In Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, if you were turned into a were-creature you could go into a town and slaughter some innocents, bringing out the town guard, who proceed to attack en masse; but since they have no silver or magical weapons, they can’t kill you and you can simply slash away until a pile of the town’s finest lay dead at your feet. They might as well have made the guards’ sound files change into sheep sounds.
In GTA 3, those lovable police will also get so furious at you that they’ll send their squad cars hurtling at you at top speed, often mowing down dozens of civilians themselves in the process, and if you’re heading down a hill and make a quick stop, oftentimes you’ll be treated to the sight of two or three squad cars literally flying overhead as they overshoot you and end up crashing or wiping out dozens of more civilians. MUWAHAHAHA!
In Hitman, all you need to do is don the uniform of one of the thugs of a gang completely comprised of Asians and hardly anyone will notice that you’re the sole bald white guy walking around.
The PC version of Blood Bowl by Cyanide has some really questionable AI choices. First, the computer doesn’t seem to understand the idea of half-time or game end. If it has the ball on the last turn of a half, it will happily run the ball carrier forward 6 squares instead of, you know, passing to the catcher who is in range for a TD. Even if that potential catcher is surrounded by opponents, at least there’s a chance to score.
Also, every now and then a computer player decides to try his acrobatic skills and goes for 3 or 4 dodges in a turn, often for some meaningless goal like a 1-die block. Often this is a dwarf blocker or other non-agile sort. The results are either amusing or infuriating because he succeeds about 80% of the time.
Lastly, the computer makes strange choices as to the ballcarrier. Goblin teams seem to love giving the ball to their chainsaw-weilding Looney. Dwarf teams can’t seem to figure out that the Doomroller can’t pick the damned thing up, ever. Trolls are not good catchers.
Master of Magic, a wonderful setting and game elements, but had a pitifully weak AI that would march around 1 or 2 big stacks, and as soon as you broke them it was a stale exercise of mopping up.
Ascendancy, also brilliant, but it was simply a race to confront the first big enemy stack, which would always just bum rush you. As soon as you win that first big stack battle, the AI never again is a threat.
I’m going to yank this over to the Game Room rather than close it, but I’d also like to point out that the thread is from 2003 for those considering responding to others’ posts.
In terms of strategy games, I challenge anyone to name a strategy game more complex than chess that ISN’T bone stupid. All of them are hopelessly inferior to a human opponent; TA, Warcraft, Supreme Commander, any version of Civilization, you name it. All stategy game AIs are made more difficult by simply giving the AIs cheats, or running logical scripts that don’t really make any sense but hassle you, such as the Civlization games’ infamous trade AIs. They’re all imbecilic.