and Guile will do a Flash Kick that completely misses, leaving him open to attack.
      • Balrog (Boxer) in the original game is amazingly vulnerable to simply walking up and punching him in the face, if your character has enough range on his or her fierce punch. It takes decent timing, but once you get it down, he can be very easily humiliated with certain characters.
      • In Super Street Fighter II, New Challenger Fei Long does not seem to be able to handle characters in a crouching block. He will either try some random kicking attacks which do Scratch Damage, or attempt to do a jumping kick, allowing him to be easily knocked out of the sky by characters who have an upward attack while in the crouched position (e.g. Ryu, Ken, Guile). The A.I. can't seem to realize that it can simply whittle your health slowly by attacking you while you're blocking, and will shortly try to jump attack and get knocked out of the sky.
  • Street Fighter IV:
    • The computer is helpless against E. Honda's command throw if you use it just as the A.I. is getting up after a knockdown. This conveniently leaves you standing right over them, ready for another throw. It will also repeatedly walk into Zangief's spinning lariat. Individual characters also have their own A.I. flaws — at a certain distance, Honda will always jump into fireballs, allowing you to spam them relentlessly; and Blanka will always attempt to block some multi-hit specials with a Focus Attack, which does not work.
    • Focus Attacks, as a whole. Only a few characters are programmed to react properly, the vast majority of the cast will just stand next to you and wait until it fully charges, only to try to block it — and it's unblockable once it is fully charged. Sometimes they try to attack you with a regular move, then all you have to do is release the charge to stun them and follow up with anything. It works on all difficulties, and makes getting enough Perfects to face the bonus bosses trivial. Following immediately with a Focus Attack Dash Cancelnote  is just icing on the cake.
    • One specific to Round Two Seth is exploiting his tendency to jump backwards and then wall-jump forwards: hang back, jump over his Sonic Booms a couple of times, and hit him with any sort of rising attack. Repeat as necessary. Seth does also not react well to Ibuki's Neck Breaker special, as his height makes it possible for Ibuki's slide to travel right under his Sonic Booms (and unlike Sagat, Seth has no low projectile variant). As Ibuki hops away a short distance after each successful throw, the player merely has to back up far enough following each attack to lock Seth into a cycle of doing nothing other than throwing Sonic Booms at you, making it rather easy to go to town with nothing but that one move of hers.
  • Super Smash Bros. 64:
    • You can defeat Pikachu in 1P Game without even touching him by just jumping around the tower on the right, causing Pikachu to Quick Attack himself off of the platform.
    • It's also possible to do something similar with Fox: Stand near the nose of the Great Fox and wait for him to charge you, then jump over him. Fox will be unable to recover, and will either fall off the screen or land on the Great Fox's lasers, at which point it's only a matter of time before the lasers fire and he asplodes.
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee:
    • The Jungle Japes stage itself could be an A.I. Breaker for several characters:
      • Donkey Kong has one tactic if the opponent stays still on his stage: charge, jump, jump, flip-hammer-punch. Unfortunately for him, his flip-hammer-punch disables his ability to hang on to edges, you spawn on a fairly small platform, and to properly hit you, he has to miss your platform by a bit. And this is one of the few levels in the game where you can't really recover from a fall — particularly since his timing puts him near the water just when an instant death enemy jumps up to bite at people's heels.
      • You can get easy wins against a maximum-difficulty Roy by turning off items, KOing Roy once, and then standing on the far right side of the stage. He WILL fall to his death over and over and over again when he tries to go directly from the respawn platform to your platform and misses the jump.
      • Level 9 Ness on a 1-stock match. If you simply do nothing, he jumps toward you, tries to recover, falls down the hole between your platform and the main one, hits the side of the stage with PK Thunder, continues to fall, and dies. Level 1 Ness will do the same thing, minus the futile PK Thunder.
    • Some A.I.s like Captain Falcon and Mario are programmed to leap off-stage and make a lazy attempt to hit you with a meteor smash to prevent you from recovering. However, they're not intelligent enough to account for their greatly increased falling speed while affected by a Metal Box and will still attempt to do this, KOing themselves in the process. Encountering one of them as the penultimate foe in Classic Mode is basically a free ticket to victory.
    • Luigi's weakness is ironically in both of the Mushroom Kingdom stages. His A.I. has him use Green Missile for recoveries, so spiking him into one of the small pits causes Luigi to use the move, hit the wall, and fall to his death.
    • The 15-Minute Melee can be mostly beaten with just Donkey Kong's hand slap. This is made especially easy as the Wireframes hardly ever use items to slow you down, and even when they do they have an alarming tendency of placing mines on the platform on which they're standing. The developers were probably aware of this: surviving for all 15 minutes unlocks the N64 Donkey Kong stage. The only real difficulty from this approach comes from RNG rather than the A.I.: it's all but guaranteed some explosive items will drop near you, causing you to set them off, so you had to hope this didn't happen when you were at high enough damage to send you flying.
    • CPU players can't cope with spikes, falling platforms or most custom stages, so one of the easiest ways to beat even the highest level opponents is simply to make your own level with those elements and just play on that.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl:
    • You can trick the A.I. into a lot of things, but the most memorable trick is probably the "Fly To Survive" scheme. It's only usable with the handful of characters who possess limited flight capabilities and it's mostly useful for the Cruel Brawl survival-test, where you face a bunch of seriously overpowered bots, but by simple constantly flying under the island the battle takes place on — hanging off the ledge on either side to reset your flight-time counter without having to properly land — you can trick the A.I. into jumping off the screen with a little practice.
    • In the WarioWare Inc. stage, if the "Freeze!" microgame comes up, the CPU will stand still until the stage transitions all the way back to the main elevator room. But the stage credits you with not moving as soon as the microgame ends. A canny player can take advantage of the two or three seconds it takes to wind up a free Smash attack or other charged move on the nearest enemy.
    • The stage editor allows for all sorts of bizarre computer player behavior. For instance, if you create a square, open at the top, on the upper-right corner of the stage and it's the correct size, Lucas will spend the entire match jumping back and forth.
    • Zelda (who is considered a terrible fighter against any human) can easily beat any A.I.-controlled character on flat stages by spamming her Din's Fire attack and slowly blasting the enemy to one side of the screen. The computer has no defense whatsoever to this strategy.
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U:
    • The Corneria stage can lead to many hilarious suicides when a powerful item (such as a Laser Sword or a Bullet Bill) spawns or is thrown by the player on the ship's cannon. High-level A.I. opponents will ignore you to grab the most powerful item in the area, and either miss the jump, fail to jump back on the ship proper, or be blasted out by the cannon firing.
    • While the A.I. in the previous games made little to no effort to defend themselves while returning to the stage, this is no longer the case, and they'll use their inhuman reaction times to air dodge virtually everything you throw at them. Problem is, they place a higher priority on doing this then actually making it back to the stage, and can thus be fooled into dodging attacks until they've fallen too far to survive or at least forced into a position where interrupting their recovery move is easier.
    • Also, they are programmed to air dodge every time you input an attack, even if you are a mile away, and (in the case of charged attacks like Smash attacks) they never take into account if you released the attack or not, but instead they will act as if you had tried to hit them with a quick move. With proper timing, this will result in the CPU air dodging then coming straight into the attack, over and over. Similarly, if you charge a Side or Down Smash, they will also try to roll into you the moment you start charging, with predictably hilarious results.
  • In the Sega Genesis version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, the A.I. was generally considered to be horribly overpowered even on easy settings, but it had one massive flaw. Ray Fillet's strong crouching kick causes him to slide forward, and the A.I. constantly fails to recognize the slide and won't try to block it. By spamming this one move, the game could be beaten fairly easily even on the hardest difficulty.
  • Tekken:
    • The A.I. in Tekken Tag Tournament 2 has a flaw where it will always try to rush at you if it is at a certain range. This means that if timed correctly, a player of any skill level can beat even high-level A.I.s by simply spamming flying kicks and dash punches. Even boss Jun/Unknown will fall for this.
    • Similarly, in Tekken 6 you can get free shots at Azazel by knocking him to the ground and spamming him with charged attacks. The A.I.'s default behavior when this happens is to not move an inch as most of the charged attacks are mid-range and would normally miss, but due to his size, Azazel still takes damage from mid-range attacks when he is laying down.
    • In Tekken 2, it was possible to get a perfect against Lei Wulong simply by crouching and approaching him, because his A.I. would start performing his double-backhand in that situation. Simply wait until he was retracting his fist from the second backhand and use a throw command to hit him with a powerful behind-the-back throw. He would fall for this every time, though in later titles he lost this weakness.
  • In the Touhou Project fighting game spin-offs, the A.I. is easy to completely humiliate even by newbies in Lunatic Mode, by continually suppressing them with delayed projectiles (this is best done with spam-capable characters like Sakuya or Yuyuko) or punishing them with counter attacks and reversals. Also, Suwako's A.I. tends to freeze when sitting on her lily pad.
  • In Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Arcade Mode on highest difficulty has the A.I. reading inputs. It seems VERY difficult at first, but the purpose may have been to let first time players know just how important and game changing Assists can be, as they can perfectly counter a single opponent, but will be forced to turtle or do unsafe moves once you start throwing Assists out. However, there is one character in particular that can force the A.I. to drop difficulty level without Assists (though the difficulty is still high enough you should probably use Assists as well): Phoenix Wright. In Investigation Mode, he is able to call out Maya to help him, which works similar to the aforementioned Assists. Unblockables can be set up with Maya's low-hitting slide combined with Wright's slip-up overhead, and the A.I. becomes notably less defensive when Maya's shield is called out (letting you get potshots by throwing bad evidence, or simply using the proper Assist). They also have trouble against his zoning in Trial Mode, and it's easier than it should be to land a random Objection, especially if they called out their own Assist (which they'll be doing a lot), letting you go into Turnabout Mode and spam projectiles and finger pointing. Due to his ridiculous damage output, it doesn't even matter if they perfectly block because they'll still receive insane chip damage. And if you land a hit, or they start to use unsafe tactics, you can throw out his Level 3 (the second strongest Hyper Combo in the game, only beaten out by Vergil's Level 4 by a measly 10000 HP*) and kill or cripple a character. Combined with the long animation, you can time out everyone. The A.I. tries to counter you with uppercuts every time you're above it, so if you just do a divekick with a gargantuan amount of priority like Foot Dive or bait the uppercut the A.I. will fall for it every time. The A.I. usually won't attack unless the attack is sure to connect, which means using Ghost Rider's jumping S from a safe distance is the easiest way to win.
  • In Wii Sports' boxing, the player can literally get their rank off the chart (and if they go at it long enough, off the screen!) by simply weaving back and forth, then countering when the A.I. throws a punch. A human player can just aim where you are going to be.
  • A.I. wrestlers in WWF No Mercy can be consistently baited into running at you, if you repeatedly sprint back and forth yourself. As wrestlers cannot counter most moves while running, this allows the player to bypass the impossibly frequent counters the CPU will otherwise pull off on higher difficulties.
  • The Game Boy Color version of X-Men: Mutant Academy is only known because the A.I. will simply not block crouching kicks, nor try countering in any way.

