http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheComputerIsACheatingBastard

Jonny Ebert , lead designer of Dawn of War 2 on video game A.I. "Cheat wherever you can. A.I.s are handicapped. They need to cheat from time to time if they're going to close the gap... Never get caught cheating. Nothing ruins the illusion of a good A.I. like seeing how they're cheating."

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The computer player is a cheating bastard whenever the "rules" differ between you and Video Game A.I.-controlled opponents. This can be a quick-and-dirty method of achieving a "level" playing field against a skilled human player (especially in older games, where hardware and AI capabilities were limited and prone to Artificial Stupidity), but can also create Fake Difficulty when the computer has access to moves that a human player (in the same context) clearly does not.

In ZX Spectrum forums such as comp.sys.sinclair , this phenomenon (real or imagined) is known as "cheatingbastness".

Some games have even used the fact that their AI is not a cheating bastard as a selling point. Conversely, arcade versions of games ("quarter munchers") often cheat more than home console versions.

Though this trope generally applies to impossibilities (things that the player literally cannot do no matter how well they play and no matter how many things they've unlocked in the game at that point, the computer will just have extra resources or abilities), it can also just apply to more conventional cheating. If the game looks at the way your characters have been customized and the AI is then given strategies or abilities specifically designed to counter yours, that's not impossible, per se (it's entirely possible that you could encounter a human player with a team that counters yours perfectly!), but it's something that was specifically given to the computer as an advantage over the player, rather than random chance.

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Sometimes this is justified due to the Rule of Fun. Computers are often prevented from using certain tactics that are open to the player, either because it's "cheap" when your enemies do it or there's no freaking way that a computer could manage to pull it off at a crucial moment. In order to make up the gap and still present a challenge, cheating is required. Ironically, players often think the AI is cheating when it isn't, such as strings of good luck from an RNG that is actually perfectly fair, while not noticing at all the subtle and behind-the-scenes ways that the computer is actually cheating. In fact, some games deliberately manipulate the RNG in the player's favour just to avoid the appearance of cheating.

Sub-Trope of Fake Difficulty. Has nothing to do with adultery.

This trope does not include "fair challenges" of the game (wide pits, powerful / numerous enemies, etc.); those are Real Difficulty. Likewise, one should not accuse the computer of cheating simply because it plays to a computer's natural strengths (lightning reflexes, omniscient knowledge of the game rules, and so forth), or because you have a single streak of bad luck. Consistent bad luck, however, may be a sign that the computer is using the RNG to cheat. On the other hand, some cheats can actually work to the player's advantage, such as with the Rubberband AI or plain old cheat codes.

Compare Gang Up on the Human, Rubberband AI, and Spiteful A.I.. Contrast Perfect-Play A.I.. See also The Computer Is a Lying Bastard, Computers Are Fast, Gameplay and Story Segregation, The GM Is a Cheating Bastard, Nintendo Hard, Random Number God, and Redemption Demotion. When In-Universe AIs have these justified abilities, see The Singularity.

Note: when adding examples here, please make sure whatever you're planning to claim is actually true, meaning you have hard data saying there is cheating going on, not just some vague feeling that you always hurt yourself in confusion and the AI never does. The phenomenon making you feel that way is almost definitely Confirmation Bias, as any of the various people who have done actual testing with hundreds of data points can tell you.

This is not a place to complain about enemies that have skills you don't have, or about how unlucky you are and how many times you missed, or about how hard That One Boss is, or how the computer is actually half decent at some of the game's more advanced maneuvers that you happen to suck at. This is only for scenarios where it would be expected for the player and the AI to be on even footing. For example, in the campaign of a strategy game, it would be natural for the computer to outnumber you and/or have more resources than you — that's part of the challenge of a campaign. However, in free battle or skirmish mode, a computer starting with more resources than you is usually cheating, since you would expect to be on even footing with the computer (unless you can set what everyone starts with).

Works with their own pages:

Examples:

Note: Since this trope is so incredibly common, only egregious examples should be listed here, otherwise this entry would take over the entire wiki. Aversions or subversions should probably be left out as well, since that's (hopefully) the default.

