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A.I. Roulette
- 347 statements
- 65 feature instances
- 77 referencing feature instances
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One of the three methods a Video Game A.I. uses to perform moves and functions is to simply pick moves at randomnote (the other two are listed under Artificial Stupidity). For some simple foes, this is fine, as the player probably won't notice. But the more complex or varied the enemy, the more likely actions will be chosen that would never be performed by any intelligent and sane human, or any sufficiently advanced enemy AI. Lower the player's physical defense? Let's use magic! Put them to sleep? Wake them up the next turn! Have victory one turn away? Run like a chicken! Even if an enemy possesses an attack that will effectively ensure defeat for your team if used first, it's perfectly possible that they won't bother to use it until it's too late, or even not at all. Warning: AI Roulette occasionally can have a run of competent moves in the same way you can have long streaks of one color in true roulette, and for the same reason. AI Roulette is usually laughable, but if the AI is having a lucky streak when your party (esp. a beginning party) is fighting it, you'll stop laughing. In particular, some bosses are only vulnerable when they perform a specific move; this trope can result in controller-tossing rage when the AI Roulette doesn't come up with this move. There are several reasons that this trope may be in use: It takes less developer time. Complex AI routines would require a lot of coding for each individual creature to use its attacks most effectively, which increases the time it takes to create a new monster. In games with hundreds of different creatures (even if some are Palette Swap creatures), AI Roulette is a reasonable alternative to writing hundreds of AI routines. The AI would be very predictable otherwise. No matter how sophisticated the AI, if the same situation always causes the same reaction, the player will learn the pattern and anticipate it. A little randomness makes the game more challenging, in a way that cannot really be described as fake. For this reason, even more advanced AI architectures often involve randomness, except that instead of picking uniformly from all available moves, they draw a weighted random from among the few best ones (the tricky part, of course, is teaching the AI how to evaluate its options). Execution speed. Online video games may be host to thousands of players encountering hundreds of thousands of computer-controlled entities at the same time. AI Roulette may provide a performance advantage because it keeps the server from being bogged down with conditional trees. Even simple additions to AI can result in doubling or tripling server load, and consequent game slowdowns. Keeping things somewhat fair. Computers don't make mistakes, and sometimes have an unfair advantage; when monsters know your weaknesses or have devastating attacks, using the right skills all the time — using its strongest attack nonstop, breaking your best armor, going after your weakest characters, exploiting your elemental weaknesses, gaming the counterattack system — would result in incredibly frustrating difficulty. Story reasons. In a game that features AI that is otherwise reasonably smart, this kind of AI can be used for characters and enemies that are meant to be stupid or unskilled. A combination of the above. Many RPGs have monsters that are impeccably strong, but use a random AI to keep that strength in check. It's easy to make a stupid AI (takes less time) with high stats (keeping things fair). However, these sorts of enemies can easily turn into a Luck-Based Mission, since the RNG essentially determines whether your party is smashed into goo or walks away unscathed. Not related to Gambit Roulette or A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Compare Artificial Stupidity. |
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| A.I. Roulette / int_108cd205 | type |
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| A.I. Roulette / int_108cd205 | comment |
A few fortunate spins of the AI Roulette is your best chance of defeating Werdna in Wizardry. Amongst his devastating attack and spells is...Zilwan, a "kill undead" spell. Since you don't have any zombies in your party, you'd better hope he decides to Zilwan you three or four times in a row, because you're not surviving much else. | |
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The AI in Company of Heroes does this to a degree. While the AI will still use reasonably effective tactics (how effective depends on difficulty, of course), the basic plan seems to be based largely on AI Roulette. It should be noted, however, that the AI will, on higher difficulties, still be able to completely fuck you up no matter what he does. This is because The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. At all difficulties. The most important thing the difficulty choice affects is how much the opponent cheats. |
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| A.I. Roulette / int_1a8119af | comment |
Enemies in Dragon Quest VIII, even bosses, pay little attention to the state of the fight. They'll use a special move removing all effects on the party, even when there are none. They'll cast buffs on themselves when they're about to die anyway. They'll call for backup even when their party is already full, and other pointless actions. | |
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There are several situations in Dragon Age where most characters, and even parties, can be wiped out if the enemy mages randomly cast the right spells unless the character is specifically built and equipped to have massive generic spell resistance. This isn't a completely bad thing because there are several fights in the game that would be impossible to win if the AI was intelligent. | |
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Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard: The Ur Child has a randomized attack pattern if you attack him at night, and averts the trope if you do so during day. | |
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Monsters in Monster Hunter do this on occasion (e.g. using close-range attacks when the player is far away), although it's not as jarring since most of them are supposed to possess only animal-level intelligence, and they usually do choose an appropriate action. However, their tactics are not completely random, and may sometimes come as a nasty surprise (roar to stun and immobilize the player, launch a normally easy-to-dodge beam which knocks off 2/3 of his health and sends him flying, follow up by charging him and stepping on him). | |