    First-Person Shooter 
  • In Blood (1997), Cheogh and his Degraded Boss counterparts, the Stone Gargoyles, are normally quite threatening, with a massive health pool, good armor, a melee attack for point-blank range, and quick-moving Eye Beams that deal a lot of damage. The fight with him can be somewhat circumvented with tactics similar to Doom's Revenant — that is to say, get right outside his melee range and keep backing away, and he'll just chase you futilely to try and claw you to death rather than going for the eye beams. If you want to completely remove the challenge from his fight? Just crouch. For some reason, literally none of his attacks can hit a crouching target, turning Cheogh into a sitting duck.
  • Multiple examples in the Borderlands series:
    • The first game, Borderlands, has a secret final boss. "Crawmerax the Invincible", who could be soloed in a few minutes without much trouble by a Siren with the right skill set. Her action skill, Phasewalk, lets the Siren turn invisible and increases her run speed. If she exits Phasewalk while out of line of sight of Crawmerax and all his cronies the boss would effectively de-aggro and stand around, doing nothing. This time could then be used to reload guns, regenerate shields and health, and wait for a safe attack to his weak spot on his back, effectively turning the boss trivial.
    • In Borderlands 2: Having trouble against Saturn? Simply lure him down from the bridge (just jumping down from it will often be enough) and run into Fyrestone. The A.I. will have no idea how to handle the situation and will simply start wandering around in circles, occasionally launching an easy to dodge missile barrage towards you, all while you are free to chip down at his health from a safe distance.
  • In Call of Duty: Black Ops, if you blow up one of the jeeps on the Firing Range map, get in the back and crouch down, A.I. opponents can no longer see you, while you're perfectly free to riddle them with bullets.
  • Descent 2 had enemy A.I. that worked in beats. So the best way of fighting mine robots was to work in counter-time, to move and fire in the split second before the next A.I. poll. It gave the game a rhythmic, dance-like quality.
  • Doom:
    • In classic Doom, melee-using enemies like Pinkies and Revenants can be utterly neutralized as long as you simply move into their attack range, then move out. This is due to the fact that they stand still while doing their melee attack, giving you a good half-second to simply walk out of reach while the enemy is still winding up a bite or a punch. This is especially evident with the Revenant, because its ranged attack is far more dangerous than its melee attack, so dancing in and out of its reach can result in it flailing in your direction futilely while ignoring the shoulder-mounted rocket launchers that would do a much better job.
    • In Doom³, enemies that only have melee attacks (i.e. zombies or Pinkies) are completely unable to attack you if you jump up on a table or crate, and will run in circles around you rather humorously. The levels are generally designed as a flat plane (other than stairs, which enemies can manage) so you can't do this (most objects are impossible to jump on top of, unlike earlier Id Software games).
  • In GoldenEye (1997), enemies treat the edges of bridges and catwalks as solid walls, and cannot see or fire at you across them. This leads to the tactic of simply standing to the side of the bridge in the Jungle mission and blowing Xenia to bits without her ever firing a single shot at you.
  • In the early Halo games, the A.I. is programmed to aim at the center of the player's hitbox. As a result, if you can find a piece of cover where only your head is exposed, you can fire over it with near impunity while the enemies futilely try to shoot your chest and only hit the cover. Exploiting this can make completing Legendary difficulty much easier. The one limitation is there actually aren't a large amount of pieces of cover which are the exact right height to pull this off.
  • Half-Life:
    • In Half-Life: Opposing Force you can break the A.I. of the Voltigores, some of the strongest enemies in the game, by being half in cover from them, so you can finish them off easily without being attacked.
    • Similarly, in Half-Life 2, the A.I. occasionally falls victim to "If you can't see me I can't see you." A fixed-position soldier will simply stop shooting if the player holds up a barrel (or even a can of soda) to block the soldier's view, and can easily be walked-up on.
  • Force-using enemies in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy are designed to perfectly counter all non-lightsaber attacks. They'll deflect projectiles with their lightsaber, bullet-dodge sniper beam shots, and will Force Push rockets and other projectiles back at you. However, they can't do this when knocked on the ground and being jumped on or throwing their lightsaber, so you can just shoot them at these times. The first phase of the Final Boss in Jedi Academy can be beaten in seconds by blasting her with the concussion rifle when she tries to throw her lightsaber or use her scepter beam.
  • Left 4 Dead:
    • L4D and its sequel have some parts of the map where the zombies somehow become blind to your presence, even if they are within arms reach of you. Due to bugs or just faulty A.I. navigation, being in certain places causes the zombies to act like they cannot reach you anymore. Similarly, Tanks can suffer the same problem and they will die after some time since it's programed to suicide if it cannot see or reach the survivors after some time has passed.
    • Speaking of Tanks, they are programmed to go straight for any player who uses a mounted machine gun (often present in finales). Dismounting the gun causes the Tank to resume its previous target, meaning, with some good coordination, you can play a game of Tank tennis.
  • PAYDAY: The Heist has a similar problem to Left 4 Dead with its A.I. If you hide under or behind certain props or level geometry, the cops will either make no attempt to flank you out of your hiding spot or very few cops will actually rush you. The A.I. is also broken when it comes to player priorities. In certain maps, if three players huddle together in one room and the fourth player goes off on his own, the cops will ignore the lone player most of the time, allowing him to do all the objectives. Likewise, some maps can break the enemy A.I. by having a lone player hide in a particular spot, causing the cops to focus on him and ignore the other three players.
  • Perfect Dark:
    • The A.I. doesn't know how to use the Remote Mines. If you create a Combat Simulator scenario in which Remote Mines are the only weapons on the map, the A.I. will place the mines but never detonate them, even rendering DarkSims helpless.
    • They are also unable to shoot through most ratholes, as they cannot target opponents on a different room.
    • There is a multiplayer map with a large window in the wall between two corridors. The A.I. seems to think this is a door and will get stuck trying to get through it. Expect to see large groups of bots wedged up against this waiting to be taken out with a single rocket or grenade.
  • Team Fortress 2:
    • In Mann Vs. Machine mode, robots never notice disguised spies unless the spy drops his disguise or is set on fire. Some people have taken advantage of this by having a disguised Spy act as a living road-block to the bomb-carrying robot, stopping its progress until they damage him by complete accident.
    • Giant Mook Scouts are a complete nightmare to deal with, since they are crazy fast and have a huge pile of hitpoints, but stick a Level 3 Sentry in the middle of a sufficiently narrow path and this completely stymies the Scout. (Unfortunately, this strategy only works against Scouts — other Giant Mook classes can either completely destroy a sentry before it becomes an issue or simply climb over it.)
    • To prevent Engineers from turning the game into a Tower Defense game, Sentry Busters will spawn to destroy any sufficiently successful Sentry Gun. While they are still disruptive, and continue to spawn until the offending Sentry is blown to smithereens, there are at least two ways to force them to waste their detonation without actually destroying the targeted sentry. Both involve exploiting the fact that their detonations begin as soon as they are in close proximity to the targeted Sentry Gun, but take approximately a second to complete. The first is to pick up the targeted Sentry Gun and walk it up to the Sentry Buster, then run away with it. This will trigger the Sentry Buster to begin its detonation, but you will be able to get yourself and your Gun out of its splash radius before it completes. The second is to use the Rescue Ranger to teleport your Sentry away after the Buster starts to detonate, but before it completes.
  • Unreal series:
    • One of the components of the enemies' Artificial Brilliance in Unreal as well as the multiplayer A.I. in the higher levels, both in this game and the Tournament games, is that they dodge projectile attacks... except that only applies to projectiles that travel in a straight line; if a projectile is affected by gravity, the A.I. doesn't know how to react to it. This makes flak cannon shell bombs, Eightball Gun grenades and the otherwise Awesome, but Impractical Bio Rifle very useful to take out even the higher-tier Skaarj.
    • In both Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, many maps have one or two tricks which the player can do in Single Player or Instant Action matches to completely break bots. One such example is 2004's AS-Junkyard, which features two routes: the normal one and a shortcut. Both routes start with the attacking team retrieving the engine for the vehicle and passing the bridge. But from this point onwards, the team may choose to go through the marked route, open the gates to escape from the Junkyard, and go with the vehicle through these gates... or to take a shortcut which involves a giant magnet conducting your vehicle in a more exposed route, but with the huge advantage of having three accomplished objectives at once, thus gaining a big amount of time. The A.I. will NEVER use the magnet.

    MMORPG 
  • In the online game Dragon Awaken, the Deity Dungeon sets players up against an A.I.-controlled version of their own team. The A.I. team eventually has its stats increased by a significant margin over the player's, making them potentially quite powerful and hard-hitting. Because the A.I. has your character's statistics at a higher level, it will eventually become quite difficult for most players to beat in a straightforward fight. However, there are some simple ways to take advantage of the A.I.'s default behaviour in order to simplify the fight. One of these ways is that, when your character uses the Cleric skillset, the A.I. will follow suit but will typically overlook the Cleric's Area of Effect attack in favour of simply healing one person, meaning that even if they could kill your team easily they will have to attack one by one and not on successive turns. This gives you lots of time to defeat the enemy, while in other skillsets they will use an AoE skill to do large amounts of damage quickly. Further, there are some skills that the A.I. of this dungeon and elsewhere is not programmed to use, called Talents, that mean that you can use powerful moves targeting your opponent while they are potentially restricted to healing moves or otherwise. A further consequence of these A.I. traits appears in places where you can attack players who are represented and defended by an A.I. version of their team, such as when trying to plunder their land. If the player is using a Cleric skillset at the point when you attack, then their A.I. will also take on the same flaws as the Deity Dungeon's A.I. and become much less damaging, even if the player themselves would be more effective.
  • Bosses in Final Fantasy XIV run on a script where the boss always attacks in a certain pattern and then changes its pattern when its HP goes below a certain threshold. The changes in the script aren't always instantaneous, so players that can really pump out the damage can cause the boss's HP to drop so quickly that it skips a phase in the script and moves onto the next one. However, this can also royally screw players over if the boss has an attack that can wipe the party or severely cripple them. For example, the Extreme version of the Leviathan fight has him use Tidal Wave when his HP dips below a certain amount. Normally, you're supposed to use a machine to create a shield that protects you from the attack. Damaging the boss too fast has him trigger his special attack immediately and will kill everyone.
  • Guild Wars:
    • The Doppleganger in Guild Wars: Prophecy copies a player's equipped skills and uses them against you. Players studied its usage of skills and determined it prioritized maintaining buffs, regardless of usefulness, and using skills from left to right on the skill bar. Strategies for defeating it range from front-loading the skill bar with useless buffs that will drain its energy to giving it useless skills with only the right-most being employed by the player. Many classes are able to defeat the Doppleganger with a single skill.
    • The most widely available strategy is using the single skill Empathy which causes damage whenever the afflicted attacks. The player need only cast the spell as needed and avoid attacking; the Doppleganger will die faster than its melee can kill the player.
  • In one of the early Elf quests of the Epic Story line, in The Lord of the Rings Online, you're charged with rescuing an elf, where you have to carefully navigate through a fortress city, avoiding patrols (which will spawn more mobs) until you reach the ship the elf is held captive on. However, this part can be easily breezed past by simply making a bee-line to the ship, jumping the side rail, and standing behind it. All the mobs that aggroed and spawned will be stuck on the railing, failing to path to the part with no railing, and instead, trying to rush directly at you. At this point, you can just pick each of them off at your leisure with any ranged skill you have — before advancing the quest by talking to the elf.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Perhaps best example for Melee mobs in the classic version of the game has to be fences. Caster Players like mage, hunter or warlocks can jump over a fence, and the mob will just try to run around it. You can jump again when they are about to reach you and they'll run around it all over again. Rinse and repeat, and you can even defeat a group of mobs at once this way without ever getting hit. Melee mobs in areas with farms or graveyards like Westfall and Duskwood are suceptible to this tactic. Later expansions changed this so the mobs will just pass over or through the fence to reach the player.
    • Jousting in Wrath of the Lich King:
      • Jousting can be frustrating because the A.I. is always faster than you and has a shorter cooldown than you on all the moves. However, after a set period of time they will always, always turn and ride away, giving you ample opportunities to hit them in the back and charge them down.
      • Also, you can spam the thrust attack to get a melee hit while charging. Best tactic is to hold on strong with thrust spamming, wait until he turns and runs, charge and thrust. While your charge takes you past him and winds down, turn around and spam the spear throw to get in that attack as well and get in close to repeat the cycle. The idea to charging first instead of throwing and then charging is that the latter often gives the A.I. time to charge before you, while the former denies this. Every cycle, your opponent can lose up to two shield charges, costing you a single one at most you can recover immediately.
      • Even easier, you can beat every A.I. jouster while taking nothing but thrust attacks by abusing their minimum range. Run past them and jump while mouse turning so you're going backwards while facing them, and you can use shield breaker or charge instantly as soon as the abilities light up. The A.I. will attempt to close to melee and will never use their ranged abilities unless you run too far.

    Maze Game 
  • Pac-Man is completely deterministic — if you make the same moves on a given level, the ghosts will always respond the same way — allowing players to develop and memorize patterns guaranteed to clear a level if executed correctly. Here's the particularly show-off-y "Donut Dazzler" pattern. Ms. Pac Man solved this by randomizing the ghosts for the first seven seconds, and not resetting the RNG at the beginning of each life.

    Mecha Game 
  • In Besiege, enemies are coded to attack whatever part of your contraption is considerably larger than the rest and contains the Key Block. For the most part this makes them a threat as typically that is your contraption and anything else is pieces that have fallen or broken off, or spent projectiles you've hurled. This means, however, if you build a large mobile platform that deploys attack drones, and move the large platform far enough away that all enemies stop chasing it, they will ignore said drones when they enter their attack range. A drone can be as simple as a bomb and remote grenade, or a flamethrower, or a buzzsaw, on wheels or with propellers, and a clever player could cram enough of them onto their contraption to sweep pretty much any map.
  • MechWarrior:
    • In the free release of MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, the newly added dumbfire Inferno Rockets can completely break the A.I. Infernos cause a massive amount of Over Heating, and their rate of fire is enough to keep an enemy completely shut down from overheating. Players can override the automatic shutdown to fight back albeit with some catastrophic engine damage, but the A.I. cannot and aren't even designed to fire weapons if they can't handle the heat output without overriding in the first place.
    • There was a hilariously easy way to break the "Beach Fight" mission on New Exford. The premise is that you must take an understrength company of 'Mechs into battle against ten Clan heavy 'Mechs on open terrain, led by an Ace Pilot in a powerful, tough, and agile Mad Cat Mk II. Going in 8 versus 10 against the superior equipment of the Clans is usually a great way to have a lot of shot up 'Mechs and possibly dead pilots at the end of it all, a fairly punishing price to pay. So, here's the trick: Go alone. The A.I. for that mission is theoretically following the Clan rules of war known as zellbrigen, and the commander in her Assault 'Mech normally challenges you and only you, forcing her subordinates to not fight you. However, according to those rules of honor, firing on anyone but the person challenging you is dishonorable and should result in all the Clanners taking shots at you, but in this mission it was coded as "No other Falcons will engage the player until the Falcon commander's 'Mech is destroyed." What this means that you can choose to cripple her 'Mech instead, rendering its weapons useless and unable to damage you, then turn on her allies, walk right up to each of them, and score easy headshots or shots in the back without them retaliating, even as you destroy them one by one. The trick is surviving a straight fight against the Mad Cat Mk II while crippling but not destroying it — taking her down will cause all the remaining Clanners to dogpile your 'Mech if you're alone, honorable rules of war be damned.

