Or my old favorite, a thief could set traps, rest, set more traps, rest, set more traps, rest and then turn an enemy hostile and watch it blow up (Baldur’s Gate 2 without Throne of Bhaal expansion).
I also liked stranding customers in RollerCoaster Tycoon to keep park count high. Kidnapping could help you win
Rainbow Six - the game where elite counter-terrorists could be stopped in their tracks by a four inch protrusion from a wall.
I remember a football game for the Sega Genesis back in 1993 or so where if you were playing the Detroit Lions, you could run Barry Sanders in for a touchdown every single time, no matter what the difficulity level. By the end of a game against the AI, I would often have Sanders up to 1000 yards of rushing for the game.
Settlers III, that’s enough on that topic.
The Nazi guards in the original Castle Wolfenstein were dopes.
Police 911 -
Okay, I’m an unarmed innocent bystander, I find myself caught in the middle of a raging firefight between cops and yakuza gunmen, and I want to live (and the yakuza aren’t paying any particular attention to me, so I don’t have to worry about that). Depending on my location, I immediately do one of the following:
Needless to say, the nimrods in the game generally do one of the following:
Konami’s done more to kill sympathy for innocent bystanders in shooting games than any other company I know of. (“It’s not an innocent victim, it’s natural selection!”)
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out -
A number of total pushovers here, but two really stand out.
Don Flamenco (first time): Punch anywhere. Blocked. Dodge the Flamenco Foolishness, hold up, and pummel his face. Repeat until he’s down. When he drags his butt off the canvas, he’ll immediatly go for the Flamenco Not A Chance In Hell. Hit him with a left to the body four times. 10-count, fight over.
King Hippo: Wait for him to open his mouth for that big downward punch thing. Hit him in said mouth, than nail his belly eight times. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat once more for good measure. 10-count, fight over.
Rollergames -
This one’s a tad obscure, but it’s such a good example, I just had to put it here (it was an arcade game, BTW). Sometimes, at the end of either of the guy’s rounds (first and fourth), the two “jetters” will go into a quick one-on-one fight. If you’re facing the CPU, here’s how to beat it:
The teammates in SOCOM: Navy Seals are some of the worst AI I’ve seen in a while, at least since Deus Ex’s badguys.
They’ll have silenced MP5s, and silenced M9s, and there will be a bad guy facing away about 30 feet away. Do they shoot with the submachine gun? Do they shoot with the pistol? Do they sneak up and cut the guy’s throat with a knife?
Nope. They stand up, run, and hit the bad guy with the butt of their gun. This does not knock out the bad guy. This makes the bad guy turn around and light up the whole team with an AK-47, which sets off all the alarms and half the time ends the whole game.
Also, never tell them to throw a grenade. “Throw” in their vocabulary apparently means “drop at your feet and blow yourself up”.
The worst problem is that they don’t stay put when you tell them to. At least the teammates in Rainblow 6 stay still when you told them to, allowing you to go in alone and clean up.
Thought of another one: Oregon Trail.
Me: Hi. Would you like to buy an ox?
AI: Sure! Here’s an axle!
Me: Would you like to buy an axle?
AI: Sure! Here’s 3 oxen!
And my favorite:
Me: Hi. Would you like to buy a bullet?
AI: Sure! Here’s 10 bullets!
Starcraft has serious pathfinding problems. If you send an army off to attack, and they get slowed down going through a narrow spot, the units at the rear will start wandering off looking for a different route, often getting killed/separated from the main force.
Additionally, when playing against the computer (single player), you can send one of your peons into their peons and the collectors will begin attacking yours (and stop harvesting resources). You can even run your peon around the whole map and the computer will follow with all of his peons, while you happily build up enough to go wipe him out (which doesn’t require much at that point).
The Civ games have already been mentioned, but Civ Call to Power stands out as a particularly bad AI. After you get to the technology level of warwalkers and sea cities, and it stays at the samurai and cavalry level, suddenly a switch is thrown. Now the computer suddenly has warwalkers and fighter planes (literally within one turn), and in addition it can rush buy or build any wonder in less than 5 turns. AI that pulls literally impossible tricks in its quest to win are the worst kind of all.
The flipside of the Deus Ex enemies is that they’d balance their rock-stupidity with flashes of total area omniscience.
The rudimentary behavior of the other drivers in Driver drove me batty, as they all followed the same script–namely, oncoming civillian cars would deliberately steer into you.
Are you talking about the original Oregon Trail on the Apple II back in like 82? If so I congradulate you on your memory. I played that game all the time, and was the envy of school because I could always get a perfect shot on the deer on high speed, and I don’t even remember that.
Total Annihilation
Best game ever, but damn the AI sucked. I remember several games where I frantically built up a huge army, and stormed the enemy base only to find a single solar collector and a his commander trapped behind a rock or something.
If you played a map where it was a battle between two islands, I would often build a ship and sail over there only to find a bunch of tanks looking woefully across the water at me. You could almost see the look on their pitiful metal faces as I shelled them from offshore.