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In Spongebob Squarepants Battle For Bikini Bottom, all of the bosses that're robotic versions of the characters use their attacks at random; Robot Sandy can do her clothesline move 15 times before she's vulnerable to attack. | |
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| A.I. Roulette / int_2ba3e3b9 | comment |
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey may not have Nocturne's Press Turn system that allows enemies to mercilessly destroy you if they hit a weakness, but this trope is still the only thing keeping you alive, especially against certain bosses. In particular, if the final boss of the Law and Neutral routes spammed her 100% accurate, unblockable instant kill or even specifically targeted the protagonist, she would go from merely hideously unfair to actually impossible. | |
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Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: The Abyssal God randomizes its attack pattern after losing only 1/4th of its hitpoints. Since all of its moves are lethal, both common tactics for beating it involve simply shredding it in a single turn using one of the game's two most broken moves. | |
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The entire SaGa series has this in droves, especially SaGa Frontier. While a few enemies have a powerful move activated only after certain circumstances, they typically spam their moves indiscriminately. Battles devolve into games of chance in which the player hopes that enemies don't use their most powerful attacks. It doesn't help that many of the bosses get multiple turns. Even some of the most innocuous low-level enemies have sort of party-decimating attack that can result in an impromptu Game Over, like Magnetic Storm. | |
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Shin Megami Tensei: An accepted break in the already Nintendo Hard Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. Most enemies would curb stomp you with ease if they used their moves intelligently, even the random Mooks. Mot, infamous for spamming Beast Eye several times a turn, would be absolutely unbeatable if it actually thought about what it was doing. And the Optional Boss works out to be a Luck-Based Mission with the correct strategy. There are two ways that fights can go in Persona 2 Eternal Punishment: the bosses either spam a manageable attack or a useless move that makes for a fair a decent fight, or they'll keep spamming their respective That One Attack until you are dead. In the latter case, you need careful planning, pre-preparation and a deep understanding of each boss's moveset to win, so better be prepared because you cannot count on the AI being stupid. Persona 3: The only reason Optional Boss The Reaper can be killed without resorting to Armageddon. The key to surviving this fight is that it likes to waste turns using element Break spells and then refuse to exploit the new weakness. The hardest part of the fight is actually the end - once the Reaper is almost dead, the roulette shuts off and its AI goes to "Nuke 'em" mode. Speaking of Persona 3 (As well as 4 and 3P if you leave Tactics on), this can be applied to your Party Members. Granted, you can tell them to favor certain tactics, and they will listen to what Fuuka has to say once she finishes her Enemy Scan, but that won't stop Mitsuru from using Marin Karin at the worst possible time. In their defense, once something not mentioned by the scan doesn't work, they won't repeat it for the rest of the fight; the downside is that their AI can't remember it won't work (unless you toggle the enemy's scan file again to remind the AI that the enemy has a weakness). Persona 3 actually gives quite a bit of Artificial Brilliance to the AI. God help you if you're ambushed by an enemy and are equipped with a persona weak to their attack: they will hit you with it, and once you're knocked down, they'll hit you again, and then the all-too-familiar game over screen loads. Your enemies (and your allies, prior to a scan) will almost always start with some version of "inflict damage on all enemies" in the hope of knocking everyone down, and, if that fails, the next member will zero in on the one who's weakest. Since this goes for enemies as well as your party members, there will be at least one battle in which you never make it to your first turn and simply watch the enemy use your tactics against you. There's also invoked That One Boss on 135 — Natural Dancer, who will learn that since you're willing to eat the damage of a reflected physical attack in order to break their barrier, it's best to charm you into inaction and pound you with consecutive pierce attacks if you've made yourself immune to wind. (They also tend to stop casting the Useless Useful Spell if you don't die from it.) On the other hand, some fights simply come down to AI Roulette: if the Hierophant boss chooses and inflicts "Prophecy of Ruin" at the start, you may as well reset. Generally, the AI shows signs of brilliance and waits for you to reveal a vulnerability, but if it chooses to attack, it will notice if one attack is more effective than another. If three out of four are vulnerable, it will take out the three before turning to physical attacks on the player character...damnit. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey may not have Nocturne's Press Turn system that allows enemies to mercilessly destroy you if they hit a weakness, but this trope is still the only thing keeping you alive, especially against certain bosses. In particular, if the final boss of the Law and Neutral routes spammed her 100% accurate, unblockable instant kill or even specifically targeted the protagonist, she would go from merely hideously unfair to actually impossible. |
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Etrian Odyssey: Etrian Odyssey: The Yggdrasil Core subverts this. It has three elemental attacks, any one of which will wipe out your entire party if not blocked by the specific, one-turn-only anti-elemental technique. The only way to beat him is to memorize the entire set 50-turn-long sequence of attacks he uses so you can counter them at the appropriate time; so strictly speaking (barring an insanely defensive tactic), he's only beatable because he subverts this trope. Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard: The Ur Child has a randomized attack pattern if you attack him at night, and averts the trope if you do so during day. Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: The Abyssal God randomizes its attack pattern after losing only 1/4th of its hitpoints. Since all of its moves are lethal, both common tactics for beating it involve simply shredding it in a single turn using one of the game's two most broken moves. |
