Worst Game AI

The Game Room
41

Back in the day I liked to play in a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) called Omicron (a variation of another MUD called DikuMud). I discovered the following bugs that could be considered poor AI:

Wally of Wally’s Magic Shop was such a fanboy that he would buy magical items from you for more than he charged for the same item! This meant that you could acquire unlimited amounts of what he carried by selling some of them back to him.

Among these was the Staff of Sleep, which had a comparitively weak Sleep spell. But since none of the NPCs considered casting the spell an attack, you could keep trying until you finally got lucky, and could put even the most powerful character to sleep eventually, if it wasn’t programmed to attack you on sight.

The Steal command could actually be used by any character- you simply had zero chance of stealing from someone undetected unless you were a Thief and could enter the Thieve’s Guild for traing. But someone under an enchantment of Sleep (see above) couldn’t wake up to stop you. So my Warrier could walk up to Jupiter, go through 50 or 60 Staffs of Sleep until I finally put him out, then rob him of 600,000 gold.

I could then go to the Pet shop, and buy a pack of 100 trained wolves. Then I’d find the Palaquin of Knights, sic the wolves on him, then move out of the way until they’d killed him (losing 70 or 80 of the wolves in the process.) I then scavenged his body and acquired Silver Palaquin armor and sword that would allow me to safely fight enemies 10 levels above me.

42

In the old gold box games, enemies didn’t have any notion about avoiding areas made hazardous by spells. They’d approach you through your cloudkill until they dropped. If they didn’t have anywhere to go, they’d use up their movement points moving back and forth through your blade barrier until they killed themselves.

In Elite II, once you had the biggest ship in the game and filled it with shields, you were invincible. You just sped up time, and waited for the enemies to commit suicide trying to ram you.

43

I once had a pro football game called Front Page Sports Football. I don’t remember what version it was, but it was the last version before they got NFL licencing, so you had to create your own league and teams, which I thought was cooler anyway.

Anyhow, in certain situations, if your quarterback pump-faked, the DBs would start running away…and would continue to run away, even if you decided to scramble. Sometimes your QB would be running down the field and the DBs would actually be running away from him.

The other weird thing about the game is that the computer didn’t like being shut out, so if they hadn’t scored by the last 2:00, there would inevitably be some impossible play, like a 60-yard field goal or an 80-yard run where all your players tackled the ballcarrier at least twice and he still wouldn’t go down.

44

The game is “Freedom Force” from Irrational Games. Real-time strategy with individual superheroes or superhero teams. Perhaps the best superhero PC game ever invented.

Interestingly enough, the AI isn’t bad. In fact, in some parts of the game, it’s devilishly clever!

… and then… there’s Nick Craft.

Nick Craft is a teenage superhero groupie, who at one point will begin following members of the Freedom Force around while they go out to fight crime, right? He’ll stand on the sidelines and cheer on his fave heroes!

Unfortunately, there are a few missions in the middle of the single-player game where this is nuts.

You see, these missions AUTOMATICALLY FAIL INSTANTLY, if Nick is in any way injured.

You can’t stop Nick. You can’t pick him up, you can’t interfere with his movement. Nick will lock onto a hero when the level begins, and do his best to follow the hero around. Nick always knows where that hero is, even if the hero flies away, and will do his best to get within ten feet or so of that hero.

Nick will merrily trot into the middle of a firefight between the Mighty Man-Bot and a dozen gun-wielding thugs, and get shot to pieces before anyone can do anything. Whoops. Level failed. Try again?

It gets worse. Mentor has a superpower, “Instinct Dominance”, which causes a target to become enraged and attack the nearest other person. This can be fun when dealing with a mob of bad guys who haven’t seen you yet – just use ID repeatedly on each badguy individually, and sit back and watch them beat each other stupid. Easy, right?

Not on this level. Any thug who falls prey to Instinct Dominance will immediately seek out and attack Nick Craft, regardless of where he is, or how far away. Whoops, Level Failed. Try again?

It becomes a race to kick the crap out of every single bad guy you encounter, FAST, before he gets to the kid.

