That game is cheating!

[fluxy100]

I always have that moment in 4X where I know that there is no possible way that a human player would know what I'm doing but the AI does. The worst example is Endless Space, even if the two player starting points are on two edges of a galaxy. The AI knows the moment you start expanding and will start pumping out settlers at an impossible rate just to start grabbing up land. This is from some 500 light years away, with no scouts whatsoever to give it this knowledge. That was the moment I uninstalled the cheating game.

 

[HybridChangeling]

Undertale's Sans battle. Whoever has gone through it knows how cheap the game can get.

I am going to vote Flowey over Sans for very obvious reasons, which I will not spoil, but it's close. From any other game I sometimes get angry when playing FTL on hard advanced mode.

 

[MiskWisk]

Well, I'm going to say a new one:

Tom Clancy's End War. Not a great game in the RTS genre but I had fun with it.
Unfortunately, to make the AI "challenging" on higher difficulties the devs decided to do the laziest forms of difficulty. Namely, their units receive massive boosts to health, damage, and range to the point the games "rock, paper, scissors" gameplay is irreversibly broken by it. The AI artillery just loses its weakness and can bullseye your forces through the fog of war. Finally, the WMD is perfectly calculated to wipe out as many of your forces as possible despite the fact that it should have no idea where your units are.

It's a real shame because when I played on the lower settings the AI's strategies were pathetic but it remained as braindead as before when the difficulty increased. Would it really have been so difficulty to program it to coordinate its attacks a little more?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Funny. An Elephant Troop just appeared from his city. I know those things take several turns to build. Maybe I didn't kill him the last time. This time, I make sure I missile launch him away, watch the death animation, and wait for my nukes to build. End turn, pass it along.

another Elephant trooper appears out of the city. Full blown cheating.

I decided I wanted to see how many turns the ai would do this. For all of the ten turns I passed, Gandhi's city produced another Elephant trooper. I made sure to level all his producing tiles to make sure he just didn't have a jacked up city. But nope, he was just producing these troops out of no where.

Civilization sometimes sucks.

This is a long time AI cheat in the Civ series, going back as far as 2 (and possibly 1). The AI will just winkle units into existence when its back is against a wall. There are other ways it cheats as well (the difficulty levels are really just you deciding to what the degree the AI is a red handed cheater, it doesn't play the game any smarter), but few that are as egregious and evidently in the player's face.

 

[hermes]

Fighting games AI, specially in higher difficulty levels or against bosses, are cheaters by definition. This is not even subjective, since it can be measured. There are a lot of ways they can pull this off, some of which are:

- Reading the player input, which gives the illusion of "impossible reflexes".
- Characters that have moves only available to them when used by the AI, or that are noticeably more powerful when controlled by an AI (including fast proyectiles that cover the entire screen and/or can't be blocked by your proyectiles).
- Move restrictions that don't apply to the AI character, like charge moves that don't need to be charged, powers cooldown that don't apply to AI, reduced chances of being dizzied or even infinite energy bars.
- Priority values through the roof, meaning they can throw you even while you are hitting them, have counter attacks that haven't even connected or have special moves that can't be interrupted no matter how much you hit them during their animation.

That is why, despite being relatively veteran to the genre, I haven't bother to end many games since Street Fighter, and series like MK can only be beaten by cheesing the bosses.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Crash Team Racing actually cheats.

In the story mode, at every level there's a boss that you have to race. The boss usually has a faster cart than you, but if you use power slides correctly and your items right you can usually outpace them. Only thing is, the further ahead of them you get, the faster they go. No matter how far ahead of them you get, they will catch up to the point that they're within firing range of you. This may also be the case in regular races too (Although to less of a degree), but I haven't confirmed that.

That being said, I actually like it when racing games cheat like this. Most of the fun of racing games (Particularly games with a focus on weapons and combat) is being around where the action is. If you're so far ahead of everyone else that you don't see another player for the entire race it gets pretty dull. Sure, there is a degree of satisfaction in being able to lap other players, but that tends to wear thin pretty quickly.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. Not at all the newest of RTS games, but one of the few I actually liked. Set that mode to anything higher than normal and the AI manages to magically kick your ass with more troopers than you can handle and get resources fast enough to gain tech levels quicker than you can. Unless you get very lucky with your starting area, food will be hard to come by. Not for the AI, of course. Buggers

 

[Floppertje]

I suspected red alert 2 was cheating when my tanks were destroying an enemy base and the AI just built 6 power plants on the spot in front of my eyes instantly.