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Phantasy Star IV: Lashiec will have you praying that he attempts to cast Possession (which may or may not put one character to sleep) instead of casting Anothergate (which deals a LOT of damage to everyone). Dark Force (the second encounter), with Evil Eye and Lightningshower. The Profound Darkness may use Cancellation on you, removing the effects of your protective techniques. Resetting your party's magic defenses (if you even care about them) is far less costly than recovering from a group-damage attack. Juza also acts as a Beef Gate boss. If you're not leveled high enough for at least one party member to have Gires (which is referenced specifically in a cutscene soon after the fight), he will spam Forceflash, a high-damage ability guaranteed to turn your party into chunky salsa in a few rounds. If someone does have it, the AI Roulette takes over, and he will use other attacks between Forceflashes. |
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Safer Sephiroth of Final Fantasy VII is an exception to the general rule, having a pre-programmed pattern. The only parts in which he varies are his stat caps and when he replaces his seventh attack with Heartless Angel on low health. | |
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World of Warcraft: Bosses (and mobs) that mind-control your character will then use your powers against your teammates in completely random fashion. Hilarity often ensues. Some examples are:Druids can be forced to cast Teleport:Moonglade in a dungeon that was on another continent.The AI is unable to cast targetable AoE attacks properly and is always casting them on itself. Most mind-controlled caster classes will spend a large amount of time feebly whacking their teammates with their staff or mace.A highly amusing case is with a mind-controlled Mage. Part of the time will be spent AoEing around themselves, and the rest will be spent swapping back and forth between the 3 self-only buff spells that a mage can chose between.Other particularly hilarious times are when the boss will force you to use a move that will break the mind control.There is one major exception: If you get mind controlled, expect the AI to use your longest cooldown skills just to deny your their use at a moment where they would be helpful. For that matter, mobs generally use their own abilities at random as well. Bosses tend to be less random overall but within the confines of the cooldown timers they also work pretty randomly. Including targeting of the ranged abilities - woe is the raid if the boss randomly starts focusing on the healers. The AI for the Pet Battle system introduced in Mists of Pandaria is definitely this. It can spam its most powerful attacks and defeat you easily — especially in the trainer "boss" battles, or it can cast buffs on itself repeatedly while you beat it up. |
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Every single battle in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest narrows down to playing Russian Roulette with the enemies, but everything favors the enemies until way later on: The very first enemy, Behemoth, you are forced to fight before you gain any means of surviving other than Attack can kill you in two critical hits, and if you miss one or two attacks you will die! Guess how many times you can die before the game takes pity on you. Some enemies are capable of causing status effects, and the chances are absurdly high. Unless you get gear that prevents Stone, Freeze and Death, you will be fearing those enemies and shudder every time you are forced to fight them. Confusion has about 90% chance of killing you, in the sense you will blow yourself up with bombs. Your Partner AI cannot hold a fight on its own due to its random nature. Only logical thing it does is try to revive the player if they can. |
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Golden Sun has this with all of its bosses except Dullahan, the Superboss of Golden Sun: The Lost Age and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, as well as for mooks. Downright painful for mooks, since they're already severely underpowered. There's a point where you just feel sorry for enemies using their non-damaging defense lowering move on your weakest character for two turns (which is actually a good idea), then attacking your strongest character the third turn, right before dying and having done practically no damage at all. | |
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In Crisis Core, you will run into enemies on the harder missions who outnumber you 5 to 1 and have the AI roulette. Example: One of the Wutai missions pits you against 5 Silver Wutai Soldiers, who have a move called "Death Missile" that kills you in one hit unless you have that rare item that makes you immune to Death. They seem to like this move a lot. | |
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EarthBound (1994) in particular has the Clumsy Robot boss, which has one devastating attack and so many "do nothing" moves it could be considered a lampshade. Of course, this also means that if you get unlucky and Clumsy Robot uses the missile, say, four times in a row, even the rolling HP meters won't save you. | |
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There are two ways that fights can go in Persona 2 Eternal Punishment: the bosses either spam a manageable attack or a useless move that makes for a fair a decent fight, or they'll keep spamming their respective That One Attack until you are dead. In the latter case, you need careful planning, pre-preparation and a deep understanding of each boss's moveset to win, so better be prepared because you cannot count on the AI being stupid. | |
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Persona 3: The only reason Optional Boss The Reaper can be killed without resorting to Armageddon. The key to surviving this fight is that it likes to waste turns using element Break spells and then refuse to exploit the new weakness. The hardest part of the fight is actually the end - once the Reaper is almost dead, the roulette shuts off and its AI goes to "Nuke 'em" mode. Speaking of Persona 3 (As well as 4 and 3P if you leave Tactics on), this can be applied to your Party Members. Granted, you can tell them to favor certain tactics, and they will listen to what Fuuka has to say once she finishes her Enemy Scan, but that won't stop Mitsuru from using Marin Karin at the worst possible time. In their defense, once something not mentioned by the scan doesn't work, they won't repeat it for the rest of the fight; the downside is that their AI can't remember it won't work (unless you toggle the enemy's scan file again to remind the AI that the enemy has a weakness). Persona 3 actually gives quite a bit of Artificial Brilliance to the AI. God help you if you're ambushed by an enemy and are equipped with a persona weak to their attack: they will hit you with it, and once you're knocked down, they'll hit you again, and then the all-too-familiar game over screen loads. Your enemies (and your