And if you succeed… you have another level where you get to do basically the exact same thing… only this time with the flying Latino superhero, El Diablo, instead of Mentor and Man-Bot. Again, Nick will charge up to bat-wielding thugs if they’re between him and El Diablo, and will hang out in dark alleys, if that’s how he can get as close as possible to Diablo while Diablo is fighting on a rooftop, or flying around the city. Oh, and he still shows his customary merry willingness to charge into the middle of a firefight. The only thing he doesn’t actually do is try to follow El Diablo off a rooftop. Whoops, Level Failed. Try again?

Then again… this may be intentional. If Diablo succeeds in trashing the bad guys without permitting Nick to get himself shot, we then cut to a cinematic, in which the mighty Minuteman and Mentor are confronting the superpowered gangster, Pinstripe. Pinstripe cuts loose at Minuteman with his tommy gun. Nick flings himself in front of the bullets, natch.

…and then, you’re suddenly in control of your heroes. Your mission? Defeat Pinstripe and his gunmen before Nick dies.

At least you don’t have to keep the little bastard from flinging himself into gunfire any more.

(and, of course, this scene is necessary, to set the stage for Minuteman to save the kid’s life via a blood transfusion that turns the boy into the superpowered sidekick, Liberty Lad. Still, I sure wouldn’t trust a kid that dumb with superpowers…)

45

A lot of these are good, in terms of generically stupid AI.

But if you want a glaring example of a case where the designers had to try to make the AI stupid, look at the original version of Masters of Magic.

The computer would hardly ever place units inside its cities. Instead, it would place a huge army, One hex outside the city walls.

46

I guess that’s why Fallout 2 allows you to push people out of your way.

47

I think thats sorta realistic really. if I was a real trained trap expert and spent a whole month (or week) setting up traps in a real room in real life I could probobly set up a fairly fatal web of stuff to kill whoever entered… breaks the balence of the game but seems realistic to me

48

In Quake II I used to love to lure the baddies into range of those monsters with the mechanical legs and the railgun, who’d forget all about you and mow down his own collegues.

Also, I seem to remember that the baddies had a fondness for walking undernieth elevator shafts, then happily standing there as the elevator repeatedly hammered them into the ground.

49

Okay, this doesn’t count as AI, but it’s a computer “opponent’s” programmed behavior for which the response isn’t exactly intuitive.

In Star Control 2, all of the aliens really acted alien to you or to one another, so you had to kind of figure out a different strategy for allying with each of them (or with specific members of their race . . . sometimes neither type of alliance was possible).

One of the aliens – I forget its name but the music was awesome – was the last of his race. You wanted to ally with him, but he kept thinking you were the enemy and he’d cut off the convo and just attack you.

Now, his ship is weak and very easily destroyed, so there’s no way he can win. He’s on a suicide mission, and even though you’ll survive any outcome, strategically you HAVE to retreat. Thing is, his most devastating attack is to blow himself up, so you have to retreat FAST, about five or six times, before he’d realize that his enemy was always too proud to retreat and therefore you must be something else.

Kind of like the Nick Craft scenario. I never figured that one out on my own. But since the designers made the character so prone to suicide, I’m sure most people (like me) just gave up and let him kill himself before realizing there actually was a way to ally with him.11

50

Wing Commander (Origin) - There was no line-of-sight checking for the wingman’s AI. If you got on a bad guy’s tail and started shooting him, your wingman could come up behind you and shoot YOU, not realizing you were between him and the bad guy. I’ve seen this problem in some other flight games, but WC was the worst.

Rainbow Six (Red Storm) - Your squad mates could get inseperably tangled on narrow passages or ladders.

:wally

51

I’ve been playing a lot of Civ III lately, and the only thing that really bugs me is how automated workers will cheerfully build their railroad right up to an enemy’s border during wartime so they can be kidnapped. You’d think the game’s programmers would have thought to have the citizenry behave differently during wartime, but no. And because of the unlimited movement of the railroad, the workers will unexpectedly appear out of nowhere, and since they’ve used their movement allotment you can’t move them back, so you have to frantically stick a military unit on top of them to prevent them from being swiped. Come on, guys, how hard would it be to tell your workers not to go within, say, three or four squares of the enemy border while bullets are flying?

