State your reasons why you think XYZ game has the worst AI. In my opinion, AoE II's AI is pretty bad, if not just plain worst. How bad? Lemme count the ways!

Exploitable Units...

This one killed the game as far as single player is concerned, especially with early rushes. The AI just can't handle it.

The Two Towers - Build 2 gaurd towers nearby, and stick your villagers in them (unless the AI's 10 militia/sword units come at your tower). Each tower will fire at the base of the other, so once the army is gone, if applicable, the AI will send the only attackers it has. Its' villagers.

Clueless army - Do the same as the above, and let the militia, swords, whatnot attack the towers. Now, have the villagers repair the towers. The enemy will not even think to attack your villagers.

Allergies to walls - Take a group of villagers, and build a paliside walll (even 1 tile will do). If you do it early on, the enemy villagers will come charging. 3-5 on 1 has much better odds, as the AI spreads their units out. The same goes for AI units even when they're allied with you. They could have a ton of petards, and they'll bump right into your walls as you're building them. Nice ally, huh? :)

Scout Rush - Here's another. Use your starting scout (horse) to find the AI village, and attack their mill. You'll see villagers pass, and you can attack them. You can cripple the AI, or even win the game.

"Maybe if I look at the resource, the enemy that's attacking me will go away." - Here's another one. Find a villager busy gathering berries, wood, gold, or stone. Attack it, and 60% of the time, it'll stay there. If they go to their town center, just leave, and they'll come right back to what they were doing. Easy picking.

Cowardly Villagers - As hinted above, go near the town center, attack something, and run away. You'll make the villagers enter the town center. Since there's no enemy within the visible radius, they'll think it's safe and come back out. Attack a building, or villager, and run back out. They'll do the same thing.

If only they could walk through walls - or trees for that matter... The shortest path routine isn't the sharpest code on the block. A villager, or scout on goto might try to get to another point 3 "tiles" on the other side of a forest. They'll go straight for it, and ignore the fact that it can take a 100 tile detour.

Sabotaging one's own defenses - Sometimes the AI will build a wall, but there's often a problem... one end is sometimes connected to forest. So, as villagers chop forest, they wind up chopping down the very forest protecting them from your army!

Resource hungry villagers - If you block the AI off, or there's a choke point and the AI's side is bone dry of resources, opening a gap between the choke point will send a flood of AI villagers your way. Again, easy picking.

The order of things - The AI seems to like building a few farms, then a mill, barracks, chop forest, etc. in a precise order. So, if it runs out of wood and all of its' farms are gone, even if you give it more wood, the villagers will just stand there and do nothing.

Blind Trust - When allied, you can still destroy your ally's buildings, and kill their units by having your catapults (siege onagers) bombard the ground. Once, in a 1vs.1 game, I got the AI to say, "Help, the enemy is in my city!" after I bombarded something elsewhere, and my villager passed their town center).

Sheepless in AoE II - The AI also doesn't keep watch over its' sheep very well. It's very easy for the player's scout to find them early, and steal them, while the villagers are doing who knows what (probably building the mill...) ...not to mention you can slaughter their sheep (And deer), too.

There's of course, a lot more, and I think I know what they did with their AI code:

- If an enemy starts to build something (especially a wall) nearby, or if there's an enemy unit nearby, send the most powerful attackers. Well, this also includes villagers as a last resort.

- Shortest path is that, the shortest path between point A and B. If there's an obstacle, ignore it and try to go through it.

- If 67% of the villagers are killed, even if the Town Center has adequate food, resign.

- Move to the closest Fog of War. This is one that scouts often fall victim to, and wind up in an infinite loop until another path opens up. I trapped my ally's scout this way, and it didn't think to build another one.

- If a player builds a building nearby, or sends a unit through, attack with Petards. When the petard reaches its' target.... check to see if it's an ally. If it's an ally, don't attack.


And for the "villagers attacking anything that builds" "tactic", case in point...

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads10/ct_AoEII_exploit.jpg

The moment I clicked the wall icon on the ground (didn't even start to build), the villagers came running. Worst AI ever.