allies, prior to a scan) will almost always start with some version of "inflict damage on all enemies" in the hope of knocking everyone down, and, if that fails, the next member will zero in on the one who's weakest. Since this goes for enemies as well as your party members, there will be at least one battle in which you never make it to your first turn and simply watch the enemy use your tactics against you. There's also invoked That One Boss on 135 — Natural Dancer, who will learn that since you're willing to eat the damage of a reflected physical attack in order to break their barrier, it's best to charm you into inaction and pound you with consecutive pierce attacks if you've made yourself immune to wind. (They also tend to stop casting the Useless Useful Spell if you don't die from it.) On the other hand, some fights simply come down to AI Roulette: if the Hierophant boss chooses and inflicts "Prophecy of Ruin" at the start, you may as well reset. Generally, the AI shows signs of brilliance and waits for you to reveal a vulnerability, but if it chooses to attack, it will notice if one attack is more effective than another. If three out of four are vulnerable, it will take out the three before turning to physical attacks on the player character...damnit. |
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Occasionally seen in Warcraft III, where sometimes the AI starts creeping and expanding as normal, but sometimes does nothing until it gets its second hero, putting it two or three levels behind everyone else, but also leaving them short one hero. Even worse for the Night Elves, who sometimes trap themselves inside their own base due to randomly putting down buildings (said buildings can move out of the way). Averted where spellcasting is concerned however, as they will always fire off their spells as needed. | |
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Lufia: The Legend Returns has this for a few enemies, but notably, also has it for Mousse, a playable character. Mousse can't be selected for an action each round, but will attack automatically each turn, allowing more than three members of Wain's party to act per turn. It can perform basic attacks, use stronger Mousse Punch attacks, use Mysterious Bubble to lower a target's defense, or — very rarely — unleash Tail Illusion, which is extremely powerful. | |
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The Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition book Tome of Battle include the Crusader class, which gains access to randomly selected known abilities each turn. | |
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Etrian Odyssey: The Yggdrasil Core subverts this. It has three elemental attacks, any one of which will wipe out your entire party if not blocked by the specific, one-turn-only anti-elemental technique. The only way to beat him is to memorize the entire set 50-turn-long sequence of attacks he uses so you can counter them at the appropriate time; so strictly speaking (barring an insanely defensive tactic), he's only beatable because he subverts this trope. | |
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In Poker Night at the Inventory, this is how Max's AI works. All the computer players in the game have two stats: skill (their ability to figure out how likely they are to win a given hand) and aggression (how much they're willing to bet on a given hand). Max has either the lowest or the highest skill, depending on difficulty, but his level of aggression changes with every hand. Sometimes he'll play incredibly conservatively, and sometimes he'll go all-in at the blinds. A few of his lines have him claim he doesn't know how to play poker. | |
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Enemy weapons targeting in FTL: Faster Than Light is random, leading to things like bombs exploding harmlessly in empty rooms. The game is Nintendo Hard as it is; an AI that can Alpha Strike through multiple layers of shielding or strategically target bombs to knock out weapons or kill crew members would get frustrating quickly. Enemy crew members, on the other hand, are governed by easily-predicted and manipulated Artificial Stupidity. | |
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In Pizza Tower, The Noise uses the 4 attacks he has at random in his boss fight, and the same thing goes for The Doise. Pizzahead pulls out anything he wants from out of frame at random in all of his attacks, too. | |
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Final Fantasy VI presents a unique scenario for this trope: the Coliseum, wherein the player chooses a single champion from the active party to fight solo against the enemy. The AI Roulette will then take over this character. The problem is, the more abilities (or spells) the character has, the more likely it is to perform something useless (like trying to cast Imp at Siegfried for ten turns in a row, or using Remedy or Float on oneself) or downright harmful (such as Meltdown, summoning Crusader, or Self-Destruct).note Many a player has gone into the Coliseum with a fully-leveled up Sabin, armed with a Genji Glove and a Master's Scroll/Offering, expecting to kill the enemy in one shot, only to see him cast Soul Spiral and kill himself on his first turn. The most painful situation possible, however, is if the AI controlled Terra chooses to Trance herself. For some bizarre reason, whenever that happens the AI will simply sit there, letting Terra soak up whatever the enemy chooses to throw at her, for up to a minute at times. This is a triple-whammy: It wastes the precious MP Terra uses to stay in Trance mode, it essentially ruins the battle for you, and it's boring as hell to watch if the enemy can't kill her quickly. Ironically, this factor makes Umaro (normally a character of questionable usefulness at best) invaluable, since he's in a permanent berserk state and can only attack, which in turn means that Umaro isn't going to kill himself by doing anything stupid. | |
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Enemies in Final Fantasy XI generally pick attacks and spells at random. Sleepga spells can render an alliance useless, and the mob could go to town on targets one-by-one...if they could only remember to not cast any damaging Area-of-Effect spell, which wakes everyone up.note Of course this was somewhat offset by so many of the big boss level enemies in FFXI having moves that are essentially "You lose if I use this attack". Being randomly woken up after being slept by a low damage spell means you get to live at least as long as it takes for the AI to decide to give the wheel another spin. Bard enemies are especially funny: lower level ones tend to use useful songs (since those are all they know), but higher level ones may waste an entire 8 seconds casting a MP restoring song on themselves (despite not even needing MP). Some Notorious Monsters, however, either have only one spell, spells of a specific element, or a very small set of spells that maximize the NM's performance. At least one NM is actually scripted to cast Sleepga 2, then Thundaga 3 for massive AoE damage. | |
