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General discussionTell me of the times you felt cheated by AI.(38 posts)(38 posts)
(38 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted Yesterday
There's a TV Tropes page with lots of examples of how the AI cheats :)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheComputerIsACheatingBastard
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rjbuffchix: Anyway, as for the topic, the biggest example I can think of is rubberband AI in racing (occurs in too many games to list). This has annoyed me for several decades now. My point of view is that if I am fortunate to be skilled enough to literally run laps around the competition, I should be able to do so. The "rubberband" phenomenon of keeping the other competitors close, giving them artificial boosts, having them travel at speeds unattainable by the player, just strikes me as literally cheating. I have been told and have read that the idea behind rubberband AI is to make the races exciting; you, the player, can't rest and must engage in intense competition or lose to the non-player competitors. Some may find that exciting; to me, participating in a largely-rigged competition is not exciting, it is annoying and intellectually insulting.
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BreOl72: One term: "Rubber Band A.I.".
Whenever that gets used in a racing game, I feel cheated.
The most obvious example of cheating rubberband AI i have seen in a racing game is Need for Speed Underground. lol
Posted Yesterday
Racing games were already mentioned. Honestly, I think I've encountered more racing games with it than without.

One funny example though - Moorhuhn Kart 1. In the fastest race category, once you've crossed the threshold for the rubberband to kick in, it speeds up the AI so much the opponents start regularly throwing themselves out of bounds. Can make some tracks way easier :D

Fighting games were also infamous for their input reading, often having to resort to cheesing the input reading AI with some method that gets around that (usually meaning spamming one move/sequence the AI can't handle).

As for other games, RTS is often the case. From way back in Command & Conquer, where the hardest difficulty just gives the enemy units a 50% rate of fire boost through Warcraft 3 or Starcraft, where the AI has unlimited resources and is only mining to make it appear like they need to. And of course, it always knows where you are.

Unreal Tournament games, where the hardest difficulty levels give the bots an unrealistic field of view. On Godlike, bots have a 360 degree vision, meaning you can never surprise them and this difficulty also makes it so they are omnipotent, always knowing where you are, even without visual contact. Which is not the case on lower difficulties.
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CthuluIsSpy: In Kingmaker I once failed an easy lockpick check like 10 times in a row with save scumming. Each time the RNG refused to roll greater than 7.

Similarly, Mordheim has quite a bit of jank with turns of poor attack rolls and dodge rolls followed by your unitsgetting crit and stunned to death. Combined with the poor pathing and glitchy level geometry it can make for a frustrating experience.
With RNG, a lot depends on whether it's deterministic, pseudo-random, seed-based or random (as close to true random as you can possibly get). It is honestly quite an interesting topic
Post edited Yesterday by idbeholdME
Posted Yesterday
I certainly share in the complaints of input reading; I can't remember how many times Liu Kang ended my attempts on MK2 in the old arcades due to always fireballing me high, low, or airborne every time I approached. Another issue is in shooter and how the AI bots always seem to know your location even if you've just respawned. At least in Perfect Dark, the highest difficulty bot description essentially, if not outright states that the Dark Sims cheat, but most don't admit that much.

My other complaint is similar to rubberbanding, but in other sports.

I played a lot of hours of Madden 10-15 years ago or so, and no matter how good you or your players were, 'catch-up logic' would interrupt your game. Your defender could have the maximum speed and acceleration stats, and an opposing offensive player could be 10 or 20 points behind that, yet would routinely run right past your defender, catch the pass, and accelerate away at unreachable speed to score even if your defender was within a step initially. By the stats, you should be able to catch the runner, but you never could.

Similarly, in the NCAA game, my best (stat maxed or nearly so) receivers would regularly drop easy, wide open passes, while opposing CPU teams caught nearly everything. And let's not forget in both games the infamous defender within10 yards of the QB magically leaping 15 feet in the air to instantly snatch your lob pass that was way above his head.

Lastly, for now at least, FIFA had a knack for successfully blocking nearly all of my best goal attempts. I know scoring is rare in the real world, but I'm referring to a perfectly executed cross from one side of the field to the other and immediately booting toward the goal with a world-class striker. Goals are large enough that no keeper can simultaneously defend both sides of them. Meanwhile, my super goal keeper couldn't stop terrible kicks from near midfield.

I know it's intentional to 'maintain the excitement of a close contest' as was mentioned earlier with rubberbanding, but it just crushes the immersion for me and eliminates the realworld sports fun it claims to simulate. It comes across as being condescending from the developers in that we demand you play our game this way; your skill is irrelevant.
Posted Yesterday
I thought this was about generative AI. Alas.