    Platform Game 
  • In Donkey Kong 64, the best way to avoid being hit by the first boss's missiles is to just... stand still. The first salvo will hit the ground far away enough in front of you that you won't be harmed. Once the boss starts moving and repositioning itself, you'd better start running. Presumably, the developers never noticed this because they never thought any player would be stupid enough to just stand still when the boss is firing at them.
  • In Kirby Super Star, the boss Computer Virus fights like it's in a turn-based game, taking turns to attack you while invulnerable during "his turn", and then sitting there letting you strike it on "your turn." Blocking with the Mirror power or turning into a statue with the Stone power during his turn makes you completely invulnerable.
  • The Mega Man series is chock-full of such examples:
    • Mega Man: Elec Man can kill you in three hits with a hard to dodge attack, but timed correctly, you can prevent him from ever attacking. Fire Man is also a notoriously difficult boss due to a bug causing him to shoot more projectiles than intended, but can be easily beaten if the player continuously jumps and shoots simultaneously without moving upon enter the boss arena, which forces Fire Man to only shoot one projectile at a time, and remain completely stationary.
    • Three Mega Man 2 bosses are purely reactive. Metal Man will not attack unless Mega Man does (or the player waits a while) and Crash Man will only jump and attack if Mega Man jumps or shoots. Heat Man however, takes the cake. It's possible to force him to do his charging attack if the player times shots correctly, and all the player has to do is jump over him.
    • In Mega Man 4, Toad Man's A.I. has... issues. When he's hit by a Mega Buster shot, even uncharged, he'll try to jump on you. If you slide under his jump and shoot him when his invincibility ends, he'll try to jump on you again. Rinse, and repeat until dead. If, for some reason, you decide to leave him alone for long enough for him to start activating Rain Flush, you can get close to him, which prompts him to try to jump on you (interrupting him attack to do it), or you can shoot him. Which makes him try to jump on you. It's not only possible but incredibly likely that anyone even the least bit experienced with Mega Man 4 will never actually see Toad Man using any attack.
      • Bright Man has a similar issue: his big attack is Bright Flash, which freezes you in place for five seconds or until you get hit by something. He likes to smash into you for a whopping 8 points of damage while you're frozen. But he only activates Bright Flash when he has exactly 24 and 8 points of health left. If you hit him with enough damage that you skip from 25 to 23 and from 9 to 7, he'll never use Bright Flash. He can still shoot you, and he'll still move around, but his attacks are predictable and his movement is slow, making him a very easy boss.
    • Also in 4, the Cossack Catcher. For some reason, if you use the slide or the Wire Adaptornote  against him, Dr. Cossack stops whatever he was doing for a second or two, then restarts his attack pattern from where he is.
    • Mega Man 8 gives us Astro Man, who's normally That One Boss... until you charge the Homing Sniper and unleash it in his face. He falls down and doesn't move, you recharge, he gets up, hit him in the face again. Repeat until dead.
    • Blade Man from Mega Man 10 is a really annoying That One Boss for those new to the game. He jumps all over the walls and ceiling, giving you little opportunity to attack him, and his signature move is a spread of three painful thrown swords aimed at the player. However, if you get familiar with his movement, and know where to stand and move such that his swords will ALWAYS miss, he becomes the most predictable boss of the eight. (Case in point: Roahm Mythril had serious trouble with Blade Man the first time he faced him in his blind run, but by the time Roahm did MM10 as a "perfect run"note , he'd cracked Blade Man's A.I. wide open to the point that his stage difficulty rating was 1/10, the lowest possible.)
    • Guts Man is particularly good at this in Mega Man Powered Up.
    • Lots of bosses in Mega Man X can have their behavior broken by their weaknessesnote , but Boomer Kuwanger can also be stuck in a loop by an extremely risky dance of death — he'll try to teleport in to bull rush X and slam him into the ceiling, but if you dart out of range while he attempts this, you get a bunch of free shots on him.
    • In Mega Man X3, if you have the air dash and are fighting Blizzard Buffalo, there's a glitch where if you're in the air at a height higher than his height (courtesy of the air dash), then instead of charging across the screen into you, he will charge straight into the wall behind him. Repeated well-timed air dashes straight up will lead to a battle where you can fire off charged shot after charged shot while he does nothing except repeatedly charge into the wall behind him.
    • The tutorial boss of Mega Man X5 is, oddly enough, the originally very difficult Magma Dragoon from Mega Man X4. With X and Zero's newfound ability to duck, however, most of his attacks now sail right over the player's head.
    • Rather hilariously, the final boss of Mega Man X7 can be defeated with Zero by taking about two steps forward, then two or three steps (depending on camera angle) to the right and then holding down the button that executes Zero's reflective guard move. The boss either misses or hits himself with every attack. The actual position is a little tricky to get into, unfortunately, but once there, you're set.
    • The speedrunner HideOfBeast, who plays the X games under severe constraintsnote , has had to break several bosses' A.I. to beat them. Mega Man X2 boss Bubble Crab is easily the one he's embarrassed the most.
    • In Mega Man Zero, Harpuia will always react to getting hit with a fully charged Ice shot by shooting three easily avoidable wave attacks. By the time he's finished firing all three attacks you'll be fully charged again and can fire another shot, and he'll just respond the exact same way. You can trap him in that pattern until he dies. He gets slightly smarter in the sequel, but not by much. You can still use basically the same strategy.
    • Phoenix Magnion in Mega Man Zero 2 hovers in place until you try to attack him. If his A.I. detects input from either attack button while you're near him, he flies or teleports away and counterattacks, which is your window to deal damage. If you hit him hard enough, he cancels the attack and goes back to waiting for you to attack him. Equip the Thunder Chip, Z-Saber, and Shield Boomerang. Charge your saber, tap the Shield button to bait him without triggering his Mercy Invincibility, then slap him out of his attack run with the Z-Saber. Repeat until dead.
    • In the MM4 ROM hack Rockman 4 Minus ∞, if you attempt to use Rush during the second phase of the battle against Snatch Man, Rush will end up assisting your Evil Doppelgänger instead. The only way to stop Rush from doing this is to suck Snatch Man up with the Recycle Inhaler, allowing you to finish him off while he's trapped in the can. That is, if you didn't let Snatch Man steal the Recycle Inhaler between phases...
  • In the SNES version of Prince of Persia, a character backed against a wall no longer has room to recoil from being hit and becomes helpless against non-stop sword strikes.
    • Arino in Retro Game Master also discovered the same thing by accident when he was playing the game, which made the challenge noticeably easier.
  • Olmec, the final boss of Spelunky, will quickly stomp in place if the player runs under too soon after he jumps. While this will catch any player too eager to cross to the other side, it does make Olmec dig its grave more quickly. If the position is just right, it also creates a safe zone for the player to repeat the process, as seen in this speedrun. The exact same trick returns in the HD remake as well.
  • During team battles in Sonic Heroes, flying out of the enemy team's reach makes them spin around in circles without attacking until you land. Since you can fly infinitely as long as you stay in one place, you can safely use Thunder Shoot until the Team Blast meter is full to make the fight much easier. That is, as long as the enemy team doesn't kill themselves first.
  • Using Spider-Man's slide kick attack at just the right distance makes fighting Puma in the Game Boy Advance version of Spider-Man 2 a breeze, since he just stands in place as you hit him over and over again.
  • Spyro: Year of the Dragon:
    • Enemies on the whole don't attack you when they're off-screen, allowing you to render them harmless if you keep the camera rotated away from them while you approach. You can even cancel their attacks by deftly rotating the camera off of them for a moment. Since a lot of enemies are largely immobile and tend to patrol small areas, this is an effective tactic against any enemy that is otherwise deadly to engage fairly like the gun-toting dinosaurs of Dino Mines.
    • During the boxing match as Bentley the Yeti in the Frozen Altars level you have a very good chance of winning both times if you just hold right and mash O for quick jabs as fast as you can without letting up. You'll take hits, a lot of hits even, but the opponent usually takes just a wee bit more damage than you. When you're blocking he responds with specific attacks to get around it, but when you're on the offensive he picks his three attacks at random, so if you keep throwing quick jabs you're guaranteed to hit him first any time he goes for a low shot or a wind-up, which is 66% of the time. Given the fight is one of the hardest challenges in the game if you attempt to actually fight properly, this is a welcome little abuse of the game's A.I.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989):
    • The first NES game had a hilarious one with the foot soldiers; walk away from them at exactly the right moment as they jump at you, and they get confused and start hopping in place without attacking. Makes them rather easy to beat.
    • Not to mention being able to defeat Rocksteady by staying on top of the box in the upper right corner of the room and repeatedly attacking downwards as Donatello: Rocksteady can't jump high enough to reach him, while Donatello's staff has just enough range to hit him.
    • Even Shredder is not safe from this. Stand in a certain spot (on the bottom floor on the seventh tile from left wall) when the battle starts and he cannot touch you, while you can kill him at your leisure or even put the controller down.

    Puzzle Game 
  • A common speedrunning tactic in the various Panel de Pon games is to dump a small garbage blocknote  on your CPU opponent followed by a large chain garbage block. The CPU will always prioritize the block closest to the bottom of the well, even if it doesn't make sense for it to do so. If the CPU can't dispose of it, they become paralyzed, even if there's a solution to the garbage block above it. This works even on the True Final Boss of the games, leading to easy victories if accomplished.

    Racing Game 
  • In Burnout Paradise, driving the Hunter Toy Citizen in a Marked Man event makes it incredibly easy to win as the pursuing Civilians just drive right past you.
  • When playing Crash Team Racing, take note of the line that goes down the middle of the track in Papu's Pyramid. When you race him as a boss he will without fail drive down the dead center of that line, meaning he'll hit everything you leave on it guaranteed. If you get ahead of him early on, it's rather easy to win his race with a lead of half a minute by abusing this.
  • Crashday: "Welcome to the Underground", in the Professionals League, is a Race Point-to-Point race with weapons which takes place inside of a series of tunnels, with the occasional outdoors racing. In this race, you can exploit the AI tendency to shoot you if you shoot them to get into the first place to get them to stop, usually with them facing the walls of the tunnels, and then use nitro to get as far as possible. With the right car and the right customisations, you can rack up a lot of money via easy wins, as this race also pays a decent replay amount ($11.500).
  • Cops in the original Driver are often faster than you and incredibly persistent, but handle their cars horribly, to the point that simple slaloming between cars and other obstacles are often all you need to get them to crash.
  • Playing on the X Cup in F-Zero X is bound to hit this trope at some point. Because the tracks in the X Cup have randomized designs, it's possible to have tracks where the A.I. cannot handle the weird dips and curves, causing them to fling themselves off the track. It is entirely possible for the X Cup to generate a track where all 29 A.I. opponents kill themselves with no effort on your part.
  • Mario Kart:
    • In Super Mario Kart, the computer will always jump over a banana peel on the track if it could reasonably see it coming on higher difficulties. On tracks where you need to hit a jump panel to proceed (which is how this game handled "figure 8" sections), placing a banana right where the computer would drive would cause all of them to miss the jump and be stuck, giving the player a clean victory.
    • Mario Kart 8 has the 200cc engine class, which is an extremely fast speed compared to the then fastest 150cc class. 200cc has the speed cranked so high that the A.I. can barely handle it. Depending on the track played, you can see the A.I. smash into the walls or go flying off the track and into a Bottomless Pit. The clearest case of this is Cloudtop Cruise, which has a shortcut near the end involving driving off the track and landing on a series of small platforms. The A.I. is programmed to attempt this shortcut, and almost every single time, it will overshoot the platforms and fall off every lap, making it one of the easiest tracks to place 1st in 200cc (provided you've accustomed yourself to the track).
  • In Mickey's Speedway USA, Colorado is peppered with so many sharp turns and Bottomless Pits that the A.I. racers will often fall off even on Professional difficulty, making it slightly easier for you to maintain a lead.
  • In StreetPass Mii Plaza's Slot Car Rivals, the computer players have problems with jumps that require boost pads, namely recovery after landing. The idea is to let go of the accelerator right before the end of the jump, which will provide the boosts needed to cross the gaps. However, the A.I. will not restart the accelerator until long after it has landed, causing the A.I.'s cars to decelerate to an unnecessary degree. This makes racetracks with many such jumps, like Soaring Skyway and Start 'n' Stop Island, pathetically easy to beat the A.I. on by huge margins. Even the Final Boss, Iceman, takes jumps like this, and is the key to outdoing him as he will play near-perfectly otherwise.
  • Twisted Metal 2:
    • The entire game is about this. Park on a rooftop where the enemies cannot get to you, avoid the occasional missile and wait while the enemies pile up down below and hit each other while fruitlessly spamming their weapons. The only level that cannot be beaten this way is (for this reason) by far the hardest. But it is fair: the A.I. is a cheating bastard and if you attempt to fight honestly, you'll get blasted with an endless chain of freeze missiles with no hope for escape or get 20 special weapons in your face.
    • While the final boss cannot be beaten this way, he fails at another cheap trick you can exploit for all it's worth: land mines. Just drive around the city, dropping long rows of mines. Eventually he WILL roll over them, taking tiny amounts of his enormous life bar until you can finish him off in a regular shot or two (or just finish him with mines, really).
    • Why use mines when you can simply play hide and seek in one of the buildings?