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Angband has opponents randomly deciding on whether or not to cast a spell, and picks one of those spells at random. Intelligent monsters will filter out ineffective spells (e.g. won't teleport to the player if already adjacent), with an additional option of them keeping track of players resisting one of the damage types. | |
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In Generation I, most trainers behaved like this as well. Outside of not using status-inflicting moves if your Pokémon already has a non-volatile status (i.e., burn, freeze, paralysis, poison, or sleep), they'd pick their moves completely at random, not accounting for type-effectiveness or if a move will have any effectnote (e.g., using moves the opponent is immune to, trying to do Whirlwind/Roar when those moves had absolutely no effect in trainer battles during Gen I, etc.). Certain trainers, like Gym Leaders and the Elite Four operate under a command that fans refer to as the "Good AI flag", where they will prioritize using attacks with a super-effective typing against your Pokémon. Said AI doesn't differentiate damaging moves from non-damaging moves, however, leading to an A.I. Breaker which can render particular trainers practically harmless. One of the most memorable moments in the first Twitch Plays Pokémon directly resulted from this, where a Level 36 Venomoth (a Poison type) killed Lance's Dragonite due to it spamming the Psychic-type Agility (a non-damaging speed buff) in lieu of anything actually harmful. Some Gen I trainers additionally have random chances of taking special actions like using an item or switching. Gym Leader Blaine is infamous for this, as he's coded to randomly use a Super Potion... but the coders forgot to specify any clause about HP, meaning that it's surprisingly common for him to use it on a full-health Pokémon. |
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Dragon Quest II features the Sacrifice spell. It destroys the party member who casts it, but also insta-kills every single enemy in the fight with 100% chance to hit. Unfortunately, certain foes also have Sacrifice, and will use it when low on health. There is not much more frustrating than having your entire group killed randomly after a lengthy dungeon crawl. | |
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In the original Dragon Quest IV, this also applies to your allies. In order to represent that everyone aside from your hero is an experienced warrior by the time you recruit them in Chapter 5, the player only gets to directly control their Heroic Mime. All the other heroes have their own AI, which... doesn't work out that well in practice. Such as having team Cleric Cristo/Kyril constantly casting his rarely-hitting insta-death spell against bosses. Thankfully, they added a manual command option in The Remake. Even the original NES version has a Game Genie code that allowed manual command. | |
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Pokémon: Nearly all wild Pokémon in every game uses the Roulette. This is justified by the wild Pokémon not having the decision-making skills of humans, but can reach noticeably silly levels when, for instance, a wild Gastly decides to use Curse (which inflicts a nasty status effect, at the cost of half the user's HP) when it's at half health or less, causing it to immediately lose. Exceptions are typically those where you cannot catch the Pokémon, like the fused Necrozma fights in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, as well as the Alpha Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. In Generation I, most trainers behaved like this as well. Outside of not using status-inflicting moves if your Pokémon already has a non-volatile status (i.e., burn, freeze, paralysis, poison, or sleep), they'd pick their moves completely at random, not accounting for type-effectiveness or if a move will have any effectnote (e.g., using moves the opponent is immune to, trying to do Whirlwind/Roar when those moves had absolutely no effect in trainer battles during Gen I, etc.). Certain trainers, like Gym Leaders and the Elite Four operate under a command that fans refer to as the "Good AI flag", where they will prioritize using attacks with a super-effective typing against your Pokémon. Said AI doesn't differentiate damaging moves from non-damaging moves, however, leading to an A.I. Breaker which can render particular trainers practically harmless. One of the most memorable moments in the first Twitch Plays Pokémon directly resulted from this, where a Level 36 Venomoth (a Poison type) killed Lance's Dragonite due to it spamming the Psychic-type Agility (a non-damaging speed buff) in lieu of anything actually harmful. Some Gen I trainers additionally have random chances of taking special actions like using an item or switching. Gym Leader Blaine is infamous for this, as he's coded to randomly use a Super Potion... but the coders forgot to specify any clause about HP, meaning that it's surprisingly common for him to use it on a full-health Pokémon. |
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Iji's General Tor starts off as straight AI Roulette, but the probabilities adjust to favour attacks that have already hit you as the fight goes on. Fortunately, this doesn't apply to his charged shots that you can reflect. | |
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Most enemies in the Final Fantasy series act this way, though some bosses would be subjected to certain rules (such as only being able to use a devastating effect every 5 turns with combat messages warning the player). Final Fantasy VI presents a unique scenario for this trope: the Coliseum, wherein the player chooses a single champion from the active party to fight solo against the enemy. The AI Roulette will then take over this character. The problem is, the more abilities (or spells) the character has, the more likely it is to perform something useless (like trying to cast Imp at Siegfried for ten turns in a row, or using Remedy or Float on oneself) or downright harmful (such as Meltdown, summoning Crusader, or Self-Destruct).note Many a player has gone into the Coliseum with a fully-leveled up Sabin, armed with a Genji Glove and a Master's Scroll/Offering, expecting to kill the enemy in one shot, only to see him cast Soul Spiral and kill himself on his first turn. The most painful situation possible, however, is if the AI controlled Terra chooses to Trance herself. For some bizarre reason, whenever that happens the AI will simply sit there, letting Terra soak up whatever the enemy chooses to throw at her, for up