AOE 2, pretty much for the reasons stated. Never understood why it was so popular.

BF1942 also, but that was made to be a multiplayer game, so it's not quite the same.

I just built an army of 20 swordsmen, walled off the AI, and attacked 3 villagers near some deer, and the AI simply gave up.... and yet, I walked right past 1 militia unit...

If you play AOE2 at the hardest difficulty, let the AI build up, and are average in skill. It is hard.

The "Police" A.I in GTA Liberty City for the PC. They'd happily go over cliffs into rivers to get at you if you were by the bank of the river. Essentially they'd head straight for you no matter what and often to their demise. They also liked ramming vehicles that would blow themselves up, even if it wouldn't hurt the person they were ramming.

Fixated nutter A.I.

Doom has crappy AI. The creatures just walk straight at you! Sometimes if they're accidentilly hit by their fellow monsters, they ignore you and murder their buddies!

I would have to say that Alpha Centauri had godawful moronic AI. You can easily see this by spying in the enemy cities. There is some advance or something that lets you look in enemy cities for free anytime you want. You can see utterly disastrous decisions being made. For example, Morgan was being defeated by Santiago. I gave Morgan some hovertanks to fight back. I noticed no counterattack by Morgan. I looked in his capital and he simply kept his tanks there. Also, I gave him too many for his resources accidentilly. He simply let the extra ones die and he was trying to build some stupid building in his city. But then he had NO resources because I gave him too many. Absolutely pathetic.

Other than what I said above, I can't think of an AI that just screams to me "dumb!" Maybe WarCraft 2?

A few of those you have to be lucky with. In general the AI should have troops by the time you can build towers so if you can build them considerably earlier then its probably on too easier difficulty level.

Another one is the army attacking a tower. I seem to remember that units would eventually attack the villagers or at least this was patched at some point.

Stealing sheep is something that a human player may struggle to avoid as well. Especially the four outer sheep that are harder to find.

I think you can turn off blind trust. Either way I would rather have it on than have a catapult accidentally damage a building and then have them declare war on me.

Oh and I think AOE2 was popular since in general it was a decent game and of course there was multiplayer.

I seem to remember that cowardly villagers doesn't really work after a patch since only some of them would go to the town centre or would fight back.

Pong has horrible AI. I mean, the computer has just one thing to do, and it can't even do that right!

Real Life has some pretty stupid AIs, and many AIs that act stupider than they are.

I would think you would have hard time finding one any weaker than Ascendancy. I enjoy the game, but it is brain dead.

You can find systems with a colony and other planets are not clonized. Those would have been around nearly the whole game.

It is not uncommon to find an AI planet with an Artifact sitting next to or very near the colonizer. They never ran a dig to get the free tech.

AI of Half-life 2 is sometimes pretty stupid. Here is an example: I saw a soldier standing on road and I decided to sneak past him. I climbed to the roof of nearby house. The soldier hasn't seen me yet so I decided to save my SMG ammo and use pistol instead to bring him down. I shot him few times and he didn't notice anything! He just stood there. Finally when he was almost dead he noticed that someone was shooting him and he tried to shoot me but he was died before he managed to do anything :lol:

The "Police" A.I in GTA Liberty City for the PC. They'd happily go over cliffs into rivers to get at you if you were by the bank of the river. Essentially they'd head straight for you no matter what and often to their demise. They also liked ramming vehicles that would blow themselves up, even if it wouldn't hurt the person they were ramming.

Fixated nutter A.I.

Yeah. The zombie cops of GTA are funny though.

Sniper Elite has some wonky AI.

Like I'm on the hardest mode, and there is a sniper directy across from me. He just lies there and stares at me. I put a round into his forehead.

@Grohan, these things are like routines in GTA series...

Darn it, a fabulous game was ruined.

Doom has crappy AI. The creatures just walk straight at you! Sometimes if they're accidentilly hit by their fellow monsters, they ignore you and murder their buddies!