    Real Time Strategy 
  • Age of Empires:
    • Attempting to convert a unit with two priests at once in the original Age of Empires would leave it unable to decide which to attack, resulting in the unit standing still until converted.
    • Also in Age of Empires II, the A.I. was programmed to attack walls but not gates, so making your wall entirely out of gates would make it basically indestructible.
      • Another tactic to exploit this is build one of your gates directly in front of the enemies' gates, keeping them locked in their own city till your forces are ready to overwhelm them.
    • In Age of Mythology:
      • One way to stall a Titan-level enemy was to build lots and lots of little wall pieces near their base. The A.I. soldiers see them and think "Enemy structure. Must destroy." and they do just that, giving you extra time to build an army or team up with other players.
      • Another wall example: the A.I. can be herded into ambushes consisting of your entire army. Repeatedly. See, if you build a wall all the way around your base, the A.I. will choose what it believes to be the weakest point and attack. However, it is also programmed to seek out gaps in the wall. Therefore, the best way to secure your base is to make a wall that goes almost all the way around it, and then simply park your army in the gap. As long as they can get there, the enemy will always beeline for that one spot.
      • Another variation of the above strategy is to surround one's base with walls but with a single gap, as above, then build further layers of walls around that, such that the enemy must navigate even further to get at your buildings, passing through narrow corridors of walls along the way. Line the interior of those walls with arrow towers, and the enemy will get strung out and shot to pieces as they try to run the gauntlet. Suddenly your base has turned into a Tower Defense level!
      • Not to mention the fact that you can simply use the Titans' slow walk speed against them; simply cause them to aggro a slightly faster unit (an Argus, which is basically a sentient blob, is fast enough) and lead them in circles until you get your archers/whatever to finish the Titan off.
    • In Age of Empires III, ranged attackers would usually go for the walls, and keep attacking them until they were all destroyed. Simply building a long, winding wall away from the camp could keep them busy until they could be destroyed.
  • AI War: Fleet Command has this as its whole point: Attacking the AI planet-by-planet is a certain way to lose the game. The AI doesn't get units depending on how much territory it controls and can draw ressources from, but depending on how much of a threat you appear to be. Should you for some reason manage to destroy every command command station but the final, game-winning one, you will now face fleets bigger than ever. The solution? Harm the AI as little as possible while still making progress — conquer only those planets where you can obtain something valuable, cripple the threatening ones and ignore the rest so your threat rating doesn't go up.
  • In BattleZone II, the International Space Defense Force is totally incapable of handling a player whose tank is equipped with the Sonic Wave cannon, a weapon which will make any projectile-based weapon harmlessly reflect away from your tank; the ISDF uses projectile-based weapons by default on almost every combat unit save for the Atilla LM (a very late-game unit) and the Thunderbolt scout, rendering basically every unit belonging to the ISDF A.I. completely pointless. The weapon is less of an A.I. Breaker for the Scions, who have hitscan weapons on their defense towers, and upgrade their primary tanks to fire hitscan lightning bolts. Thankfully, it's impossible to used massed Sonic Wave equipped ships, because the tank A.I. is incapable of using the weapon properly.
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn is full of these.
    • Attacking an enemy harvester would always make the A.I. empty its base to defend the harvester with everything it had.
      • Enemy harvesters would also try to run over attacking Recon Bikes, which they had no hope of catching. This means a Nod player could ride a single Bike to a couple of enemy harvesters, fire a shot at each, and then lure the harvesters back to his base defenses.
    • Building a wall of sandbags or other barriers allowed the player to completely trap the A.I. in its base. It never intentionally tries to destroy them.
    • The A.I. would rebuild its bases according to the predetermined layouts if any of it was destroyed, and it would ALWAYS replace lost buildings if it had the financial capability to do so, allowing the player to drain their funds easily if a vulnerable building could be found to continuously wail on (and the A.I. would always spend money to repair damaged buildings). The final mission of the GDI campaign actually seems to be designed to allow the player to exploit this; a large group of Nod tiberium silos is concentrated outside of the main base, allowing the player to continuously capture them (stealing the money inside), sell the silos and transfer the stored tiberium to their own storage facilities, and then the A.I. would rebuild them and fill them up to be captured again. On the flipside, another GDI final mission has the A.I. suddenly start building near a tiberium field, making the A.I. rather dangerous.
    • Combine the last two by building a sandbag where an A.I. building was destroyed and the A.I. will never rebuild that building.
    • The A.I. scans for targets starting from the top left of the screen, possibly assuming that was where your construction yard was. This meant that you could defend against airstrikes by putting a minigunner northwest of your base. This was much more cost-effective than building multiple SAM sites to destroy the planes, which had no rebuild cost. It also meant that you could potentially stop your base from ever being attacked, simply by diverting the A.I. away from it.
    • Similarly, with Engineers the A.I. always tried to take over your Tiberium silos. Even if it has to walk past your Construction Yard or other valuable buildings, not to mention other units eager to shoot them, to get there. When you don't have silos, it may send Engineers into defense structures, which can't be taken over. (You as the player cannot give such an order; when the computer does it, the engineers just disappear into the building which remains unaffected.)
    • The "wall trick" exploits the A.I.s' incapability to directly attack walls. It involves building a sandbag wall across the map to the enemy base, then sealing them inside with concrete walls. Any wall will work for sealing them in, but Concrete walls work best as collateral damage is possible with certain units.
  • Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars:
    • The A.I. doesn't consider Tiberium fields to be harmful, so you can bait the A.I. to fight there (if your own units are immune) or go through it, useful for weakening infantries, even outright killing the tier-1 group.
    • Support power that harms an A.I. unit is considered an attack against it, which will then attempt to retaliate against the building used to enable the power, even if it means leaving a relatively defended position on the path of deadly turrets.
    • Global Conquest mode has several:
      • Tactical battle doesn't consider MCV and other production-building capability to overwhelm the opposition. This means a Tier-3 base that in Real Time will be swarming with defenders before your strike force can even reach it is easily defeated in Tactical A.I.
      • Orca and Vertigo strikes are only used against strike forces inside the AI base area of influence, thus an easy way to avoid it is to stop right outside their border before striking. Other support powers are only used against bases and prioritize those with strategic structures, letting your basic bases and strike forces go around untouched.
      • AI strike force in Real Time has objectives that don't adjust to the varying situation. Enemy tanks and infantries may chill outside your base waiting for you to build a turret or offensive unit (so don't), letting you build your economy in peace. Quickly disabling enemy harvesters (or destroying their building on strategic view) might lead the A.I. stuck waiting for the resource that never comes and not selling/building anything. Destroying walker's husk doesn't stop the engineers sent to recover them from walking to their deaths, or vice versa, leaving the husk to keep the enemy barracks producing engineers that immediately get taken out
      • Pure anti-air units that can't harm anything not flying aren't aware of that fact, and when combined with their high speed, strike force in real-time will just send those starting units to their death without support.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2:
    • The A.I. will always (and we mean always) fire their once-per-ten-minutes superweapon at the most expensive cluster of your units and buildings possible. Usually this means your War Factory, source of your main assault forces. But the Naval units you can build rack up the expenses pretty quickly as well, and superweapons do next to nothing to Naval production facilities. Cluster a bunch of Subs/Destroyers/Aircraft Carriers/Dreadnoughts around your Naval Yard, then have them scurry off when the Superweapon alarm goes off. The Superweapon lightly grazes the naval pen, and you lose nothing.
    • The A.I. also targets whichever War Factory is set as your primary building (where the units come out). So you can build one away from your base and set it as the primary just before the A.I. fires the superweapon, drawing the fire.
    • On campaign missions, the A.I. also build along a fixed base layout plan. Block the predefined location with a unit/building and the A.I. won't rebuild what was originally there. Also, A.I. units appear to be permanently stuck in Guard mode, meaning that they are very susceptible to luring via shooting them with artillery then retreating behind a wall of tanks. The A.I. will mindlessly charge the wall and get slaughtered.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
    • In the very first mission of Uprising you need to get a large group of infantry past several of the expansion's Game-Breaker units. The enemy fields artillery units that can transform into Awesome Personnel Carrier with a anti-infantry Gatling gun. In your force, you have units that can disable vehicles, but a single enemy unit can kill most of them with its close-range APC weapon. Try to just run a crowd past the enemy, and they'll massacre them with artillery fire. Winning the mission honestly is almost impossible. Alternatively, you can order a single soldier to run in a circle just within artillery range. The enemy tank will keep firing and missing him and will not start to transform into an APC until you fire at it. With your entire infantry force positioned point-blank around it.
    • The Imperial defense can switch between Anti-Air and anti-ground. Having a flying unit nearby, even if it's not in range or can't attack, will cause the turret to switch to anti-air, allowing ground forces to destroy it with impunity.
    • While the A.I. gets several advantages (notably in terms of using their powers even without a spotter and knowing where your expansions are), their strategy essentially boils down to "rush the human, then keep rushing with more expensive units and build a superweapon". If you can defeat their first wave and continue building units, you've pretty much won once you reach their base.
    • The A.I. is not good at building multiple resource expansions, meaning an Imperial player could conceivably cover the entire map in bases and correspondingly flood the enemy with units.
  • Dawn of War:
    • If you're playing as a faction that can send a long stream of units into an enemy's base (Ork Slugga Boys, Tau Harbinger Drones), the A.I. will attack them first, letting your army shoot them at range. Particularly hilarious when fighting Space Marines, as they'll often fire an Orbital Bombardment inside their own base.
    • In the Dark Crusade campaign, enemies attacking a sufficiently fortified defended area you control will get sidetracked by destroying the Listening Post just outside their base and ignore the two automatically unclaimed Strategic Points right inside it.
    • In the sequels, Cyrus is the best character to use against bosses. Simply give him all the explosives he can use, stealth him, and park your other squads with lange bombardments at maximum range. The boss will just sit there without trying to detect or counterattack and take every shot, missile and grenade to the face until you move in your melee squads for the kill.
    • A.I. units will always run away from a demo charge before it can explode. However, they always run directly away from it, allowing you to herd them into a remote charge (even more damaging, and invisible) or into range of your other units, or simply get them to stop shooting you for a few seconds.
  • In Dungeon Keeper, the Computer's Keepers would drop their entire army on an intruder that is seen on their territory, while you can only pick up eight creatures at a time. You can turn this against them later in the game when you get the spell Destroy Wall. All you have to do is find the enemy portal (which you already see at the start), and destroy some of the walls around it, leaving bare earth. Drop an imp on it, and you can see into the enemy base (at which point you can cast lightning, picking off the enemies one by one). The A.I. Breaker comes when the enemy spots the imp next to the portal, and drops its army on the portal because it is next to the imp, at which point you pick up the imp. A good number of them will walk into the portal, as dropping a creature on the portal dismisses it. Repeat this a few times, and the Keeper will have removed most of its strongest creatures without spilling a drop of blood. It's best to do this on a level where gems are available, as this can be costly.
  • Empire Earth:
    • The game has one example where A.I. units attack whoever attacked them with all priority, even if that means getting past the wall of other units in their way. In the Greek campaign it is possible to win Alexander's battles by having a single archer move up, fire once at an enemy, and run like hell. The entire enemy army will follow and get shredded by the rest of your units, inflicting no casualties on your side (unless you let your archer get killed, then they attack anything in range).
    • Additionally, the best defence in the game is having two spaced-apart layers of walls. The A.I. is designed to make a hole in your wall and then flood through the gap. However if they break through the first wall layer only to find more walls, the invading army will simply go home. Since the maps are so big and replacing that single destroyed wall segment takes only 15 seconds, this exploit can buy the player as much time as they need to build up forces.
  • The MechCommander games had absolutely abysmal A.I.; they would make use of the game's built-in pathfinding and range-keeping routines to have their units walk towards their targets and maintain their optimal weapons range to attack, but the A.I.'s so-called decision making process could be entirely summed up by "issue a single attack command on the first thing you see." Notably, the A.I. was completely incapable of telling its units to change targets, even if its target was no longer accessible. This meant that you could destroy an unlimited number of A.I. units with minimal risk by simply getting their attention with a fast 'mech and luring them past the rest of your force. This would result in the A.I. 'mechs obliviously plodding through a lethal gauntlet of your heavy and assault 'mechs and getting shot to bits without ever returning fire as they obsessively continued to try to catch up with the harmless light 'mech on the other side of the map. Due to the game's "stat inflation" style of difficulty, exploiting this quirk was almost mandatory for completing the game on harder difficulty settings.
  • Rome: Total War:
    • When defending a city, enemy troops will tend to congregate in the town square, which they're supposed to be defending. They will continue to stand there mindlessly under a hail of missiles from the adjacent streets, so long as none of your troops actually sets foot in the square itself.
    • Alternatively, you can run a cavalry unit into the town square, cause the enemy to chase after you, then leave the square. Repeat this until the enemy can barely walk before a full frontal onslaught. This actually works in any offensive battle where you out-power your opponent.
    • Before the first patch, a single group of town watch with a Level 1 wall could easily beat any size of army that didn't have elephants or onagers. As soon as you get besieged (before they can build battering rams), sally out to meet them. Then, go out the gate opposite the army (you have a gate on each side of the town, N/S/E/W). The army will see that there is an open gate and run around the city, right by the towers. Then, go back inside. As soon as the gate closes and there is no units targetable, the army will stop where they are, regardless of whether or not they are being shot at by the towers. As only siege can target towers, they do not respond. Crank up time and watch their best units die one by one. After 15 minutes or so, the battle will end. Continue until their army is literally dead through stupidity.
    • If you attack an enemy army and then walk your archers a short distance ahead of your infantry, the enemy will send a few troops 0 — cavalry if they have them, infantry if they don't — to attack your "defenseless" archers while the rest of their infantry force holds back. If you wait until their infantry are almost to your archers, you can then pull back your archers, massacre their tiny infantry detachment, back off and repeat until their entire army is dead or the A.I. generals decides that they Know When to Fold 'Em and run away.
    • Notably, all of these exploits were fixed in the remake.
    • The AI has trouble dealing with attacking walled settlements in general - it will secure a gate and pile its entire army through it, never bothering to run some units along the walls to capture the towers along its path to the town plaza and stop them from shooting its army. You can line up the walls along the path to the town plaza with ranged units, which will outright massacre the enemy army from height as it moves forward. Once the AI has climbed the walls and captured a gate, it will - if no enemy units are near it on the walls - go down to the street level and never climb the walls again, no matter how easily it *could* slaughter all the archers currently turning its soldiers into pincushions.
  • In Sacrifice's skirmish mode, the A.I. never uses the low-level but powerful Teleport spell, giving human players an enormous advantage.
  • Starcraft:
    • A well-known example: If you wall off a chokepoint with buildings that don't attack (generally Terran supply depots) and then put ranged attackers behind those buildings, the A.I.'s Zerglings or Zealots will run around in front of the buildings looking for a nonexistent path while you shoot them to ribbons.
    • Another with Carriers: they have no attack of their own, but rather attack with swarms of mini-units they themselves build. These units, called Interceptors, are targetable and indeed destroyable — and the A.I. will usually prioritize them rather than the Carrier itself. They're also cheap as chips and speedily rebuilt, so Carriers can easily wreak havoc on enemy bases without incurring much damage. Notably this is a tactic doomed to fail against human opponents, who'll ignore the Interceptors entirely and focus all available firepower on the Mook Maker, whose death will also eliminate its sub-units from the fight — but the automated defenses still follow A.I. rules, so Carriers remain useful against turtling players.
    • There are two examples of this in StarCraft II.
      • First is that the A.I. will ALWAYS have an attack around 6 minutes. If you build up enough to defeat that early attack, you can simply macro up to take their base when their second (much smaller) attack comes.)
      • Secondly, the A.I.'s response to a rush (very early offensive tactics) can be sub-par which allows you to always win if you use those tactics. It used to be that the A.I. could never handle these extremely early attacks, but in a case of Artificial Brilliance, newer versions of the game A.I. can recognize and stop some forms of early aggression using the same methods a human would (catching you in the act, then attacking with Worker Units).
  • Stronghold was plagued with A.I. that would always send its melee troops to the nearest gap in the fortress walls instead of attacking the nearest or weakest wall. This allowed the user to set up elaborate death traps of burning pitch fields and endless rows of archers to decimate the incoming hordes as they marched mindlessly toward the "weak spot", or even better mazes.
  • Warcraft:
    • Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness: The campaign missions can often be dealt with by throwing your starting forces into suicide runs on the computer's transports (which the computer rarely if ever rebuilds) and/or town hall, buying all the time you need. Dungeon Bypasses and the computer's inability to marshal distant forces when under attack help.
    • Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos:
      • In skirmish games with a random hero enabled, the A.I. will react to an enemy hero attacking by sending their own hero. However, if severely damaged the hero will run away, either until you stop chasing or into a group of creeps, denying you the experience when it dies, and leaving their base crippled. They also have great difficulty dealing with focus-firing on heroes or hit-and-run by air units.
      • The A.I. often has problems if it didn't start with the right hero, often doing nothing until it get to Tier 2 and the desired hero. By end game (if they survived that long) they are then stuck with two useable heroes and a weak one in their base, while the others are running around with three high-level heroes.