to a minute at times. This is a triple-whammy: It wastes the precious MP Terra uses to stay in Trance mode, it essentially ruins the battle for you, and it's boring as hell to watch if the enemy can't kill her quickly. Ironically, this factor makes Umaro (normally a character of questionable usefulness at best) invaluable, since he's in a permanent berserk state and can only attack, which in turn means that Umaro isn't going to kill himself by doing anything stupid. Safer Sephiroth of Final Fantasy VII is an exception to the general rule, having a pre-programmed pattern. The only parts in which he varies are his stat caps and when he replaces his seventh attack with Heartless Angel on low health. In Crisis Core, you will run into enemies on the harder missions who outnumber you 5 to 1 and have the AI roulette. Example: One of the Wutai missions pits you against 5 Silver Wutai Soldiers, who have a move called "Death Missile" that kills you in one hit unless you have that rare item that makes you immune to Death. They seem to like this move a lot. In Final Fantasy VIII, after some plot events, Rinoa gains the new Limit Break ability Angel Wing which sends her into a unique berserk state: the player loses control of her actions but she gets boosted speed and magic power, (limited) status immunity, and continuously casts magic at no cost. Sounds great at first, but since berserk Rinoa selects spells entirely at random based on what she has available, she's as likely as not to cast Scan and Silence/Sleep/Confuse over high-level damage-inflicting magic. The bosses of Final Fantasy X were typically a combination of AI and randomness, e.g. random single damage attack followed random AoE attack followed by random buff, heal if at low health. The final boss in this game has an attack that reduces your entire party to 1 HP. Potentially dangerous, but not if he uses it multiple times in a row... Enemies in Final Fantasy XI generally pick attacks and spells at random. Sleepga spells can render an alliance useless, and the mob could go to town on targets one-by-one...if they could only remember to not cast any damaging Area-of-Effect spell, which wakes everyone up.note Of course this was somewhat offset by so many of the big boss level enemies in FFXI having moves that are essentially "You lose if I use this attack". Being randomly woken up after being slept by a low damage spell means you get to live at least as long as it takes for the AI to decide to give the wheel another spin. Bard enemies are especially funny: lower level ones tend to use useful songs (since those are all they know), but higher level ones may waste an entire 8 seconds casting a MP restoring song on themselves (despite not even needing MP). Some Notorious Monsters, however, either have only one spell, spells of a specific element, or a very small set of spells that maximize the NM's performance. At least one NM is actually scripted to cast Sleepga 2, then Thundaga 3 for massive AoE damage. |
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The Tag Duel gameplay style in recent Yu-Gi-Oh! games tends towards this. To explain, a Tag Duel is you and (usually) a computer ally against two computers with 8000 Life Points and one playing field per team. You each have your own decks and hands and can use your team member's cards to your advantage when it's your turn. An example: after the player has used Nightmare Wheel on an opponent's face-up Oracle of the Sun, his computer ally proceeds to use Lightning Vortex, ruining the nice set-up the player had just put into place. |
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A speedrunner named Cosmo, while attempting a world record speedrun of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, ran into this with the Fire Temple boss, Volvagia, during one of his most promising runs. Due to the specific sequence break he was using, he had a limited amount of time to defeat Volvagia before the game auto-killed him, which would waste too much time to catch up to the world record, meaning he would have to start an HOUR's worth of gameplay over. So of course, Volvagia, only being vulnerable when the AI Roulette lands on certain moves, proceeded to perform anything but those moves until Cosmo's run was ruined. This happened repeatedly. | |
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Spellcasters in Neverwinter Nights can be just embarrassing. Casters with access to powerful damaging spells will instead start casting 0th level protective spells like Virtue or Resistance, and target you with Daze, a spell with a 5% chance of very briefly incapacitating you. Then randomly they'll take off half your health in one hit, before going back to casting Dispel Magic on someone without any spell effects on them. The game's toolbox allowed you to reprogram almost everything in the game, including the AI of the NPCs. Such reprogramming could make enemies vastly more dangerous, though it took considerable effort; some servers, such as Abyss 404, programmed entirely novel enemy AI behavior unlike anything in the base game. A simpler solution employed by many folks was to simply take away the low level or situational spells of the NPCs, so they only used the good ones. |
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Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] both use this for their boss AI, unlike all other games in the franchise. It's not especially noticeable during the stories due to the generally low difficulty level, but the bonus bosses in these two games are generally considered the worst the franchise has to offer because they follow no patterns, have no or insufficient tells, and will break out of being staggered by the player's attacks at random. 3D also uses it for your Dream Eater allies, though with the chance to perform a particular action varying based on their disposition and the remaining HP of themselves and their allies. As such, it's not uncommon to see them reapplying Status Effects or a Status Buff on something that they just put it on instead of doing something more productive. They also might heal you immediately when you're almost dead, or not at all. | |
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In Adventurers!, Eternion has an attack that allows him to nearly kill the entire party in one hit. After he declares his intent to use it again to finish them, he instead uses something else. When he expresses his confusion, Karn explains this trope to him. | |
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The iOS/Android game Summoners War: Sky Arena. If you choose to automate the combat, it's likely that you'll lose. There's some parameters that makes it less random, but even then it's not a sure thing. | |