Need for Speed Undercover for the PS3. Apparently after you update the game, the AI become so ridiculously difficult, even the lower end races start to feel impossible. Mind you, I already played the same game to 100% completion on PC. At some point this stopped being fun and I just decided here and there to quit the whole game. I could try again but this time make sure I don't have the patch installed.
Posted Yesterday
There's Civilization 1, the AI is notorious for cheating, like randomly being awarded free Wonders of the World, or having huge armies it can't possibly have or sustain.

And the SNK fighting games where the AI reads your input and can counter your attacks before you've even launch them.
Posted Yesterday
Apart from the fact that the computer always knows where you are in RTS games (that idbeholdME mentioned), there's also the fact that the computer can do many different moves, and on all the mission's map, simultaneously, while the player has got one right hand and one mouse and can only see so much of the map on his screen at any one time...
Posted Yesterday
I think there is quite a few where the AI just cheats although I feel its most common in racing games and fighting games. The worst is when the AI just has superior stats to you.

In Judgement, one of the hardest minigames in the game (and apparently one of the hardest minigames made by RGG) is drone racing at the highest level. This is due to the fact that no matter how decked out your drone is, one of the opponent's drones just has better base stats than your drone and you need to beat him by using your limited turbo, better course pathing, and hitting turbo boosts along the course. Given your drone has limited durability, losing all durability means an automatic loss, and not great controls the mini game is hard.

I think Teioh, the Black Chocobo racer, also is a similar AI. Although Joe and Teioh appear randomly in chocobo races in the golden saucer unlike the drone race above, Teioh always has +10% the player chocobo's max speed and +25% the player chocobo's stamina while the chocobo's black breed allows it to be unaffected by the slow-down areas.

Fighting games, gamers have found that the AI can just read your inputs. One big reason why I dont really play fighting games (Im also just no good at them).
https://www.giantbomb.com/snk-boss-syndrome/3015-2788/
Post edited Yesterday by Tokyo_Bunny_8990
Posted Yesterday
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BreOl72: One term: "Rubber Band A.I.".
Whenever that gets used in a racing game, I feel cheated.
This soured RC Pro Am for me so much. You could do a perfect job on a course and then lose through no fault of your own as the computer-controlled cars would come FLYING from off screen to be right in front of you right before the finish line. If anyone who had developed the game had been in the room with me while playing that, I might well have injured them pretty badly over that.
Posted Yesterday
Order of Battle opponent AI cheats strategy & tactics wise, plus the individual battle results invariably favor the AI as well. Like arm-wrestling an octopus. Fortunately in the forum, some kind soul posted the cheat codes to enable one to offset and overcome the imbalance. And if all else fails, you employ the "nuclear" option to just declare victory in the scenario!
Post edited Yesterday by KeoniBoy
Posted Yesterday
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idbeholdME: And of course, it always knows where you are.
Not just in RTS games. I remember in the first Heroes of Might and Magic the AI heroes would always go straight for any empty town of mine, even from the other end of the map. At least that could sometimes be exploited as a diversion.
Posted Yesterday
Total War Warhammer 2, playing as Chaos raising maiden armies in the cold barren wastes of the North, only to see the ai raise armies and send those directly to the weakest link....

weakest link and wargaming or strategy, tactics in general... it is such a soft spot. I'm glad lots of those guys engage in multiplayer and other aspects of life because if we had to take the general programed ai in those situations as mentor... like sjeez
There would have been gazilions of people aimed at shooting at the weak points (next to those other people that seem to have been raised in unhealthy environments)
Posted Yesterday
Civilization 2's AI would, after a certain number of turns, look for water, and it must somehow know where it can find water. If there's no water on the map, the game will hang, as the AI gets caught in an infinite loop. (I haven't experienced this myself, but I read that this became an issue when they were making the Mars scenario in the Fantastic Worlds expansion; initially it had no water at the start, but that caused the hang I mentioned, which is no good.)

Also in Civilization 2, when you use the Go To command, sometimes it would get stuck, moving between 2 squares, particularly if you have railroads (which reduce movement cost to 0). This, of course, wastes the player's time, though fortunately the game eventually prompts you whether to continue moving the unit. Then again, this issue actually hurts AI opponents more, as *every* AI move is a Go To command; at least the AI is programmed to always say no to the "continue moving unit" prompt.