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Card Battle Games

This trope is taken to the extreme in Digimon Digital Card Battle. The Big Bad literally hacks his Game-Breaker-filled deck to always get the same cards every time! This can be used against him if you have the ironically named 'Hacking' card, which swaps the HP of both Digimon as long as yours is a lower level.

The Magic online game Magic Duels has an AI mode which states: "Duel against Randomized AI opponents". The "randomized AI opponent", however, is actually a script that analyzes your deck card-for-card and then proceeds to build a deck out of the entire game's card pool specifically to counter your build. Not only that, but the AI knows what cards are in your hand at all times. Also, the "Easy/Medium/Hard" difficulty levels don't actually do anything except dictate how many coins (5, 10, or 15 respectively) should you be victorious and win. note However, it should be noted that the AI occasionally mana-screws itself, and/or sometimes plays a card that makes zero tactical sense. One of the Origins campaign opponents uses Mindshrieker , with an ability that mills the top card of either player's deck and gains power and toughness based on the milled card's mana cost. Somehow, whenever that opponent uses this ability, it knows which player to mill and always hits a card with the right cost to get lethal damage or survive combat, and rarely does it ever hit a land.

Invoked in Card City Nights where the final boss sneaks an illegal deck into the game by playing a friendly game with the Card King before hand. Since it was a friendly game, the Card King didn't bother to check the card and implicitly accepted the deck; and since the final boss only used fair cards from the illegal deck (itself a feat of luck, since it requires always having a legal card in hand to play) it didn't rouse suspicion during the game, and since they won they technically defeated the Card King before you did. The end result is a final boss deck with no card limitations and loaded with some of the best in the game.

All Yu-Gi-Oh! games have a list of restricted cards, just like the real card game, and usually matching the official one when said videogame came out. But computer opponents were not bound by it. The computer could have 3 copies of Game-Breaker cards that you were only allowed to have one of (many of which would later be outright banned with the introduction of the real-life game's "Advanced" format used in official tournaments). This was probably to make up for AI so stupid that it often seemed like it was trying to lose. Of course, that works both ways; in a lot of situations, you have to duel with someone as a partner, and your partner is usually kind of stupid too. In Tag Force 3, F.G.D. and all other dragons on its side of the field deal piercing damage (Their Atk - the target's Def) when they destroy a defense position monster, and no trap or spell cards can be activated when F.G.D. attacks, unless you're the one controlling it... And the trend has continued in Duel Transer, the game will always follow the March 2010 Banlist even if you change it to the September 2010 Banlist. Sure, you'll be able to use Dark Hole and Monster Reborn when your opponents can't, but they get Heavy Storm, Brain Control, Rescue Cat, and Substitoad in exchange. Oh, did we forget to mention the post-game content where the game doesn't even hide that it's cheating? Multiple Pot of Greeds, Graceful Charities, Harpies Feather Dusters and RAIGEKI's abound. 7 Trials To Glory was relatively good about the banlist. You had to obey the banlist, and the same cards wouldn't show up in the computers' decks. However, you'll eventually notice a pattern of the days when Card Destruction is off the banlist (it works that every card is cycled on and off it), it will show up in your opponent's hand within the first three turns about half of the time. Aside from the AI also knowing your facedown monster's defense before it's flipped, it's pretty fair otherwise. The only place the cheating really shows up is when you're facing the anime characters, as nameless side characters will usually display pretty jarring Artificial Stupidity. One other place where you'll see cheating (or just really, really good planning) is in the Limitation duel against Joey. In this duel, trap cards are banned, and almost all of the monsters he has in his deck have at least 1900 ATK. So you summon Gora Turtle, which prevents anything with 1900 or more ATK from attacking. Within two turns of summoning this, guaranteed, he'll summon Spell Canceler, the only monster he has with less than 1900, and it still has 1800. It's also a card he never uses in any other duel. Opponents in Eternal Duelist Soul will only attack face-down monsters with a DEF lower than their monster's ATK. Each opponent has a threshold of error with their "card reading," the weakest opponents blatantly attacking any face-down monster you have while stronger opponents will single out all of your weaklings and ignore any face-down monster capable of withstanding the attack. Fortunately, this makes it easy to exploit the A.I. using cards like Man-Eater Bug (they'll read your card's Defense, but they won't read any effects so you can draw the opponent into attacking and triggering them). The really worst part is that, of course, the game knows which cards you have and the opponent AI will actually base the cards it plays on whichever cards you've played. This is easily tested with an emulator that allow save states. Save before playing a particular card, and see the AI play a card that counters yours. Load the save state so you can play a different card that counters the AI's and it will actually play an entirely different card that counters your new one. note Of course, if you actually use save states to give you an advantage, that counts as cheating on your part Forbidden Memories. Not only does the AI have cards that you can't obtain without cheating devices, but it doesn't even bother to stack the deck, no; it turns the cards in its hands into other cards. Duel Links feature Vagabond, an NPC whose deck is copied from the deck other players used in Ranked Duel. The issue here, is that Vagabond uses decks from the last few weeks, and this ignore the fact that there could be a new banlist within those weeks. Meaning, if you challenge Vagabond after the new banlist, there's a chance that Vagabond will use a pre-banlist deck.