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The bosses of Final Fantasy X were typically a combination of AI and randomness, e.g. random single damage attack followed random AoE attack followed by random buff, heal if at low health. The final boss in this game has an attack that reduces your entire party to 1 HP. Potentially dangerous, but not if he uses it multiple times in a row... | |
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A.I. Roulette | |
| A.I. Roulette / int_c7c06b71 | comment |
In the Game Gear and Master System versions of The Lion King, the hyena enemies use this instead of following a set attack pattern. This was also the case in prototypes of the 16-bit version, though it was changed before release. The random behavior makes them rather difficult to defeat, since Simba can only attack them after they repeatedly use certain attacks against him and get tired from doing so; this trope can cause the hyenas to be effectively invincible for several minutes at a time. | |
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Enemies in Bookworm Adventures invariably use this tactic. And it's a good thing, too, because if they used their abilities intelligently many of them would be able to stunlock Lex. | |
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In the Microprose Magic: The Gathering game, the AI has a particular talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because it randomly selects its moves. It's particularly amusing to see it countering its own spells. It is rather obvious to anyone who plays that the AI does not understand the game. | |
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Mother The battle systems in the MOTHER series rely on this for most enemy encounters. Many enemies (with few exceptions) have "do nothing" type actions in the list, such as furrowing one's brow or falling down. These are chosen from an enemy's list of attacks just as often as their regular attacks are, so it's possible to get lucky and have an enemy spend several turns idling. Other actions include particularly strong or deadly attacks or attacks that inflict status ailments upon the party (like a particularly odd enemy action leaving a character "feeling strange," or confused). Given the somewhat quirky atmosphere of the games, it goes a long way with infusing the series with a lot of its charm. EarthBound (1994) in particular has the Clumsy Robot boss, which has one devastating attack and so many "do nothing" moves it could be considered a lampshade. Of course, this also means that if you get unlucky and Clumsy Robot uses the missile, say, four times in a row, even the rolling HP meters won't save you. |
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Liero's AI is entirely random. Even in tweak programs the only things that can be changed about the AI are its actions' probabilities. Needless to say, it was pretty dumb. Worse yet it can force you to have to quit. | |
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Ōkami: All enemies are subject to this. The most prominent example is Yami's slot-machine form where, if you don't Powerslash it or use Mist, it will just pick random moves. Another good example is the boss fight against Lechku and Nechku. | |
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While a standard problem in turn-based strategy games, Steel Panthers used to really take the cake, as going harder widens the roulette. It's not unheard of for a king tiger to suddenly turn around to fire at the crew of a destroyed tank while the entire enemy army is lining up on it, or to overrun a position just once, then drive harmlessly away if it doesn't succeed. In short, mid-tier difficulties were the hardest, as easy is colossally stupid, and expert-level difficulties afflicts the enemy With Great Power Comes Great Insanity as they will pound you into gravel, then randomly give you a game-winning opening, provided they haven't blown up all your guns or chased off your tank hunters. Also the AI's support vehicles have a tendency to get 'stuck' and drive in circles until they finally decide to flee giving you a LOT more time to get to them and shoot them. Sometimes you will even see such insanity as an enemy transport getting its passengers killed because it spotted 'soft targets' before the 'hard targets' and it will attempt to charge up and engage your recons with SMG fire despite the fact there is a tank or AA gun one hex over, all while forgetting to let the soldiers on board disembark. The remake World at War fixes a lot of that, but not all. | |
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The Last Remnant for the Xbox 360 is an unusual case in that you, the player, are subject to partial AI Roulette just as much as the enemies due to the battle system. Though you still have command over your units, the available list of commands you can pick from turn to turn (as well as depending on the enemy you target) is determined entirely by the AI. Sometimes the commands available are entirely logical and normal, sometimes they're nothing near what you need (i.e. no healing commands when you could certainly use some), sometimes they give you access to your uber attacks for trash enemies and sometimes at least one member of your unit will use a move than does absolutely nothing. | |
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Kingdom Hearts III averts it for all bosses except the secret boss, who randomizes the order of his moves each time he's fought and can even choose to skip straight to his second phase. Unlike the above examples, however, all nineteen of his moves have substantial tells, and he still breaks out of stagger at a predictable time with a consistent response. | |
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Dragon Quest: Dragon Quest II features the Sacrifice spell. It destroys the party member who casts it, but also insta-kills every single enemy in the fight with 100% chance to hit. Unfortunately, certain foes also have Sacrifice, and will use it when low on health. There is not much more frustrating than having your entire group killed randomly after a lengthy dungeon crawl. Enemies in Dragon Quest VIII, even bosses, pay little attention to the state of the fight. They'll use a special move removing all effects on the party, even when there are none. They'll cast buffs on themselves when they're about to die anyway. They'll call for backup even when their party is already full, and other pointless actions. In the original Dragon Quest IV, this also applies to your allies. In order to represent that everyone aside from your hero is an experienced warrior by the time you recruit them in Chapter 5, the player only gets to directly control their Heroic Mime. All the other heroes have their own AI, which... doesn't work out that well in practice. Such as having team Cleric Cristo/Kyril constantly casting his rarely-hitting insta-death spell against bosses. Thankfully, they added a manual command option in The Remake. Even the original NES version has a Game Genie code that allowed manual command. |