    Roguelike 
  • The Binding of Isaac:
    • Most enemies that chase the player, as well as some bosses, will stand around and do nothing if they can't figure out how to reach them (e.g. if the player can fly and is sitting on the other side of a pit from them or on top of some rocks). If that enemy can't shoot back, they are completely helpless.
    • Gurdy can be reliably baited into using her five projectiles if you stand in a specific place beside her. Since this has considerably wind-up (she twitches and her face sinks into her body) you can pretty easily dodge it (by briefly running down and toward the center of the room), so once you get into position and into a good pattern you can just stand there shooting her, occasionally dodging, and just drain her health without her ever coming close to hitting you back. Occasionally she'll spawn enemies, but usually they'll be blocked by her own body or out of range, and the occasional one that gets past you can duck into position to shoot without breaking momentum at all. Despite her menacing appearance, Gurdy is even easier than Monstro once you get this simple pattern down.
    • Ultra Greed has a move where he charges at you until he hits a wall. With the Gnawed Leaf, you can block him in mid-charge, causing him to get stuck in his charging animation until you move out of the way. Add any damage-dealing orbital familiar and enough time, and you've basically won the fight.
  • Etrian Mystery Dungeon has Provoke, a skill that makes enemies target the user of the skill instead of allies. However, enemies target that character even if they can't get to them due to one reason or another, making the best strategy against bosses and DOEs to have the Protector use Provoke and stand behind the Runemaster or Hexer as the enemy shuffles around fruitlessly.
  • The CPU characters in Spelunky HD can have some amusing behaviors in Deathmatch mode.
    • If they're in a closed-off area, they'll bomb their way out, but if they have no bombs but do have access to a mattock, they'll pick it up and never intentionally use it to dig their way out. The best they'll do is use it to break a crate if one happens to spawn near them, and accidentally dig at the same time. Setting starting bombs to zero and picking The Dig as your level will easily let you see this.
    • If both a cape and a jetpack are in the level, a CPU will lay on the ground and repeatedly drop one to put on the other. Frame-perfectly, at that. The only things that will disrupt them are either another Spelunker or the anti-camping Alien Queen psychic blast (if you have it active).
    • If they get caught in one of the honey globs on the floor on Buzzing, they have a tendency to stop making any effort to escape (even with the anti-camping attacks on), despite it being possible to jump or walk out.

    Shoot 'Em Up 
  • Defender has the Mutant Reverse Line. The playing field is Wrap Around, but the deadly mutant aliens never take advantage of this: Players crossing the threshold will cause any nearby attackers to scurry off in the opposite direction on the long way around. But given the game's vicious difficulty level, no one complains.
  • Robotron: 2084 has the "Mikey bug". On the fifth level, there are about a dozen Mommy clones and one Mikey clone. The brain robots will all seek out Mikey and ignore the Mommy clones. If you can keep Mikey alive, and not rescue him, you can finish off most of the brains and then score a huge number of points picking up the Mommy clones. Here's an example.
  • In the second act of Soulstar's final level, there are a couple of giant mechs that will come from the background every once in a while. While powerful, they're unable to aim at you if you get close and circle them, resulting in them jumping, vulnerably, to another position.
  • Thunder Zone: The top-level A.I. has excellent reflexes and aim, but is predictable. It will always fly straight toward the player at maximum speed. Flying toward it to engage in close combat will almost always be suicide, but if you instead fly directly away and just start launching missiles backward, the computer will charge straight into them until it dies.
  • Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View:
    • The lasers in Eiki Shiki's boss summon Spell Card (Level 4 Charged Attack) are an A.I. Breaker because the A.I. only plans ahead a couple frames at a time. Like most other Touhou lasers, it gives plenty of warning with a thin line marking the path where it's about to fire, which any human player would see as a sign that they should get out of the way ASAP. The A.I. will ignore the warning and dilly-dally, try to move out of the way at the last second, and get hit because the laser is too wide for them to move far away enough before it hits.
    • Most of Aya's attacks, in normal gameplay, can be easily avoided by simple bullet streaming. The A.I., however, doesn't bother with such tactics, and promptly takes a shot to the face due to its poor handling of fast-moving bullets. This can reduce the amount of time the A.I. survives by nearly 50%.
    • The A.I. handles Medicine's poison clouds fairly poorly; these clouds reduce movement but the A.I. plans ahead everything with assumed normal speed which may make the A.I. run into a bullet it would have otherwise perfectly dodged.
  • Touhou Juuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost: The A.I. handles Chiyari's homing purple flames poorly. Not only is the A.I. easily backed into a corner by them, they will also stop moving when caught inside them, leading to a quick death once Mercy Invincibility wears off. This is so effective that Chiyari can defeat her story mode opponents before the Instant-Win Condition by depleting all 5 of their lives, while other characters would be lucky to take out even one.
  • U.N. Squadron / Area 88's Stage 3 boss (the forest fortress) and Stage 8 boss (the battleship) have turrets that fire at you... but only at preset angles. If you position yourself far away enough from and slightly above the altitude of a turret, you'll be perfectly safe from it while in place to pound it into pieces. The same applies to their counterparts in the SNES port as well as in its Creator-Driven Successor, Carrier Air Wing.

    Sports Game 
  • In Blades of Steel, you couldn't aim your shot; an arrow would move back and forth across the goal to show where your shot would go, and the goalie was very good at standing in front of it. You could, however, skate directly at the goal and pass the puck into the net without any reaction from the goalie at all.
  • FIFA Soccer:
    • In FIFA Soccer 2003 the opposing goalkeeper had a habit of rushing out to the edge of his box when a free kick was rolled for a second player to take a shot. Free kicks in central positions, no matter the distance from goal, could therefore lead to certain goals for players with high enough long shooting stats.
    • The original FIFA International Soccer had a notorious A.I. exploit: stand in front of the opposing goalkeeper when he's about to take a goal kick, and he'll blindly kick it straight to you, allowing you to run past him and score.
    • One year's release had unlockable cheats that could be used to modify gameplay. One of these turned the touchlines into invisible walls, off which the ball would ricochet. With this enabled, one could run towards goal, and shoot so that the ball would fly over the crossbar. The opposing goalkeeper would try and save the wild shot, leaving the player free to catch the rebound and tap in to the now undefended goal.
  • Nintendo's Ice Hockey had a bug in which if you skated straight at your opponent's net, just below the middle of the rink, and held the "shoot" within a certain range, the goalie would move out of the way, letting you make an easy shot.
  • Madden NFL:
    • The SNES games had this problem: it is possible to use the same play for an entire season and the computer opponent could never figure out how to stop you.
    • Quite a few offensive plays can be used infinitely and the A.I. will never catch on. Exactly which plays vary from year to year as the A.I. is tweaked, but there has yet to be an iteration of the game which doesn't include at least a few of these. For example, you can set "Hot Routes" for individual receivers before the play starts. Set your Tight End to run an "Out" or "Slant" pattern, and throw just after he cuts on the Out route or right after your Quarterback's dropback animation on the Slant. He'll be between the Outside Linebacker and the Cornerback and uncovered by either 9 out of 10 times, even on All-Madden difficulty.
    • For several iterations in the mid-2000s, it was possible to take manual control of defensive linemen before the snap and align them in ways which break the offense's blocking A.I., creating unstoppable blitzes. Madden 08 nerfed this by moving these players back to their original position once you switch manual control.
    • Madden 18 took this to the next level with the Gun Monster playbook. This set of plays involves lining up only three offensive linemen in the center with the tackles lined up next to the wide receivers. The problem? The A.I. responds to this play by spreading out its front seven to cover the groups of three, resulting in an easy run up the middle every single time. (In real life, as the tackles aren't eligible receivers, the defense won't bother to cover them.) EA eventually nerfed this playbook in response.
    • A.I. players set their contract demands based on their Overall rating. One common trick is to forcibly change their position to one they are terribly ill-suited for (WR -> DT, for example), so that their Overall rating takes a massive hit. Then re-sign them for peanuts and switch them back. You could even do this to opposing teams' players and get them to trade away their stars.
  • In Major League Baseball for the NES, throwing a slow pitch would make the computer batter move toward the front of the batter's box. It was possible to throw a slow curve ball to the left that did not cross the front of the plate (so the computer batter wouldn't swing) but did catch the back of it (so it would be called a strike). Using this one pitch repeatedly, it's possible to pitch a perfect game of 81 consecutive strikes.
    • Nearly any baseball game that allows the player to control the pitch at all in midair can utilize the same trick: At some point during the pitch, have the ball curve away from the hitter (the timing is different in each game and depending on the pitcher's abilities, of course). If the timing is right, the A.I. batter will swing even though the ball has gone out of hitting range, causing a strike. Get really good at this and you can pitch a perfect game with ease.
  • In the PS3/360 version of NCAA Football 11, pump-faking backwards causes all the defenders to abandon their assignments and rush the QB, leaving your receivers completely uncovered downfield.
  • NHL Stanley Cup for the Super Nintendo had a flaw where performing a full-power slapshot from one of the lines would cause the puck to fly over the opponent goalie's head directly into the goal, as being that far out made the goalie pull out.
  • Up until NHL 2001, the goalie A.I. was so slow at poke checking, skating in front of the goalie would cause it to attempt a poke check with the player free to shoot on an empty net.

    Stealth-Based Game 
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • Assassin's Creed:
      • Those wild sword swings guards make can hurt other guards. What's that? You can crowd them together while they chase you? You don't say...
      • It also has one that can specifically be used to get an achievement. There's an achievement for staying in combat for 10 minutes. You can get the guards near vigilantes, and the guards will just keep running into the vigilantes without knocking them down, going around, etc.
    • In the second game, if you jump on a beam about 3 meters above the ground and your legs are pulled up, enemies can't reach you with their weapons, so they switch to throwing stones. As they do, they holster their weapons. Then you can assassinate one or two of them and jump up again and repeat. Amazingly effective.
  • The Metal Gear:
    • In Metal Gear during the boss fight against Big Boss. He always tries to be on the opposite side of the room to you, so if you stand in the middle of the room, he gets confused and runs back and forth in one of the corners until you move. You can use this exploit to force him to run over your mines.
    • Metal Gear Solid is full of them. All of these examples and more are demonstrated in a mostly finished tool-assisted speedrun of the game, done by theenglishman.
      • Vulcan Raven sometimes fails to notice that he's knocked over one of the crates, but the collision detection keeps track. You can lure him into shooting one down, and then watch him walk into it repeatedly until he's provided with some other stimulus, like seeing you. If you hide in the corner, you can flatten him with Nikita missiles without him moving from his spot. He also has a slight overlap in his cone of vision and his minigun's hit radius, meaning that he can theoretically be whaling on a wall while you stand behind a wall and Nikita spam.
      • During the second phase of the Hind D fight (after the first major air strike) standing underneath the Hind will cause Liquid to be unable to see you, and you can spam Stingers underneath him while he strafes back and forth looking for you.
      • Guards will have a temporary moment of blindness after finishing their search of a suspicious noise, allowing you to take them out early.
      • It's possible, with very precise timing, to interrupt Ocelot's initial attack animation so that he enters a state where every single shot of his will miss as long as you keep firing at him.
      • During the second Sniper Wolf battle you can use Nikita missiles instead of the PSG1, and Wolf is only programmed to react to the rifle. She won't attempt to dodge, hide from, or even shoot the slowly approaching missiles, turning what is normally That One Boss into a Zero-Effort Boss.
      • And, of course, the infamous Infinite Combo, which can leave an enemy, with proper timing, in a constant state of recoil, allowing you to wail away as long as you keep the rhythm.
    • In Metal Gear Solid 2, when fighting the Harrier, you can't protect yourself from its missiles by hiding behind objects, because the missiles will always hit the object, and its explosion passes through the object and hits you. However, if you press yourself up against the object, the A.I. will think you're trying to move in that direction, and the missiles will always come in too low to hit you. May be the only way to beat it on Extreme.

    Survival Horror 
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach:
    • Standing on elevated surfaces essentially makes you invisible. The Hostile Animatronics might be standing right in front of you, and they'll just call for you as if you were somewhere else completely.
    • Montgomery Gator is normally immune to getting stunned by the Fazcam and the Fazerblaster since his sunglasses block the flash. However, with good timing, if you set off the Fazcam the second he grabs you he'll just sort of... drop you and wander away. This glitch renders him a complete non-threat.
  • Like the Silent Hill example below, a similar tactic exists in Resident Evil 2 (Remake) with the Combat Knife. Because it's so quick it can stun-lock zombies, Lickers, and even William Birkin if you're quick on the button and hit vital points. There's not a damned thing they can do about it unless they get incredibly lucky. Knives have limited durability to prevent this from being exploited, at least until you get the infinite durability knife from New Game Plus.
  • In Silent Hill: Homecoming, spamming the fast attacks with the knife and dagger causes enemies to not be able to counterattack or dodge, with the exception of bosses.