In the Cute Monster Girl-centric card battle game Monster Monpiece, the computer will always, in every single deck throughout the single-player campaign, have three copies of Fairy +2 and Poison Toad +2. These cards each cost 1 mana, provide 3 mana when they enter play, and are very easily killed — whereupon they add another 3 mana to the player's pool. These cards are also impossible to obtain during the single-player game, being very rare drops from post-game competitive online play. The computer opponent will also get at least one of these cards on its first turn, meaning that every single-player match effectively begins with the human player at a disadvantage in terms of resources with no effective means of balancing the odds. Ironically, this also counts as Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat, as while it does have more resources, it also lacks anything to use it on and will end up being overrun very quickly.

Fighting Games

First-Person Shooters

Maze Games

Ms. Pac-Man: Maze Madness's multiplayer mode has all AI players being pretty much against all human players if there's any (and should be at least two of them) when it comes to the rules. Generally, they form a team, even though the player can't do so with other players. In Dot Mania mode, dead AIs lose merely two dots as opposed to the players' ten. In the same mode (and Ghost Tag, in the early moments), they're also notably quite spiteful, always chasing down power-ups if said power-up appears. Considering that 4 out of 5 power-ups in Dot Mania mode are lethal to anyone who didn't pick them up (though one power-up won't kill anyone but will result in dot loss regardless), this makes reaching the intended goal difficult for the players. Thankfully, the only power-ups that the AIs actively ignore are the bag of money (steals dots from other players) and the chocolate cake (makes the character grow bigger, enabling him/her to stomp on other players), which in their case can only be picked up by accident (though woe betide you if an AI happens to grab a money bag). On the bright side, those AIs are hilariously stupid when not doing anything else, often running back and forth or cluelessly going to random places, including using warps for no reason. Obviously, this often results in multiple hilarious deaths by ghosts (Dot Mania), easy tag targets (Ghost Tag and Da Bomb) and plain stupid deaths from running out of time (Da Bomb). For added hilarity, one map has electric hazards, so Hilarity Ensues if you play against those AIs in that map. note Though, in Da Bomb, don't expect the "it" player to die because of those hazards, as he/she cannot be killed that way, though the untagged player can still take advantage of dying to the hazards if said player is being relentlessly chased. Just hope the chaser won't reach your spawn spot before you fully respawn (which the AIs will be more than happy to do so). As for Ghost Tag, while all players can die to the same hazard, AIs are still smart enough to simply tag a "dead" Pac-Person to continue gathering dots, since the foolishly dead player is still vulnerable to tags in that mode.

Racing Games

Real-Time Strategy

Anno 1800 has this with Expert Level AI. Sometimes they will expand to a second island without having the necessary resources at this point of the game.