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In the chess app Play Magnus, Magnus age 5 is programmed to play random legal moves. | |
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LISA utilizes this system in its enemies; due to the way the game is programmed, a player can encounter an opponent who will do nothing but check his hair over and over, or have their companions' heads get bitten off one by one in three turns. It’s even Played for Horror when fighting Joy Mutants, as most of their moves are either crying, screaming, or staring at a party member, implying they’re aware of their horrific new forms. Then they end up scratching or biting you, dealing ludicrous amounts of damage that has the potential to insta-KO squishier members. And God help you if they get serious and bite heads off or snap necks. |
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In Final Fantasy VIII, after some plot events, Rinoa gains the new Limit Break ability Angel Wing which sends her into a unique berserk state: the player loses control of her actions but she gets boosted speed and magic power, (limited) status immunity, and continuously casts magic at no cost. Sounds great at first, but since berserk Rinoa selects spells entirely at random based on what she has available, she's as likely as not to cast Scan and Silence/Sleep/Confuse over high-level damage-inflicting magic. | |
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In Shadow the Hedgehog, the Egg Dealer is literally this. Its attacks are decided by hitting buttons (using a homing attack) on a slot machine that's on its front. | |
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Beholders in Baldur's Gate 2 tend to spam their attacks mostly at random. This can be convenient when they paralyze you then hit you with their Anti-Magic eye to dispel it, but just pray an Elder Orb doesn't decide to cast Imprisonment on your main character, because We Cannot Go On Without You, even for long enough to counter it. Mages also have an AI flaw that can make them seem a bit like this, although they actually adhere to a pretty strict pattern. Summoned demons register as hostile and will attack you unless you cast Protection from Evil on yourself. So they summon a demon, cast the protection, then spend all their energy attacking it because it still looks like an enemy. |
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Intentionally done example: in Kingdom of Loathing the Quiet Healer opponent will occasionally heal your character "by force of habit" instead of hitting them. | |
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A few Kingdom Hearts games have it in one form or another: Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories had this with Donald, making him very unreliable if summoned. He would cast two random magic spells from a list of four, which could mean casting Thundaga twice and frying the screen for you, or could mean casting Curaga on Sora twice when Sora was already at full health. He could also cast elemental magic on enemies who absorb those elements. Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] both use this for their boss AI, unlike all other games in the franchise. It's not especially noticeable during the stories due to the generally low difficulty level, but the bonus bosses in these two games are generally considered the worst the franchise has to offer because they follow no patterns, have no or insufficient tells, and will break out of being staggered by the player's attacks at random. 3D also uses it for your Dream Eater allies, though with the chance to perform a particular action varying based on their disposition and the remaining HP of themselves and their allies. As such, it's not uncommon to see them reapplying Status Effects or a Status Buff on something that they just put it on instead of doing something more productive. They also might heal you immediately when you're almost dead, or not at all. Kingdom Hearts III averts it for all bosses except the secret boss, who randomizes the order of his moves each time he's fought and can even choose to skip straight to his second phase. Unlike the above examples, however, all nineteen of his moves have substantial tells, and he still breaks out of stagger at a predictable time with a consistent response. |
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Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories had this with Donald, making him very unreliable if summoned. He would cast two random magic spells from a list of four, which could mean casting Thundaga twice and frying the screen for you, or could mean casting Curaga on Sora twice when Sora was already at full health. He could also cast elemental magic on enemies who absorb those elements. | |
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A common issue with City of Heroes and City of Villains mooks and bosses, especially later in the game. Rikti suffer horribly, as Mentalists will spam sleep powers on Heroes stuck in poison gas, Guardians will heal allies at full health and shield almost dead ones, and Drones can spend a lot of time running from characters with accurate ranged attacks. The Praetorians and the Freedom Phalanx tend to suffer from this, too, especially Numina and her evil counterpart. They'll beat you to within an inch of your life, turn on an invulnerable force field, and then run away. The force field used by Numina and her evil counterpart is used when at low life for a certain duration whenever the cooldown is up. It's predictable. This is added in deliberately for an allied NPC during the battle with Ajax. The NPC A Flawed Clone of you, has both a random combination of powersets (meaning that it's quite possible for it to have no offensive moves, or nothing but them), and a deliberately downgraded AI. Whether or not the Flawed Clone will actually be a help is a Luck-Based Mission. Even if you do end up getting an ally with a functional power combination, there is a very real chance they'll spend the entire fight doing the chicken dance. |
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In Crusader Kings II, the A.I characters make decisions based on random weights. These random weights are based on their traits, and they may make bad decisions if their traits give them a low rationality score. | |
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Flight Rising: Enemies in the Coliseum run like this. Enemies with full health will heal themselves, enemies with full breath will continue to meditate, and enemies will use elemental attacks against the dragon on your party with the strongest resistance to that element. Unless, of course, the enemy uses their attacks properly and wrecks your team in 3 turns. That is also possible. | |
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