52

Those are all good, but the single dumbest AI ever has to be from the unpatched version of Age of Empires. I have no idea how they managed to do it, but they must’ve made some desperate last-minute change before shipping it and not had time to playtest it properly.

Anyway, if you played against the computer, he’d surrender after a few minutes. No matter what you did, no matter what difficulty you played on, he’d surrender. If that’s not stupid AI then I don’t know what is. :slight_smile:

53

I think the worst game AI was probably Shodan. The one in Neuromancer was pretty mean too, but Shodan had legions of killer androids in addition to the nasty ICE.
Okay.
In Heroes of Might & Magic, if the computer opponent was approaching with a large army to attack a city, you could cut your losses by packing up your defending army and sitting right outside the city walls. The computer would attack the city first, then split the army and leave the city. It was much easier to kill both armies in halves than if they’d stayed together. Or even if the hero was defending the city.

Also, a single flying defender could hold a castle against slow-moving attackers without spells, since the flyer could just move away while the castle defense killed the opponent’s armies. The computer player would note that it still had superior forces and would not break off the attack until it was nearly wiped out.

In Escape Velocity, there was a manuever that became known as ‘Monty Pythoning’ [sup]*[/sup]. Combat was top-down 2D in a rather large space, and if your ship was just faster than the opponents, you could get at the right distance and match their speed (while they chased you), and then fire weapons at them. They wouldn’t shoot until they got closer and they wouldn’t break off chasing you until it was too late. You could also get ships to expend all of their single use ammo (e.g. missiles) by staying barely in range of the weapon, then moving safely away when they fired.

[sup]*[/sup] Because you are ‘running away’.

54

You know, I’m learning a lot of new “strategies” here. Keep up the good work! :smiley:

55

Yeah, the Thief guards lose points for not noticing their friend had stopped whistling, but they gain a few points for being able to pick out the sound your footsteps a dozen other people walking on the same floor.

56

Not as bad as Age of Empire II - where if you allied with a computer player, it would always surrender after about 3 seconds!

57

Really? That never happened to me.

I nominate CivIII for worst AI. It is so bad that programmers had to make the computer cheat, blatantly and badly, for there to be any challenge. The computer gets free units and production and science. Without building any structures. In fact, often, the only thing it will ever build is a library.

58

Not stupid, but psychotic:

Master of Orion II, the… v1.30 patch, I think. The penultimate patch released, anyway.

All the computer controlled empires would, pretty much at random, become aggressively hostile towards you, and declare war on your civilization.

It didn’t matter that they couldn’t reach any of your planetary systems, or you outgunned them 20 to 1 in single ship encounters, or even if they had no operative space fleet at all. Or, even if they had been allied with you for the previous 10 or 12 game turns, and you currently had several fleets of warships orbiting multiple undefended systems in their empire.

The final patch, of course, fixed this, but the damn game was unplayable in single-player mode until it was released.

59

I’ve always had an issue with Empire Earth 2 AI. They never seem to deploy sea units, other than the occasional battleship.
You see, using the intuitive warp planner, I used this is coordinate attacks with the AI quite effectivly while attacking over land. But when I direct them with targeting an attack over sea, they will simply send 1 or 2 helicopters over to the said target every 10 minutes. They wouldn’t send merchant marines (or transport choppers), not even fill them up with troops who are desperately attempting to find a path over the ocean without utilising transport. Nor will Hardest AI attack me other than with choppers every five minutes over the ocean. Even if they have a whole blooming continent to themselves. They even have the merchant marines, they just don’t use them :smack:.
It anger me to see such a good game ruined by poor programming of AI.

60

Sure your SOCOM teammates would constantly run through you fire, but so do morons on just about every multiplayer first person shooter.

Diplomacy has to be the worst, that game is all AI and the developer was asleep there, that game is unplayable.