 

[Saulkar]

The game FUEL in so many ways. The enemies rubberband like a gaggle of motherfuckers and if you cannot put a hundred meters between you and them using a shortcut they will never be further than 30 meters, consistent. That is to say nothing of their ability to put 250-500 meters between you and them within 3 seconds at the start of every race!!!

 

[Ryallen]

Darkest Dungeon is probably the only game so far that has ever done this to me. Basically, I was exploring the Weald on the first quest that it gave me, and I encounter these bipedal mushroom things that don't look very threatening. I'm sitting there, thinking "Oh, this should be interesting" and proceed to get stomped on, losing about half of my parties health once the battle was over. Then, in the next room immediately, I not only find two more of these bastards hanging out, but also these weird mushroom spider things. So, naturally, I'm panicking, hoping that I can take these guys out quickly and hopefully not lose too much, and then I find out that the spider things can mark any target with one of like three moves that they have. That means that not only do attacks on that character deal more damage, but they also gain basically all of the aggro of the enemies in the party, and I proceed to lose two of my guys within one turn. And that's when I quit the game.

 

[Zen Bard]

As for fighters er yeah those just hit the big red fuck you button on occasion and read your inputs react with impossible reflexes and combo you into oblivion unless you can find an exploit yourself, oh yeah and do charge moves only without charging first gotta love that. I am also generally not a fan when they purposefully break the rules of their own game usually with bosses such as removing hitstun from your attacks or some other nonsense.

Yup. Came here to post this.

You just described the Street Fighter IV Final Boss Fight with Seth. That bastard spams defenses/combos immediately after your inputs, then programs a lag from when your character actually executes the move.

I'll never play that fucking franchise again.

 

[karloss01]

I'm surprised no one mentioned Call of duty 4: Modern Warfare and World At War Veteran modes. The dying in one or two hits was fine; improving their accuracy so head shots are usually the only way they hit you is kinda pushing it. But then give them infinite grenades to hurl at you the moment you need to take cover because you somehow managed to duck the second shot the hyper accurate AI fired? Not cool or fun at all.

And the real kicker is when you die the hundredth time it jumps you back a check point because it thinks you have a bad save.*

*Might be making this one up but I'm sure some FPS did this to me and I've just assumed it was either COD4 or WAW.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I'm gonna go with "racing games" as well. I can't remember the specific entry from the "Need for Speed" series that I'm thinking of, but the AI cheated so badly and obviously that I've never touched another NFS since. It might have been Underground or Most Wanted, not sure. I remember having the AI crash headfirst into a wall and be behind me again within seconds despite my flawless high speed manoeuvres. Or when you drive 5 laps out of 6 flawlessly, then clip your wing mirror on an obstacle, causing you to slow down by 1mph and every AI overtakes you.

You can't lap them, accidents don't slow them down, it doesn't matter how much you upgrade your car or how well you drive, they will always be a few meters behind you and overtake the instant you drive anything less than perfectly. F**k that s**t.

Mario Kart 8 on the Wii also annoyed me. I did most of the races in most classes, but there were a couple where no matter how well I played, I could be out in first for ages, then you get rocketed, shelled, flattened, knocked off and sent to last. F**k you Mario Kart.

I kinda want to mentioned Dark Souls 2 that i'm playing atm. NG+ in particular is a step up in difficulty. Now I'm not complaining about the difficulty of a souls game, but every so often it veers from "tough but fair" into downright cheap territory. I don't like it but don't mind dying to my own misstep or misjudgement or from being outplayed. But then you get enemies that just avoid everything you throw at them, have infinite stamina and hit for 2000 out of my 2200 HP pool. GRRRR.

 

[Maximum Bert]

As for fighters er yeah those just hit the big red fuck you button on occasion and read your inputs react with impossible reflexes and combo you into oblivion unless you can find an exploit yourself, oh yeah and do charge moves only without charging first gotta love that. I am also generally not a fan when they purposefully break the rules of their own game usually with bosses such as removing hitstun from your attacks or some other nonsense.