There's also the situation in Dragon Warrior 4 where Christo will keep trying to use instant death attacks on bosses, only for it to fail (as bosses are, of course, immune). It's referenced in Dragon Quest 9, except with the modern names for the character and spell. (The DS remake doesn't have this issue, as the ally AI magically knows the resistances of the enemies you're fighting.)

By the way, Dragon Warrior 4's ally AI cheats.
Posted Yesterday
Speaking about strategic games.
AI not only knows everything and stuff, often enough AI can even build without gathering resources.
But the worst offender I have seen was R.U.S.E. in its last mission. With a headquarter you had to destroy with Artillerie (means it didn't took dmg from everything else) and wave after wave of heavy tank attacks out of nowhere.
And with out of nowhere I mean, they where spawned at a timer at the same location. Even when your army was in that location, the tanks where just spawned between them.

And the same style.
Same day I tried out Total War Shogun.
And small states without money or anything simply spawned new armies each turn.

And racing games not only got rubberbanding.
I just say Racedriver Grid and Ravenwest.
The "nemesis" team. They never used the best cars of the class. You where able to drive those cars too.
But their cars where accelerating better, where faster and had better traction.
Even if you manged to come out of some turns faster then they (usually by blocking them), they where simply out accelerating you, like using an afterburner or something like that.
Posted Yesterday
EVERY. SINGLE. RTS.

When playing skirrmish, if possible, I used to turn off fog of war and set map to: already explored / always visible.
Also - hooray for cheat codes.

If those bastards can cheat so can I.
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viperfdl: In Hard West I think there was a rule that you can't get your characters too close to an enemy or that enemy will get a free shot at your character. And now guess which rule didn't count for the computer in the last mission and allowed him to get near my characters and get shots without aim penalties.

I wasn't amused...
Cthulu already mentioned this and I too think that was a universal gameplay mechanic with the last level not having any cheating characters. If anything I remember the last level being a joy to play! One reason being you could acquire some ridiculously overpowered gun just before the mission.

I may be mistaken but I think I actually have Hard West installed on an offline PC... with the last level being playable.. will check tomorrow.
Also - your post made me want to either replay Hard West or puchase Hard West 2. :''D

...

If it's ''unfair gameplay'' you're seaching for... I can ''suggest'' Mutant Year Zero >:S

There's a level/map where after 3 attempts I just threw my hands in the air, gave up and haven't looked back since...

2 of my 10hp characters vs 8 30hp enemies... or something like that... with no cover abilty...
The odds stacked against you is nothing new in tactical turn based games, but you either can revive your characters after the mission or the sacrifice is worth the gain.

Not in Mutant Year Zero! If a character dies it's game over and there's nothing to gain in said frustrating level!

Not cheating per se, but one ridiculously unfair level is the sole reason I don't like that game and I had to vent somewhere... >:S
Posted 23 hours ago
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Atlo: Also - your post made me want to either replay Hard West or puchase Hard West 2. :''D

2 of my 10hp characters vs 8 30hp enemies... or something like that... with no cover abilty...
The odds stacked against you is nothing new in tactical turn based games, but you either can revive your characters after the mission or the sacrifice is worth the gain.

Not in Mutant Year Zero! If a character dies it's game over and there's nothing to gain in said frustrating level!
Just bear in mind that Hard West 2 feels like a completely different game to the first, if that concerns you at all. And about Mutant Year Zero, I remember that game a little, and if I recall correctly, the intention was to produce a more stealth orientated tactical game, sneaking around unseen and picking off isolated targets before revealing one's position. It was fun at first, but ended up slowing the pace of the game down, giving the game a very unnecessarily drawn out and tedious feeling.

A couple of other examples relating to the question:
- In the original Age of Empires 2 (not the HD or DE versions) the harder AI opponents would be granted additional starting resources (the AI was a bit primitive compared to it's modern counterparts, so it needed something to make it harder to beat)
- In Fire Emblem, e.g. 7 or 8, in fog of war maps the enemy does not act as if its sight is restricted, and just knows your location.
- Any AI in a turn based game that has the ability to read your inputs, see your team and it's moves, held items, etc, when they have not yet been revealed, and act accordingly, taking them into consideration or deciding its move only after the player has decided. For example, something like the fan game Pokemon Rejuvination definitely does this...
Post edited 22 hours ago by SultanOfSuave
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionTell me of the times you felt cheated by AI.(38 posts)(38 posts)
(38 posts)