    Tabletop Game 
  • Given their computational power and knowledge databases, defeating most computer programs in Chess requires you to take advantage of these: defeating the best chess engines requires you to utilize anti-computer tactics and have a grandmaster level of skill in chess... but even then, a draw is considered impressive. Take a look at the Brains in Bahrain for an example of anti-computer play. Simpler chess programs usually have more easily exploitable weaknesses.
    • At the very least, you want to take trades early and often unless there's an obvious reason not to. This is less about the computer's weaknesses and more about your own as accelerating the game prevents you from getting tired and impatient against an opponent with infinite stamina and patience.
    • Chess masters could beat chess playing programs by selecting suboptimal moves, which would often confuse the computer which was predicting a different course of action. However, as programming improved, this flaw has been completely removed.
  • The Dark Souls tabletop game monsters are driven by simple sets of conditionals. As a result, it is entirely possible to enter rooms where the A.I. is easily trapped in a loop that ensures they cannot harm the players. This is entirely in the spirit of Dark Souls.
  • There's a card in Dominion called Rats, which trashes a card in your hand and replaces it with another copy of Rats. In the Android version, something about this card breaks the A.I. players' valuation algorithms, and they'll happily play Rats every time they can, until they've trashed their entire deck and have nothing left but a bunch of Rats. The smarter A.I. players just don't buy the card in the first place, but if you can give them a copy with a card like Masquerade, they'll do the exact same thing.
  • Machine learning has finally produced Go programs that are capable of beating the best human players. However, with the help of another A.I. program, it was discovered that the "superhuman" Go programs taught themselves a flawed algorithm to determine whether stones are alive or dead: it usually works just fine, but predictibly goes wrong in a certain unusual situation involving groups that form circles around other groups that an opponent can set up fairly easily. Until the Go programs are successfully retrained to learn a correct way to handle these kinds of board positions, they can be beaten by skilled amateur human players that know how to exploit the flaw.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • In the Microprose game, the A.I. isn't very smart in itself, but it at least seems to understand the game, until you use Black Vise and then the computer will do whatever it takes to reduce its own hand, even if the move itself is worse than just taking the damage or even if there's an obvious, obviously better move (using a card to kill his own creatures when he can kill yours, for example), and even if it's well below the four-card safe range.
    • We can do you one better: The enemy A.I. will also do similar moves if it's above the seven card limit. And there are a few decks that can eliminate enemy lands with ease. Therefore, mana lock him, and he will be enchanting your creatures with Holy Strength in no time.
    • Also, while no pre-built deck combines Spellbook (no hand size limit) with Ivory Tower (gain life every turn equal to the cards in hand minus four), should YOU make one and the computer gets both those cards on the field, he will proceed to play NOTHING.

    Third-Person Shooter 
  • Star Wars: Battlefront 2's A.I. is programmed to duck and roll if you throw a grenade at them. Good in theory, and works well in most cases. Just not on the Death Star. The map features railing-less walkways over bottomless pits.
  • Splatoon:
    • Octolings are fast, able to wield the same weaponry you do, and tend to be very aggressive and accurate. They also don't know how to deal with your Autobomb subweapon. Introduced in Splatoon 2, the Autobomb is a small, land-based drone that walks up to the nearest enemy it can find, then explodes after a short time. Octolings enemies in single-player do not seem to be programmed to confront Autobombs and often shoot at it while standing still, perhaps under the belief it has a health bar that can be depleted, only for the Autobomb to walk right up to them and detonate for an instant knockout. Sometimes, an Octoling will instead react by hiding in her ink and not moving instead, but this doesn't work either, since Autobombs can detect them even while hiding.
    • During the "Rush" event in Salmon Run, Chum and Goldies will dash, single-file, to whichever Inkling has the Glowflies around his or her head. If one of the players has a Roller (not including brushes), that player can lower the Roller down in front of the Salmonids, and they will all crash into the Roller and splat themselves. Each stage has a single elevated "dead end" that offers only one or two entries for the frenzied Chum, so a savvy Roller or Brella player can set up shop at the entrance, letting his better-ranged buddies soften up the Goldies while the whole horde leeroy themselves into extinction.

    Tower Defense 
  • In Defense Grid: The Awakening, on some maps, towers can be used to force the flow of enemies along a particular path. You still must provide a path for them to get through, otherwise they just run through your towers. However, if you constantly change the path, by purchasing and destroying towers, you can keep the flow of enemies in a single area, thus giving your towers plenty of time to kill them off. It does make some of the most interesting and rewarding maps dull and boring, however. On the other hand, some of the more advanced maps are so hard that this strategy is effectively required to complete them perfectly. It seems to have become an Ascended Glitch.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • Civilization V:
    • The A.I. has no idea how to play as the Venice civ. Since the A.I. leans heavily towards making many small cities instead of a few big ones, playing as a faction that can't build or capture new cities except for using a very limited supply of Great People to puppeteer city-states and then fails to realize its number one priority must be gold generation leaves it absolutely crippled.
    • Venice is one of the best civs against the A.I. as well. The reasoning is similar; they don't see your gold generation and great people as a big threat, and are happy with you for not taking too much land. Once Venice gets going, it starts snowballing its gold and puppets into a powerful force, at which point the A.I. couldn't stop them if they tried.
    • Archipelago and other maps with a lot of small land masses. The A.I. isn't great at naval management, especially in the earlier versions of the game, so an intercontinental invasion is less likely to succeed, even against other A.I. Even better, these maps are the best ones for Venice to play on.
    • In general, the A.I. does not know how to manage a field army well unless those units are very mobile like mounted units, planes, or ships. Typical artillery, infantry, etc. are sent across the field without a particular order, allowing defensive players to maximize opportunities to use ranged attacks on approaching units with limited fear of retaliation. The A.I. will also tend to use a lot more melee units than a human would, and unless the A.I. army has a significant numerical or technological advantage, this mostly lets the army get torn to bits by ranged units and city defenses. The first time in the game you try attacking a city at full health with a melee unit, you'll receive helpful advice that doing so is a bad idea. The A.I. apparently did not receive that memo.
    • When declaring war, the A.I. doesn't seem to take into consideration the distance it has to travel through your borders, the terrain that's there, how fast you can bring units to the front line, how fast you generate production or gold to obtain more units, etc. So, it's not unusual to see an enemy army spill over your borders 4-5 hexes away from your city and get bogged down by forests and hills while you quickly bring other units to the cities aid via roads and railroads.
  • The Australia civ in Civilization VI doubles down on the A.I.'s inability to properly gauge production capacity. The A.I. will repeatedly start wars because it sees an enemy with small military, never mind that Australia has doubled production for 10 turns up receiving a declaration of war and will have a fresh-built defense force in place by the time the enemy gets there.
  • Disciples 3 has one that is extremely important for the Final Boss — The enemy is programmed to move mages and ranged attackers away from melee fighters, but not other mages and ranged attackers. This means that if the boss summons a Nightmare (a relatively weak mage, considering other combatants) in a specific spot next to a corner of the battlefield, the player can move Myzrael there to ensure only a single melee fighter hits them at a time. And considering that all but a single enemy in that fight is melee, and that single enemy can be killed in a few attacks, it gives the player a chance to win when otherwise it would've been a Curb-Stomp Battle in opponent's favor.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics has a few of these, but they're rare or situational enough that it's generally easier to either get better at the game, or level grind. However, players engaging in challenge runs need every advantage they can get, and there are a number of well known tricks for various bosses.
    • The most notable of such tricks is known as the Loss Strategy. Loss is an ability possessed by numerous bosses (in particular, the hardest ones) that can inflict the confusion status with 100% success rate. A confused unit will run around the battle field using random abilities at random targets. The A.I. is hard-wired to never break confusion unless it knows it can kill the target in two hits. Normally, this is not a problem, but in a solo challenge, when the player is confused and the boss cannot kill him quickly, the boss either does nothing, or uses mostly harmless spells that can't actually kill the player. With no allies to attack the confused character can only attack the boss. This means that many otherwise strategy intensive boss fights end up reduced to 'get confused with enough HP, enjoy a drink while the random A.I. slowly kills the boss'.
    • The A.I. is similarly set to ignore characters who have Death Sentence, since they'll die in three turns anyway. However, you can wear equipment or accessories that block the Death status that is applied to your unit at the end of that third turn. So give yourself Death Sentence and enjoy three turns worth of free hits.
    • The A.I. will not use attacks with elemental damage if you are wearing equipment or accessories that absorb or make you immune to said element. While this works for normal things (like shutting down Dragons, or having all physical melee units in Lionel Castle ignore you because they've got Lightning weapons and you can buy Rubber Shoes), in the original PSX version this also works against Wiegraf because the game mistakenly thinks his skills are Holy elemental; as soon as stores have Chameleon Robes are in stock and you're in a class that can wear robes, Wiegraf will never use any of his devastating sword skills on you.
    • In the battle against the assassins, they always try to kill the character with the lower HP value, which is usually Rafa, who loves charging head-on into battle (and if Rafa dies it's a Non-Standard Game Over). A player aware of this could simply get a naked unit into the battle so it would have less HP than Rafa and the assassins would go for this unit, leaving Rafa alone.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • In several games, the enemy A.I. will always target a unit who cannot counterattack if possible, even if the attack is guaranteed to miss or deal zero damage. This can easily be used to bait enemies into wasting their turns and powerful weapons on an unarmed General over a healer that could easily be killed in two attacks.
    • Although pretty risky to exploit, the one overriding rule of Fire Emblem A.I. is that, regardless of any other factor, if it is mathematically possible to kill a unit in exactly one round of combat, the A.I. will always attack them. If the wounded unit has a skill that lets them counterattack before being hit, and Wrath, which greatly boosts their odds of getting a Critical Hit when below a certain health threshold, it is possible for them to instantly kill a full-health attacker before said attacker actually gets the chance to attack.
    • In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, the Summoner class is a particularly good abuser of this: They can summon phantoms that invariably have only one hit point. This means that as long as a phantom is within range of the A.I., it will drop anything it's doing and mercilessly focus on knocking out the phantom's last hit point. What's more, one of the most dangerous lategame enemies is the Gorgon, which can use the long-range Shadowshot spell to focus-fire on your units and kill them in two or three hits — but as long as a phantom is within their range, the Gorgon is effectively neutralized.
  • The Dread Lords in Galactic Civilizations are immensely overpowered, but can easily be lead around by the nose by exploiting their aggressiveness. They will rarely stop chasing an enemy ship once they've seen it, which means a sufficiently fast ship can lead them on a merry chase all over the galaxy (though, the Dread Lords are pretty fast themselves, so this is only possible at higher tech levels). They also go out of their way to attack starbases, anywhere, so building a starbase all the way across the map from them is a great way to distract a large portion of their fleet.
  • In Heroes of Might and Magic II, the A.I. always attacks the strongest ranged units first. While most ranged units are rather fleshy, thus making this a good tactic, if you have two titans and five hundred magi, the magi are massively outdamaging the titans, yet the A.I. will still waste their attacks on the titan's massive HP. Add in the weak but plentiful halflings (whose low hit points don't matter anymore) and the Wizard troops can defeat most A.I. with little effort.
  • In Heroes of Might and Magic III, the A.I. is fairly good at avoiding terrain and traps if they can see them, unless they happen to be between their units and your own. Much like in Heroes II, A.I. creatures will always move to attack yours if they're in range, even if there's a magical wall of fire in the way.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic IV:
    • During a siege, a defending A.I. would never send its melee units out to attack your troops unless you had knocked down the castle gate, making winning such sieges a trivially easy task of "shoot the shooters first".
    • And even if you can't win the siege, hiding your army in a nearby sawmill or ore mine will lure the defenders out of the castle.
    • Melee units will always prioritize attacking the units they can reach their turn over moving towards more distant targets, which allows you to repeatedly send in summoned creatures to stall the A.I. troops, or a griffin buffed with First Strike to Total Party Kill them with its counterattacks.
  • Nintendo Wars:
    • Many levels can be taken out simply by relying on the A.I.'s loathing of APCs. You can sneak a lot of units through enemy-occupied territory just by distracting the computer with them.
    • You can similarly take advantage of the A.I.'s outright fetish for having at least one Lander on a map where they have a harbor at all times. Position a Battleship, Submarine, or Bomber that can destroy it in one turn and it will gleefully blow 12000 dollars every turn it can to build a new one just to feed to your meat grinder, severely crippling their income and giving you a gross advantage.
    • The A.I. also has a severe loathing of infantry in the process of capturing a building, even if the infantry in question has 2 HP and will need something like 10 turns to capture. It's always good to have some infantry to sacrifice reinforce your tanks.
    • Of similar note, is the A.I. utterly loves to finish off weakened units, and will prioritize doing so over doing anything else other than attacking a transport or stopping a capture (in that order). Your enemy will fly a Bomber past your Neotank that is poised to wreck their front lines and into range of your Missiles to drop a salvo of bombs on a 1HP Recon.
    • On large maps or maps with Fog of War in the first Advance Wars, enemies often won't move the majority of their units until you move into their attack range. This includes Air and Naval units, those especially powerful units which burn fuel per day just to stay on the field. The A.I. was never coded to account for this, nor is it coded to resupply its units, so you can just keep your own units supplied and keep ending your turn until they run out of fuel and sink or crash. If you're patient and don't mind getting a bad rank, it's an easy way to take out a bulk of their offensive force without taking a hit or firing a shot.
    • CO Powers that auto-target a particular clump of units can be beaten with expensive bait. Take the final mission of AW2. Sturm would throw his meteor after the expensive clump of bombers in the lower corner instead of the cheap tanks assaulting his Wave-Motion Gun at the top of the map. And considering how the meteor can only damage, but not destroy, units effectively renders the ability ineffective.
    • In Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, the A.I. knows that infantry are important. So much so that if it has fewer than 3 infantry, it will always build more, regardless of its wealth or needs. Getting out some AA guns and slaughtering infantry every turn makes levels trivial, as the computer won't ever build tanks to oppose you.
    • Two-Week Test in 2 tasks you with holding off the enemy for 14 days. If you don't build any units your enemy will have no clue what to do and will just stupidly charge forward until they've lumped all over your properties. Since the faster non-infantry units get there first the A.I. will block it's own infantry from being able to capture your HQ, and with no units to destroy they can't win by obliterating your troops. You win by doing absolutely nothing.
    • The A.I. also appears to follow a hard-coded logic table with little to no flexibility. It will always react the same way to a given playstyle. This is why those turn-by-turn walkthroughs on GameFAQs actually work if you follow the steps to a T!
    • The final battle against Sturm in the original Advance Wars is actually made easier by allowing Sturm to capture the airport near Andy's starting point. Since Sturm is guaranteed to use that airport to churn out expensive fighters and bombers every round, you can cripple his income by camping out with some missile batteries and shooting down these aircraft as soon as they spawn, slowing down his seemingly inexhaustible frontline Zerg Rush enough to make breaking through to his base significantly easier.
  • Pokémon Conquest: The A.I. has no idea how to handle the Frictionless Ice at Nixtorm, and will try to avoid crossing it at all unless they have an Ice or Flying type Pokémon on their team. If you can manoeuvre something into position to bombard them from a distance, they won't try and stop you.
  • Sunrider: In Sunrider 4: The Captain's Return, PACT Outposts prioritize debuffing your units over utilizing any of their other attacks. Even if an Outpost is the last enemy left on the map, it will forego launching its missiles and firing its assault guns in favor of debuffing any units that have not been debuffed. This allows Claude to trivialize them by repeatedly using her Restore ability to cure whatever debuffs they inflict, letting the rest of your team whittle the Outpost down as it futilely reapplies the same status effects to the same units.
  • Sword of the Stars: The A.I. doesn't really know how to deal with mines beyond "hope our PD can take it." Protip, A.I.: It can't. It also can't handle deflectors or disruptors, forward-only shields that are completely impervious to projectiles or energy weapons. Just make sure the appropriately equipped ship is in the front and the enemy will happily waste time shooting at the shield instead of trying to get around it. This is particularly effective against the Liir and Morrigi A.I., which have a strong preference to only using energy weapons.
  • Warlock: Master of the Arcane: Units have different defensive bonuses against different damage types. Ghost units, in particular, are completely immune to melee-, ranged-, and death-type damage. This won't stop the A.I. from attacking ghosts with units that don't deal any other type of damage, committing suicide-by-Counter-Attack in case of melee-units.
  • XCOM 2: Due to a programming oversight, the game doesn't have an A.I. routine to deal with unconscious units, likely because the players is unable to cause unconsciousness on enemies under usual circumstances. However, if you managed to knock an enemy unit unconscious using a mind controlled Stun Lancer or a Berserker, the A.I. would get stuck in a loop until the game forcefully ended their turn after a short while. This was later patched out.