In Mud and Blood 2, there's a reason why the game tag line is "Unfair Random Brutality"...and it's this: Many a game has ended upon the arrival of German tanks or large numbers elite infantry onto the screen at unfortunate times, and randomized artillery barrages and air strikes can ruin even the most well manned defensive line. There is actually a mechanic around them doing this - the Six Man Rule gives a chance of bad stuff happening every second for every unit over 6 you have that's unconcealed by cam nets . Blitz Waves though , those are just there to ensure you'll lose at some point.

One egregious example occurs in the final GDI mission of Command & Conquer, wherein the AI possesses the unique ability to build structures very far away from its own base and sometimes, even inside yours. In Command And Conquer generals the AI stealth general can build combat cycles immediately armed with suicide bombers just like the demolition general. The player stealth general can't do this.

In the Nintendo DS game LostMagic the enemy AI mages always have the home field advantage, being surrounded by their respective element (eg: the fire sage is surrounded by lava that she can walk on without taking damage, instead getting healed each second), which wouldn't be cheating in itself, but it lends extra annoyance when they cast spells on your from across the map with no mana constraints. The lava or shifting sands becomes a lot more annoying when you have to walk carefully around it at the same time as getting fire dropped on your head or long walls being cast to bar your way. Your player character can cast any spell that the AI can (once you have the right runes), but you have a very limited range on almost all your spells and your mana limits you to casting only 2-3 spells before needing to recharge. Of course the AI isn't nearly as intelligent as the player character and they don't have as wide a range of spells to choose from, so if they didn't cheat like they do the game would be far too easy.

Warcraft II: The AI is bad enough with its ability to see the whole map and ignore resource requirements as it is, but the Ogre Mages are outright evil in the AI's hand. The player can only cast spells with the Ogre Mage, Wizard, Paladin or Death Knight by selecting one unit at a time, selecting the spell, and targeting it. Not so with the AI, oh no. The AI is fully capable of having every single Ogre Mage cast Blood Lust on the entire Orc army at once'. And they spam it constantly''.

Warcraft III: On Insane difficulty, the main difference is that the AI harvests and gets gold twice as fast: for every ten gold mined, it gets twenty.

In Rise of Nations, the game straight up tells you that on the two higher difficulties they will get a resource handicap. Inverted, however, on the two easiest difficulties: the human gets the handicap instead.

Inverted in the Dawn of War - Dark Crusade and Soulstorm campaign modes. On Easy and Normal, computer players receive a penalty to the hit points of their units, while Hard levels the playing field. This is to make up for the fact that all but the weakest battles are fought two-on-one. Although played very straight in Dawn of War skirmish games, where the computer has a serious case of The All-Seeing A.I.. If you try to turtle up in your base, the AI will simply sit just out of sight outside the entrance. The instant you leave to attack its base, its army will run around the corner and attack yours. Cheats available in single player allow you to clearly watch it reacting to the movement of your army that it can't possibly see. This is on top of it always knowing exactly where your base, and any extensions, are without needing to scout for them and to know where stealth units are in order to target them with radar scans and the like. As the page quote suggests, Dawn of War 2 was trying to be a lot better about this, or at least attempting to not get caught doing so. What actually happens is referred to as the "Dawn of Resource". The A.I. is completely and utterly obsessed with securing all of the resource points on the map. It will try to grab all of your points, constantly allowing its units to get killed just so the A.I. can complete the capture. ◊ It knows how far your units can see to the last pixel, and will make its units perfectly avoid the sight radius of yours. The only time the computer actually starts playing the game is when it finally has all of the resource points, where it suddenly becomes reasonably competent. As soon as you take back a single point, it immediately reverts back to its kleptomania.

In Lords of the Realm 2, the nobles will always seem to be able to field large armies against you, even after you've defeated several of theirs, especially on harder difficulties. And if you invade one of their counties that doesn't have a castle built yet, they will often force conscript a large portion of the population to fight you with, along with sending all of the food to one of their counties just to spite you. If you take over one of their counties, and they have a county close enough, they will often immediately attack the county you just took over before you can even get a chance to put defenders in the castle, and promptly retake it back from you.