Yup. Came here to post this.

You just described the Street Fighter IV Final Boss Fight with Seth. That bastard spams defenses/combos immediately after your inputs, then programs a lag from when your character actually executes the move.

I'll never play that fucking franchise again.

Dont let that put you off of fighters if you are interested in them although I admit Seth and Alpha (from DOA4) annoyed the hell out of me on occasion not because they are the most BS fighting game bosses ever (they definitely are not unfortunately) but because they have terrible designs and are just BS enough to be incredibly annoying on occasion and I hate losing to characters I despise.

Hopefully SF5 has no bosses or none as annoying as SF4s (or 3s). I just wish they would remove all fighting game bosses or at least lock them off in a story mode or something they do nothing but frustrate 99% of the time. As for Seth just sweep him a lot especially on wakeup its not foolproof like the Shao Khan strategies in MK9 but it makes things a lot easier if you want to beat him.

Interestingly the only two bosses I have ever loved fighting (M. Bison and Tengu) also came from SF and DOA so they can make good bosses on rare occasions unlike say SNK (They have some cool looking but complete BS bosses).

 

[Guffe]

MrioKart.... Fu**ing MARIOKART!!!!
That game is rage 5000
I don't think I've ever had a run of MarioKart and came happy out of it...

 

[miketehmage]

I remember reading somewhere that in Shogun Total War 2 the AI used to cheat by spawning armies in areas of the map where you didn't currently have vision. This could apparently be countered by using ninjas as scouts to give you vision of as much of the map as possible.

 

[emissary666]

As much as cheating AIs in fighting games frustrate me to the point of attempting to break my controller in half, they are so depressingly prevalent that, in Mortal Kombat X, it felt weird and hollow when I realized that both Goro and Shinnok were playing fair. On Normal difficulty, at least, I have never had a hit ignored or felt like it was reading my inputs. They are still more difficult than the rest of the characters in the ladder, but the lack of cheating feels like something is missing.

 

[Zen Bard]

As for fighters er yeah those just hit the big red fuck you button on occasion and read your inputs react with impossible reflexes and combo you into oblivion unless you can find an exploit yourself, oh yeah and do charge moves only without charging first gotta love that. I am also generally not a fan when they purposefully break the rules of their own game usually with bosses such as removing hitstun from your attacks or some other nonsense.

Yup. Came here to post this.

You just described the Street Fighter IV Final Boss Fight with Seth. That bastard spams defenses/combos immediately after your inputs, then programs a lag from when your character actually executes the move.

I'll never play that fucking franchise again.

Dont let that put you off of fighters if you are interested in them although I admit Seth and Alpha (from DOA4) annoyed the hell out of me on occasion not because they are the most BS fighting game bosses ever (they definitely are not unfortunately) but because they have terrible designs and are just BS enough to be incredibly annoying on occasion and I hate losing to characters I despise.

Hopefully SF5 has no bosses or none as annoying as SF4s (or 3s). I just wish they would remove all fighting game bosses or at least lock them off in a story mode or something they do nothing but frustrate 99% of the time. As for Seth just sweep him a lot especially on wakeup its not foolproof like the Shao Khan strategies in MK9 but it makes things a lot easier if you want to beat him.

Interestingly the only two bosses I have ever loved fighting (M. Bison and Tengu) also came from SF and DOA so they can make good bosses on rare occasions unlike say SNK (They have some cool looking but complete BS bosses).

I appreciate you talking me down from the ledge. I'm not giving up on the genre...only Street Fighter. Still got my Tekken and Virtua Fighter. And I enjoyed the crap out of Injustice: Gods Among Us.

But Street Fighter V is going to have to do a lot of work to get back my trust.

 

[Captain Marvelous_v1legacy]

Assassin's Creed Syndicate's cart races. God damn was that last one annoying. For some reason the developers thought it was a good idea to have the opponents teleport next to the player if they fell to far behind. The AI can also accelerate ridiculously until they catch up to the player. They player can't achieve the same speed, so if the AI manages to pull ahead, the player can only hope the AI is dumb enough to crash. Otherwise the player loses. I actually have the video on my PS4 of the last time I tried, and won, that race. I'll upload it and post that cheating bs here.