    Western RPG 
  • In Avernum 2, controlling where you take on your enemies can make all the difference between a decisive win and a total party kill. Enemy casters' aggro radius is one square larger than their spell-casting radius, and while there is a "run up and melee" move in the A.I.'s library, "run forward a couple squares, then stop and use a ranged attack" is not. Thus, if you place a character JUST inside the aggro radius, the caster will waste their entire turn running up towards them, so your melee fighter(s) don't have to spend precious turns under fire getting across a room to them.
  • In the original Baldur's Gate, rods of summoning didn't have a cap, and enemy A.I. don't have target preferences, so one tactic used is to summon hordes of weak dogs or other low-level enemies to cause spellcasters to waste spells, keep them from attacking your own squishy mages, and wear the enemies down by attrition. The second game and remake put a hard cap on summons to prevent this kind of exploit.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • In Daggerfall, if you stand a certain specific distance from some enemies, they neither come closer to engage in melee nor do they used ranged attacks against you. They stand perfectly still and do nothing. Meanwhile, you're perfectly free to pick them off with ranged attacks of your own.
    • Morrowind:
      • NPC-controlling A.I. does not know how to respond to the Player Character using Levitation (or otherwise getting out of reach of the NPC's attacks). As they can't use Levitation themselves, they'll just stand there while you pick them off with ranged attacks. At best, they might run back and forth, making them slightly harder to hit.
      • Levitation can also be used offensively. Casting it on a NPC will cause that character to remain perfectly still for the duration of the spell, allowing you to kill them easily. This works because the A.I. isn't programmed to handle levitating, so it is treated like a high-powered Burden spell instead. This works especially well on flying enemies, such as everyone's favorite Cliff Racers, as they will fall to the ground and take fall damage.
      • NPCs are also unable to enter or exit buildings. If you find yourself being overwhelmed, you can retreat inside a building (or vice versa) to recover.
    • Oblivion:
      • Features the same A.I. problem as Morrowind, even though levitation spells were removed — if you stand in an area which enemies can't access (say, by jumping onto a large rock), they'll just run back and forth a little while you pelt them with ranged attacks. Oblivion also suffers from Artificial Stupidity with regard to invisibility (which wears off when you attack, but immediately makes everyone forget you exist if you recast it) or 100% chameleon (which makes enemies completely oblivious, even if you smack in the head repeatedly with a huge axe).
      • The odd thing is that if you have full 100% chameleon armor on all the time, this becomes such a Game-Breaker that the game becomes a breeze. You never, ever get attacked unless there is a script, as long as all the armor is on, and even enemies that are scripted to attack you won't see you. You can run around, smack guards and steal all day long and aside from the guard talking to you, they won't even see it. You can just run up, punch a guard in the face, and he will do the whole "you broke the law" talk, and if you resist he pulls out his sword and says "Where did he go!?" It makes for some quite funny gameplay.
    • In Skyrim, NPCs can catch you stealing items, but only if they can see you. It is possible to place a bucket over an NPC's head and then steal every item you can carry while they go about their business without realizing that anything's amiss. Bethesda made it an Ascended Glitch by not patching it out, since players who don't want to abuse it can just ignore it.
  • Fallout:
    • Deathclaws in Fallout: New Vegas (and possibly Fallout 3 as well) will drop pursuit of the player character if you jump onto nearby rocks. Their pathfinding loses their target and they wander off, heedless of the ammunition you're pumping into them.
    • In Fallout 3, you can steal from people who are looking right at you & sitting inches away if you hold an object between yourself & them. You can even do this with tiny objects like books but you have to hold the object in just the right spot.
    • In a similar vein to the Chameleon Armor in Oblivion: In one of the DLC packs for Fallout 3, "Operation Anchorage", there is a suit of Chinese Stealth Armor that is obtained for completing the DLC. If this suit is worn alongside certain perks and a high sneak skill, the player becomes immune to detection whenever they are crouched. With an extremely high sneak skill this becomes ridiculous: players can sneak, during the day, in the open, with their Pip Boy light on, and their radio playing, and enemies two feet from them will have no idea they are there, even if said enemies are staring at the player. Bumping into enemies will alert them to your presence, but avoiding them is easy in all but the tightest of confined spaces. This exploit, combined with the automatic 1.5X damage multiplier on sneak attacks makes the game incredibly easy, even on the hardest difficulty setting.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the last section of Telos has an optional battle against the Handmaiden sisters. First you fight one, then two, and then all five. Whoever falls or is forced off the mat first wins. All five will attack you at once and beat you to death instantly. While it is theoretically possible to win fairly, it requires a very specific build. Instead, the easiest way to win is to charge a melee shield, end combat, and place your character right in front of each Handmaiden individually. By doing this, the game has to move the NPC backwards to the minimum attack distance. Repeat until all five are forced off the mat. You win without throwing a punch. Or just use Force Whirlwind, which throws anyone who doesn't save except your target off the mat. Or Horror/Insanity, which gives you 12/18 seconds of freedom to do whatever to prepare for them — like line them up for some good ol' Force Lightning spam.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • Most enemies will tend to Gang Up on the Human and give very low priority to NPC squadmates, allowing the player to take cover and draw fire while their allies kill the enemies. In fact some enemies like the Praetorians never shoot at allies at all. Perhaps justified, as Harbinger is specifically trying to kill Shepard.
    • Praetorians will shoot at allies, but only if Shepard is an Infiltrator under Tactical Cloak. You can take advantage of this by putting your squad on the other end of the battlefield and using them to bait the Praetorian into turning around and giving you some free shots at it.
      • Tactical Cloak is probably the easiest A.I. Breaker of all, since at maximum ranks (easily achievable by the end of your first one or two post-prologue missions) you get up to six seconds of invisibility (more than enough time to relocate behind the enemy), an extra second or so while shooting (and +75% damage while shooting from under cloak...), and you have a pretty short recharge (enough time to sit behind cover and wait while the enemy whales away at the box you're hiding behind). The A.I. can't find you while you're under cloak, which translates to Shepard running around the battlefield invisibly, dropping cloak every few seconds to blast the back of someone's head open with a sniper rifle.
  • In Might and Magic VII, the Champions of the Sword could be easy if you had the Dispell Magic spell. Their A.I. called for them to buff themselves with Hour of Power, and if you dispelled it, they'd just keep on recasting it and never attack.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has a couple of pretty brutal boss fights with absurdly simple solutions that can be stumbled onto.
    • Andrei's Zulo form is a very fast melee attacker with very little hitstun, in a stage devoid of hiding places or good spots to shoot from. However, you can use the knockback from one of his attacks to propel yourself up into the archways overlooking the stage, a place you shouldn't be able to reach. He doesn't know what to do about this and you can just shoot him to death from there.
    • The Sheriff has a giant sword and a nasty habit of teleporting right behind you, and notably he's the only character who can still hurt you as normal when you have the God Mode cheat on. However, you can defeat him easily by remaining crouched for the whole fight, which causes most of his attacks to go right over your head.