In Colobot, there is a mission where you have to chase a rogue robot who's flying away with the Black Box that is crucial to continuing the mission. After the robot drops the Black Box and flies away, he will continue to float indefinitely even after his battery should have clearly ran out.

Starcraft 2: This can be true of the difficulty settings in the multiplayer option, as even the Elite AI has response times above a human, but some of the most blatant cheating is in the coop mode. The AI doesn't actually have to build any units, they get airdropped onto the field, and then commence walking to the enemy base, and the waves get progressively stronger and stronger. Additionally, no matter what units the AI was given (Terran, Zerg, or Protoss), and regardless of the build the AI was set to when the match started, the AI gets to use the Hybrid. The higher the difficulty setting, the worse this can get. Furthermore, if you have any cloaked units, even if they were never revealed to your opponent, you can expect the AI to add detection to its next wave just to overcome this. In the Void Launch mission on Hard difficulty or higher, during the last wave its likely the final escape shuttles will be accompanied by Dominion Fleet Battleships similar to the Jackson's Revenge, Motherships which will be cloaking everything around them, or the Leviathan which has the ability to pretty much strike every unit at once. You'll get about six of these spawned simultaneously, all of them have really high armor ratings and health, and a poorly upgraded or funded army is going to get quickly destroyed on the final round. The only option for an under-performing army is to try to outrun these flagships and aim for the escape shuttles, then desperately flee to the next set, otherwise you're probably going to require your whole army to dead-focus on one of these flagship enemies just to kill it. Even if you're using Abathur, you're quickly going to see how powerful the AI's Leviathan's are in comparison to yours. During the Dead of Night mission, the AI gets access to special night-units during the night portions of the mission. These range from Kaboomers (High HP and acid to break structures), Hunterlings (leap into your supply line and start ruining your base), Spotters (fly and can disable your structures), and Chokers (grab a unit and drain its health, particularly dangerous against heroes). Destroying these units has to be done, but ultimately the AI is going to spawn several more after their defeat, and certain ones can come in pairs or sets, making them worse to deal with. Even if you're standing directly on it, any enemy units on a control point in Lock and Load will overload it. Considering you have to have both allies on a point just to capture it, it can be frustrating for an Overlord to swoop in over a siege tank and steal the point without being able to defeat it. The exact same problem is present in Chain of Ascension, if you match your opponents army number-for-number, they'll still push the point backwards until eliminated. Glevig and Molten Sal are clearly both using the same character model taken from Yagdra in the Heart of the Swarm campaign, and both have similar attacks. One will quickly find that Molten Sal has no cooldowns with his Incendiary Acid, allowing him to strike a large number of units with little difficulty over-and-over.

AI War: Fleet Command straight-up tells you it cheats, as part of its core game loop. On higher difficulties, it hits every item listed and then some, with units that the player can't obtain being produced for free and targeted perfectly at things it shouldn't be able to see. The main advantage you have that stays at all difficulty levels is the AI's crippling overconfidence; you have to build your strength while making sure you do not convince the AI that maybe it should stop putting off the part where it finishes you off. The game does justify it, however, in that the war really is that asymmetrical; the AI hold at least one entire galaxy and probably more, with the industrial might and intelligence to match, along with a warp grid that lets it bring anything anywhere within its domain, and having bigger fish to fry is the main reason it didn't finish you off.