Infinity Engine:
Nobody seems to mind you casting web or entangle, so I often do that before combat begins. Dragons can be take out by staying out of sight range, casting fireballs at the edge of sight range until you’re out, resting, and repeating. Thieves can sneak, backstab, run around the corner, sneak again and backstab again when the enemy runs around the corner again. I did Planescape: Torment almost entirely with backstabs using Nameless and Annah. After Baldur’s Gate, enemies got harder to `pull’ one at a time, because they’d return to their spot after a certain distance. But that just made it easier to avoid bad pulls.
In Icewind Dale II, there are war drums that can summon worg riders. If the enemy doesn’t see your archer, they don’t notice arrows hitting their drum.
Fallout Tactics:
If my sniper takes somebody’s head off, the guy next to him often doesn’t notice. Sometimes you have to get those super mutants to step on three or four mines before they die. I plant them, and my snipers lure the suckers onto them. A super mutant will walk on one, and keep walking until he’s gibbs.
Fallout 1:
I kept the dog alive through the whole game by occasionally locking him in a room. But Ian died in the last battle because he can turn a door knob. So much for opposable thumbs.
The librarian never seems to realize that you’re selling her the same stack of submachine guns over and over. That’s okay, though, because she also mysteriously never runs out of reading materials that can only be read once.
You cannot save the life of that guy in The Boneyard. I have gone through heroic measures, but if somebody doesn’t kill him, he kills himself.
You have to rush over that bridge by the weaponsmiths, because that’s a great place to get trapped by your own party.
Reminds me of the enemy in a siege in Heroes of Might and Magic III.
Maybe it only happens on Normal setting, but they fall for the same land mine trick Johnny mentioned.
When you upgrade your castle to its strongest level of defense, that includes three archer towers and a moat. One of the town types has, instead of a moat, magic land mines (these are invisible, so if your enemy can’t count to three, they take him by surprise; then again, your entire moat disappears if he casts “despell”).
The enemy hero always does the following: blast a hole in your castle wall with his catapult, then send his monsters walking in. But they do it in the “I can only walk in cardinal directions” style of walking up to the wall, then walking along it until it gets to the hole; of course, this sets off every single landmine from the monster’s starting point to the point of entry. Monster upon monster falls victim to this . . . um . . . strategy.
**
Those aren’t examples of bad AI. Each boxer in MTPO had a specific pattern and if you learned it you could beat it. The first time I encountered King Hippo he kicked my ass all over the place. Of course once you learn his pattern he’s a pushover but still.
Marc
Driver - if you drive through a red light, the police will deliberatley ram you until your car explodes, thier AI just seems to be ‘ram him until he dies’.
Ground Control - this was never a hugely popular game (couldn’t undrestand why, I loved it), so I’ll give a little background. It’s a 3D RTS game where you control tanks + troops, and you have an APC that represents you - if this dies it’s game over. Another thing this game had was friendly fire (see where I’m going with this?) so if you positioned one tank inbetween the enemy and another tank, then the front tank will take damage from your tank. Now, imagine you send a selection of tanks with your APC near an enemy in a row, you would hope that the APC would just drive straight to where you tell it (normally on the end), but NOOOOOO - clever APC driver just HAS to drive to the wrong side of the line then around the FRONT of all your firing tanks! So now the most important unit in your army is getting shot at by the enemy and your own troops.
I’ve lost count of how many times a unit I’m supposed to be protecting has been lost to friendly fire, sometimes by a friendly NPC tanks aswell.
Not counting early games, I’d have to give the worst AI award to the “human-like” behavior of Blood 2. They would walk into walls and keep walking. They’d somersault all the way to you without firing a shot (hilarious, but terrible). And if some turd had a sniper rifle and you were in a twelve mile range, you were done sir done.
Well I got caught by one in BattleField 1942. I was trying a single player mission.(So I wouldn’t be totally clueless when I went online) Anyway I spawn into the battle and look for a vehicle. At first I see a bunch of my army’s tanks and jeeps and they’re all driving away. Ok, my bot team mates got there first so I start running around and quickly notice a fighter plane. Anyway I hope in it and it’s a tail dragger so obviously I can’t see what’s in front of me. Gun up the engine and start down the runway. After a second or 2 I have enough speed so my tail comes up of the ground. Of course I see one of the idiot bots teammtes a half second in front of me, driving right at me down the runway in a tank. Suffice it to say the tank won.
Alpha Centauri is one of my faves but had some serious AI problems.
Air units could end the turn away from a city, but it needed to be inside a city by the next turn or it would crash. The AI would frequently send out a fleet of a dozen air units to attack a city, but they’d always use the maximum number of moves to get there. Meaning that anytime you placed one of your units in its flight path back (even if it is a ground or sea unit) it would have to fly around your unit (since it could not attack it), using up its movement points before landing back in its home city. I’ve destroyed entire air forces without losing a hit point this way.
Of course the down side of a crap AI was AutoImprove Terrain, a traditional weak spot with Sid Meier games, apparently. The formers would always move around looking to improve your terrain even if it was improved as much as possible. And if you had mag tubes, no movement points would be used up. Ever. I think the computer would finally stop moving the damn things after it moved in about a thousand circles.