    Wide Open Sandbox 
  • A.I. Gods in Black & White will always fireball your Creature if you send it into their village. Your Creature can easily counter this with a Rain Miracle (and will do it instinctively if it knows the spell, it doesn't even need to be taught). The villagers aren't so lucky. With this, you can use your Creature as bait to trick the enemy God into torching their own empire without spending a point of your own Mana, or getting a single point of bad Karma (if you care about such things).
  • In Bully, nobody can jump onto cars. You can actually stand on the hood of a car and pick off police officers with your slingshot. They may throw bricks at you, but that's it, they can't do the insta-defeat grab.
  • Dwarf Fortress:
    • Invaders automatically take the shortest route to get into your fortress, preferentially heading for unlocked doors and avoiding locked ones, even when they have creatures with them capable of bypassing said locked doors. Because of this, it's quite possible to set up the entrance to your fortress with two doors with a long corridor full of weapon traps between them and constantly switch which of the two is locked, leaving the goblins marching back and forth through fields of +enormous steel corkscrews+ and *giant swinging iron axe blades* until blood drips from the ceiling.
    • This can be exploited even more hilariously (if more complicated to set up) by having two rows of 1x1 retracting bridges that are all linked to the same lever in a way so that you have a checkered pattern of bridges that are retracted when the lever's down and drawbridges that are extended if the lever's down. The invaders need to move diagonally every step to get through there, but even if you switch which of the bridges are retracted and which aren't, there is still always a way. If you order a dwarf to repeatedly pull the lever, the goblins will happily march over the bridges until they suddenly vanish under their feet. Using drawbridges instead of retracting ones is less safe (because big creatures can keep the bridges from operating), but even more hilarious because it flings the goblins!
    • The A.I. will also dodge attacks without taking into account what it's dodging into and what's it dodging away from. Construct a narrow bridge over a deep pit and cover it with crappy wooden extending/retracting spikes, and even the toughest of (non-flying) enemies will dodge right off the edge and start falling. Nothing in the game is immune to fall damage.
    • A.I. units do not react to enemies they haven't seen, including ones in hiding, even if they're attacked by them (though they will attempt to dodge or block those attacks). Before a massive overhaul to the game's stealth system in the 2014 version, units in hiding were never found by another unit outside a 7x7 box of tiles one is in the center of. Thus, in Adventure Mode, you could stand as little as four tiles away from an enemy and remain in hiding while shooting bolts and throwing rocks at them until they die. The only time this didn't work is dark places where you couldn't see enemies without getting close enough for them to spot you.
    • The effects of the Building Destroyer ability are also exploitable — a creature with Building Destroyer Level 2 is not only capable of battering down doors and destroying levers and various types of buildings, it actually prefers destroying buildings to doing anything else, including attacking your soldiers unless it's defending itself. If one of your soldiers interrupts a troll in the process of battering down a door, for example, the troll will beat the soldier into unconsciousness or immobility, then leave him or her lying there and return to beating on the door. Building destroyers will also happily stand on top of traps and get stabbed repeatedly, if it gets them close to a destroyable building. Capturing many building destroyer creatures is as simple as putting a Door to Nowhere in the middle of a ring of cage traps. And killing one is as simple as installing a nine-tile floor held up by a single support, and watching the creature punch out the support, sending the floor above crashing down fatally onto its head.
      As artifacts are indestructible, an artifact door, floodgate, hatch cover, or grate becomes like an unbreakable leash. Put up a fortified marksdwarf post nearby, and building destroyers will become literal target practice. Put it deep in the caverns and they'll end up fighting forgotten beasts for you.
  • The Escape Velocity games feature a partial aversion of Space Friction (i.e. you can drift in one direction with thrusters off while facing another), a straight example of 2-D Space (gameplay bears a strong resemblance to Asteroids), and an A.I. whose idea of combat tactics is to fly straight at the target while firing every weapon it can hit with. These three factors result in three tactics that have become so well known in the fandom that they've acquired names:
    • The Monty Python Maneuver consists of flying away from your target while firing backwards. The A.I. chases and runs right into your fire. (The name is a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, specifically the scene where the knights collectively yell "Run away!")
    • The Not the Nine O'Clock News Maneuver is a blockade-running technique that consists of flying away from the destination to lure the blockade away from it, then doubling back around them. It acquired a variation in EV Nova: since space is apparently toroidal, all you have to do is fly in a straight line and Wrap Around. Of course, this maneuver works best if your ship is faster than the blockade.
    • The Qaanol Maneuver, named after its inventor's forum handle, consists of flying an absurdly small and fast ship to draw the enemy's fire while your more heavily armed escorts make the kill.
  • Grand Theft Auto:
    • When taking over an area in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the defending gangsters will stick to the sidewalks as much as possible, walking entirely in single file at their default jogging speed. For a player with an assault rifle or sniper rifle, simply having a significant lead on the gangsters and going for headshots can turn the situation on its head.
    • Most NPCs in the series will only aim and attempt to fire at the player after they are well within the player's lock-on distance, making a player with good aim almost impossible to stop.
  • Minecraft:
    • For a long time, the game had enemy A.I. be very simplistic. If a monster was chasing you, all you had to do was stand in front of a pool of lava and watch the mobs walk straight into it. The A.I. was coded to walk in a straight path to the player when they spotted them, regardless if there was a lava pit or a cliff in the way. The update to 1.2 enhanced the A.I. to have better path finding so if the player is being chased by a zombie for example, the zombie will attempt to look for alternative paths to the player as long as it doesn't hurt itself. Skeletons were also made smarter by rushing at the player and flanking them should the player hide by a corner of a wall. Enemy mobs can also see through glass and will try to get to the player if they see them through the glass, whereas in the past, glass acted like solid blocks for mobs, thus they couldn't see through it.
    • Even with the improved A.I., enemies still fail to take trapdoors into account. An open trapdoor is seen by all mobs as a solid surface and so by digging a hole, putting open trapdoors on top, and aggroing a mob, it will walk straight over the hole and fall in as opposed to pathfinding around it. This is a staple design in Mob Farms and Experience Grinders, which take advantage of this little exploit to trap enemies for easy killing, and is a very effective strategy for Raid-Proofing a village (just mind the Evoker's attacks, and keep your villagers away from these).
    • Endermen also have an exploit in their A.I. that can be abused if used right. Endermen take damage from water and if an Endermen is hostile towards you, exposing it to water will cause it to be neutral and stop attacking you.
    • Endermen also have issues with enclosed spaces. Because they are three blocks tall, while players are only two blocks tall, endermen simply can't fit into areas where players can hide, nor can they harm players in such areas. Their A.I. will lead to them teleporting toward players that look at them, even if they can't hurt that player, as long as the Enderman doesn't encounter water. Simple Endermen traps thus consist solely of a roof.
    • Endermen also hate Endermites. More than anything else. They will ignore everything else and try to kill an Endermite with the burning rage of a thousand suns. By trapping a single Endermite in an area the Endermen can see it but not reach it, and putting a nametag on it so it doesn't despawn, you can make an experience farm in The End that will net you thousands of levels in minutes.
  • In Mount & Blade, a computer defending a castle will spread out his archers on the walls and mass everyone else on the ladders. Neither will willingly step down the ladders, so if the archers have been dealt with, an attacking player can hack away with a polearm at the remaining defenders which will simply stand in front of the ladder.
  • Not exactly useful, but fun: in Red Faction: Guerrilla, if you steal a tank or walker, the alert level will stay at red pretty much forever... unless you take it back to a safehouse. Entering one of these will always reset the alert to green. Now you can safely go back out and have some fun with the civilians, who are in no way programmed to handle a giant death engine stomping through town.
  • The sword fight in Saints Row 2 is difficult as Jyunichi will block most regular slashes and you are expected to parry and counterattack. If you drop the sword though, you can punch him as easily as you would puch any other punk.
  • Terraria:
    • Terraria has a similar pathfinding problem. Enemies only know how to reach you in a straight line, meaning a simple thin lava pit on either side of a house means infinite money as the enemies stroll in and immolate themselves. On the flip side, this will usually destroy loot in the underground areas where the lava is too deep. Enemies are also too stupid to walk around an obstacle when you're above them, since they only target you by the y-axis. This allows to effectively lock some enemies on a higher level of blocks (which you can often build on the fly if hotkeyed) while attacking others.
    • Terraria has another trick that can be useful when protecting your home during the Blood Moon. Doors open in either direction, but zombies normally can't open them if they're shut. This changes during the Blood Moon, but zombies only gain the ability to kick doors in. Due to the way the game handles sprites, putting anything other than a wall tile on one side of a door will prevent it from opening, meaning that if you simply hang a colored banner behind a door, it only opens outward and is thus zombie-proof.
  • Valheim: Enemies can deal with constructed walls by attacking them. Raising earth so they can't climb over it, however, completely baffles them (although enemies with splash damage can still hit you, if more by accident than design). Combining this with a two-handed club leads straight to Splash Damage Abuse (and as an added bonus, you don't need to repair the walls afterwards) and can even cheese some bosses with ease.
  • X-Universe series:
    • The Singularity Engine Time Accelerator speeds up the flow of time (up to 10x) in the game to make travel bearable when most ships get outran by modern-day cars. However, SETA also hogs more CPU time. On a weaker computer, this causes the game to divert CPU processing power from other tasks to keeping the game running at an acceptable speed, and the A.I. routines are one of the things to go. Engage SETA 10x in an Asteroid Thicket and watch in amazement as freighters plow head-on into asteroids and then keep ramming themselves to death. Engage SETA in a huge fight and watch as every ship comes to a complete stop in order to prevent your computer from melting.
    • The A.I. in X3: Terran Conflict is incapable of handling the sheer missile spam fired from the newly introduced Missile Frigates. Their anti-fighter missiles fire eight warheads at a time and can be fired in salvos of 8 to 12, with almost zero down-time between salvos. Generally, firing them at fighters causes them to hilariously spin around wildly to delay their inevitable death. Capital ships try to shoot down the powerful and fast Hammer Heavy Torpedo missiles with Painfully Slow Projectile firing turrets which pan painfully slow. X3: Albion Prelude gives the A.I. (and player) access to the Mosquito Missile Defense, which turns the otherwise worthless Mosquito Missile into an automatic missile defense, which launches and intercepts incoming missiles, making the Missile Frigate less of an A.I. Breaker.
    • The pathfinding in general can break the A.I. Place a Solar Power Plant in front of a jump gate and A.I. ships cannot leave the currently loaded sector without blowing up, as the A.I. doesn't know how to use the other side of the jump gate, though leaving the sector disables the collision detection, allowing ships to escape. When flying around, ships can only check the area immediately in front of them for obstacles, which can lead to bog-standard Space Trucker ships smearing themselves across the side of your capital ship because they only noticed the Mile-Long Ship after it was too late to turn. Fighter craft attacking moving capital ships have a tendency to splatter themselves into the sides of the ship (or each other). Egosoft went out of their way to rectify this in X: Rebirth, and still had to partly cheat by disabling collisions between NPC capital ships due to the densely packed areas.
    • X-Tension had spectacularly broken dogfight A.I. Normally it'd kinda-sorta work, with ships shooting other ships and trying not to get shot themselves, but if the player sat his ship 200 metres or less behind an enemy and matched their speed with it, the A.I. would stop all maneuvering and just fly in a straight line forever. They would only swerve away if shot at, which still gave the player all the time in the world to line up the perfect shot, and you could still land enough hits before your target managed to maneuver away to effortlessly destroy it or try getting the enemy pilot to eject.
    • Up until Terran Conflict guided missiles were entirely unable to deal with a ship that had the strafing extension mounted. If you kept strafing no missile would ever hit you, narrowly missing every time as they failed to calculate the correct movement vector of your ship.
    • Having trouble with one of the faster capital ships (or any capital ship, if you've installed a speed rebalance mod)? Just park yourself so that a station or an asteroid is between you and the ship. It will come at you at full bore and only notice the obstacle much too late. Result: One destroyed capital ship and one slightly repositioned station or asteroid.

    Miscellaneous 
  • In Evil Genius, most enemy units cannot resist a locked door. There are two ways this can be used to your advantage.
    • Carve a path into the mountain that leads to nothing but a series of locked doors (with maybe some traps at the end, just for fun), and watch thieves and infiltrators waste their time accomplishing absolutely nothing.
    • If an enemy unit is about to break through an important locked door, simply unlock it. The unit will suddenly lose interest and wander off in a random direction.
  • BattleBots: A Real Life example. Chomp has an A.I. that judges when to swing its hammer down on foes and how to swing the hammer to right itself once flipped upside-down or on its side, as well as keep its distance so it's always at the correct range to strike. Chomp determines this based on what it sees from a camera mounted at the front. This was exploited twice:
    • Its first match was against Warrior Dragon, whose very low height proved to be the A.I.'s undoing. Not only was it too short for the camera to see properly, Warrior Dragon's team captain, Luke Ewert, observed the way Chomp would recover from getting tipped on its side and figured out that, by putting Warrior Dragon next to Chomp's underside each time it tried to recover, Chomp would tip itself back onto its side each time it tried. Chomp has a manual override specifically for opponents who could find ways to exploit the A.I., however, which averted a Curb-Stomp Battle and allowed Chomp to keep fighting to the end, upon which there was a split decision from the judges. Warrior Dragon won.
    • A later match against Overhaul had Overhaul's captain, Charles Guan, take advantage of Chomp's positioning, namely that if the opposing robot moves forward, Chomp would scoot backwards at the same speed to keep a good position for its hammer. Guan promptly had Overhaul meet Chomp head-on and fearlessly charge forward, causing Chomp to careen backwards and into a position where Overhaul could pin Chomp against the walls. The hammer, meanwhile, lacked room to hit with any meaningful force. This would be the strategy all of Chomp's subsequent opponents that year would use too. Chomp lost every match that year. It returned in 2020 with no steering-based A.I. at all.
  • A possibly-apocryphal story details a programming student who won a competition to produce the best poker-playing AI by simply programming the AI to go all-in on every single hand. Against a human player, this strategy would be useless, because a human would recognize that any player who goes all-in on every hand is clearly bluffing. However, the other AIs were programmed to avoid risk and lacked any "memory" of prior hands, meaning that the moment they saw another player go all-in, they'd fold the hand.

    In-universe examples 
  • In the novel Epic of The Avatar Chronicles by Conor Kostick, about a world-spanning government based on an MMORPG, this is a plot point, when the main character Erik figures out that the extremely lethal Red Dragon can be defeated by a group of comparatively low-level characters by exploiting its attack patterns- it will always attack the one who dealt the most damage, or, if the damage is roughly equal, whoever attacked the most recently. He gets a group of characters together with an insane amount of arrows, and two party members take turns firing at the dragon from opposite directions, so the dragon can't make it to the first attacker before the second attacker triggers it to move in the other direction (with backup archers in case either one misses), repeating until the dragon suffers Death of a Thousand Cuts (and when both the main and backup archers fail, Erik's Draw Aggro move becomes very useful).
  • In Commander Kitty, Zenith Central's defenses are designed to lead their fire — but they apparently do so by firing in front of the target ship, so flying backwards confuses them.
  • In Hope on a Distant Mountain, this is explained as why the 5th class trial of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (in this fic, an Unwinnable Training Simulation) turned out the way it did; Makoto did something the Mastermind A.I. didn't expect and left it in a Morton's Fork where it both had to kill him and wasn't allowed to do so.[ [spoiler:He took the fall for Kyoko Kirigiri, who was being framed by the Mastermind. Because he was voted as a culprit, the Mastermind had to execute him, but the simulation was also programmed so that it couldn't kill the player outside of specific circumstances (player fails a class trial, which didn't happen because the Class Trial in question was a Frame-Up and there was no culprit, player is killed by a non-Mastermind NPC, which didn't happen because Naegi was too good at befriending them, player kills someone else, which Naegi never did, player falls into despair, which Naegi was too optimistic to do, and player attempts to escape, which hadn't yet happened) that Naegi did not fall into, so he had to survive. The A.I. solved this problem by executing him and then having Alter Ego save him, but also became fixated on "completing" the execution by forcing Naegi to despair so he could be killed... which in turn led to the game breaking enough that victory was possible.]]
  • The main enemies in Karakuri Circus are the Automata, alchemy-powered dolls who can move faster than the human eye can see, created to be both circus performers and Killer Robots. This causes some conflicts in their programming: killing people is a "circus act" explicitly meant to strike fear into the "audience", circus acts must be properly seen by the audience, unarmed people are classified as "audience", and puppets (even if they're armed with weapons) are "circus tools". The end result of these programming quirks is that Automata are forced to be much slower if they fight against a Marionette Master or an unarmed martial artist.
  • In Megalo Box, Joe does this against a combat-style analyzing A.I. by refusing to take a stance, or do anything at all. The A.I.'s creator designed it to run his Gear and fight for him, but also didn't design it to lash out randomly at people not taking boxing stances, hence leaving it useless until the designer manually overrides the A.I.'s decisions.
  • In Prophecy Approved Companion, this is the entire purpose of the player character, the Chosen One. He's been brought in to exploit the A.I. of the games, and try to bug it out. The only problem is him trying to explain it to the main character, Qube, who's an NPC in said game, and doesn't understand why the prophesized hero seems to know how certain people are going to react before they do.
  • In an episode of Smart Guy, after losing to a "learning" chess computer, the title character defeats it during a rematch by playing bizarre moves the computer has never seen before and therefore doesn't know how to react to. (In real life, A.I.s based on machine learning sometimes really will perform badly if you can maneuver them into a situation that's different enough from what it usually encountered during training runs, but that's a really, really big "if" — and when it comes to chess in particular, any modern chess A.I. good enough to hold its own against other modern chess A.I.s simply won't have any exploits that are severe enough to let a mere human win.)
  • In Super Minion, Tofu is an almost perfect martial artist. This is useful for normal opponents, but against Adder it's something of a liability because as long as she knows the ideal move from his position she knows exactly what he'll do, and can use that to direct the fight towards a situation where she can win. It annoys Tofu to no end until she explains it.
  • A 60s Superman story had Luthor build a machine that creates Kryptonite and go rob Fort Knox, and as Superman is occupied, one of his Robot Mes steps up to try to handle the robbery. However, Luthor traps and defeats the robot easily, as even though it's immune to Kryptonite, it was programmed to always avoid it and treat it as dangerous to maintain the ruse of it being the real Superman. Luthor reveals at the end of the story that the Kryptonite created by the machine was fake, and completely harmless — and when he realizes that the robot wasn't the real Superman, he's so disgusted that he gives all the gold back, because the real Superman would have never fallen for such a ploy (more likely, he would have tried to Fight Off the Kryptonite and then immediately figured out it was fake).
  • In Sword Art Online, this is the reasoning behind the switching tactic: monsters generated by the Cardinal System are intended to adapt to whoever's fighting them more and more as the fight drags on, so suddenly switching who's attacking causes a brief freeze in their A.I. while they adjust to the new opponent. Boss fights can be won or lost based on how effective the raid party is at switching efficiently.
  • Worm: This is how Skitter defeats one of Dragon's combat mechs. Dragon's highest priority is to preserve human life, so she programs her mechs to always use non-lethal force when apprehending criminals. Skitter tricks the mech's A.I. by claiming that Imp has developed a new power (possible, but very unlikely) and is now invisible to it, so any move it makes risks crushing her. The machine is skeptical but ultimately freezes up, refusing to move just in case Skitter is telling the truth, which allows Skitter to escape and her friends to more permanently incapacitate the mech. The real Dragon, who is an A.I. herself, is far too intelligent to fall for such a trick, but limitations in her code prevent her from piloting all of her mechs at once.

 
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Levitate

Levitate makes the user invulnerable to Ground-type moves. If the user happens to have a type weak to Ground, the computer will keep using Ground-type moves while failing to do any damage.

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