I remember that this was made by purpose. Different hell creature races doesn't like eachothers so if some of them is at the way, it shall die! It was quite a fun to watch when sometimes Revenant could take entire army of zombies :lol:

I don't know if they acted this way at Doom 3 but it was certainly in I and II.

By the way this was real bug in C&C when sometimes AI destroyed own units :lol: Usually it was if tank was between your units and AI NOD turret. If accidentaly AIs own unit got damage from turret then it started to shoot back to turret :D And when I'm at it AI was pretty poor at first C&C, though it's my favourite C&C game. There was quite many exploits what AI didn't know and AI cheated quite a lot :mad: Usually it was cash cheat what AI used.

@Grohan, these things are like routines in GTA series...

I have tried 3D GTA games only few times so I don't have much experience about GTA's AI ;)

AI cheated quite a lot :mad: Usually it was cash cheat what AI used.

A ha! I knew the computer cheated! Or close enoguh in this case,
Wars & Warriors: Joan of Arc. the b***ards didn't finnish the game completely and abandoned it instead of learning from their mistakes. AI will charge you when it sees you, ok, so that is a medieval tactic, but you could lure them away in piecemeal. THe archers would hold their ground and shoot, and still fire as they backed away from you. THe enemy bosses were b***es, I often had no or few surviving men in parts of missions because they would be killed by the boss. THe bosses had food so they could heal all XXX of their hitpoints or partialy heal when they were almost dead. THe pathfinding was OK, but not very good. I did finnish the game thoguh and enjoyed it but they really shouldn't have abandoned it.

A ha! I knew the computer cheated!

And there was also funny exploits, like that AI didn't know to build other locations than marked locations. If you blow up their refinery and took tank or soldier to stand there where it had destroyed, AI didn't build it anymore since it couldn't build to other location. If you moved your soldier out of there building immediately popped there :D I don't know if they fixed that in Red Alert though.

No when I start to think about it more accurate, AI was really crappy in C&C. They could only send skirmish groups not any major assault group. Allwasy with couple of soldiers and one tank. If you attacked to enemy Harvester you could wake up AIs nest and call all the units out of there. And then lead them to out of nowhere and their base empty for your major assault group.

You could easily block AIs path with cheap sandbags since they didn't know how to shoot at them. If you wanted to build units with peace and quit, just stuck their paths with sandbags.

Doom has crappy AI. The creatures just walk straight at you! Sometimes if they're accidentilly hit by their fellow monsters, they ignore you and murder their buddies!


IIRC, didn't one stage (the last one?) have that happen as soon as you walked out?

Historyline 1914-1918. An old Amiga-game. The AI always started with more units than you since the programmers knew the AI was so bad, but it always lost anyway.

IIRC, didn't one stage (the last one?) have that happen as soon as you walked out?

I didn't really get what you were asking but if monster shot another monster by accident, monsters started to slay each other until all members of hostile race was dead. They didn't kill own guys if i. e. zombie shot another zombie but if zombie shot imp, then imp slayed that zombie and it's fellow members. That's how I remember it and that's the explanation why usually Revenants slayed whole army of zombie man or even imps.

Hmm... this thread isn't too old, I think it's safe to bump it. ;)

OK, this may not be the dumbest AI in the world, but this is a contender. I was sorting through my older games and came across Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Well, I tried it out, found a few AI stupidities, and thought of this thread.

OK, it seems the ROTK AI has a weakness when it comes to ranged weapons. The ghost-thingie you see highlighted in green is an undead archer. He is greenish because I have my bow pointed at his head. He's right there, but seems content to just sit there, and not even fire. I waited a minute before firing, dispatching him instantly.

http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/6805/dummy3vr.jpg

Kinda depressing.

Oh, another game that has a mindless AI is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II. The AI runs as fast as you, so you can hide behind counters and they will be stuck, even though they'd reach you if they went to the right about a game-foot. I stand back and drill Dark Jedi with blasters, a very funny sight.

I just played AOE2 this night. I swaer the AI used to be smarter, I was like an inch away on the screen and the crusaders didn't attack me.

AoE2 is old.....I wouldn't expect the AI to be good in a game 7 years old :p