Role-Playing Games

Simulation Games

Stealth-Based Games

In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the game uses its highest difficulty as a free license to do whatever it wants. Ignoring the super-vision and super-hearing, the game takes it to the extreme with the stealth suit; even if you've got a 99% Camo Index (READ:Snake is invisible even to a thermal extent), an average mook investigating something as little as footstep noises will see straight through your entire disguise if he gets within a 15 meter radius. MGS4 is especially guilty with its warzone areas; despite being in the middle of a Militia-PMC battle, enemies will happily drop everything to open fire on the elderly spy not bothering anyone. This can thankfully be somewhat mitigated by finding a disguise and/or giving rations and the like to the militia, but the PMCs cannot be swayed in this manner and will continue focusing on you when you're detected (even in disguise), even if it means their own death by ignoring the fifty other guys who are actually shooting at them note Oddly enough, this is justified : the PM Cs take their orders from Liquid, who's a dick like that

The Hitman series is very fond of this. Something as innocent as holding the wrong item in the wrong disguise means you're in for either a great deal of scrutiny or unprovoked assault. The newest entry is better about this, with distinct differences between "trespassing" (if you're caught, guards will escort you out and only attack if you resist) and "hostile area" (guards attack you immediately if you're caught). However, you are still the only person in the universe they care about; the most noticeable example is areas where you have to be frisked to enter - Non Player Characters will walk right past the same guards without them so much as turning their heads.

Up until the third installation, the Splinter Cell series was guilty of this as, upon entering the sight of a mook above 75% visibility, he will begin firing immediately whilst everyone in the area promptly charges directly towards you and can now see you in the dark. The kicker? Running anywhere but to the next area means they'll constantly pursue; even if you hide out of reach, they'll follow as close as possible and wait for you to come back. Indefinitely. Also, enemies alerted to your presence will never miss when firing at you with a pistol, even if the enemy in question is outside the range of the player's scoped rifle... Even if the enemy is far outside the range of the game's draw distance. Oddly, they will occasionally miss if shooting with a rifle.

Sniper Elite V2, thanks to both the game's focus on sniper kills and this trope, is almost impossible to play as a stealth-based game, outside of the few areas where there is loud enough background noise for you to mask your shots. In particular, you have the ability to toss small rocks to distract unaware enemies, but no matter where you throw them at or from, any enemies whose attention they grab will immediately know where you threw it from, investigate, and find you.

Survival Horror

Haunting Ground: Each of your stalkers has a single instant-kill ability that cannot be dodged, averted, or prevented in any way. It can strike at any time, like, say, when you are nearly done with the block-pushing Puzzle Boss and have to start all over again. What makes this particularly Egregious is that your Canine Companion Hewie can attack enemies during any other attack animation to help you, and there is an accessory (the Diamond Choker) that is supposed to prevent these moves from happening. It doesn't.

Third-Person Shooter

In Syphon Filter second and third game, certain enemies can target-lock Player Character for head shot even when they are constantly moving. If the player want to do head shot, they need to do manual aim (using target-lock will automatically aim your enemy's chest), which means Player Character will not be able to move while doing so and left become vulnerable for rear attacks.

In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the crossbow is a powerful weapon that can kill most enemies in one hit. In the player's hands, it needs to be reloaded after every shot and reloading takes some time. Guardians wielding crossbows are capable of firing several shots in quick succession, easily killing the player if they're not careful.

Turn-Based Strategy

In the PSP remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, the Onion Knight job is marked by being able to use any piece of equipment, being unable to use abilities, yet having extremely high stats when mastered. However, in one link mission, you and your partner must defeat a team of master Onion Knights who have a full range of powerful abilities equipped. They'll hit you back and more than likely screw you over.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has some boss enemies who are granted immunity from the game's law system, while you're stuck playing by the rules. Ice abilities are illegal for the battle? The boss will laugh while casting Blizzaga every turn and the judge will just yellow card him repeatedly. Some other characters are given ribbons, granting them immunity from the law.

In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, enemies will regularly be given 'bonus' turns at the beginning of a battle before you can act in any way, on top of their statistically unlikely shenanigans. Probably the worst of it is the fourth round in the Brightmoon Tor, where the enemy is given twelve bonus turns, Game-Breaker abilities that cost no MP, and massive level advantages that did not exist in the previous stages. One of these abilities casts Haste and Protect on their entire party, resulting in an approximate minimum of twenty-four bonus turns before you can do anything.

Inverted Trope in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM2. In addition to obvious advantages like fewer enemies, more money and better soldiers, the game fudges probabilities in the player's favor. The easiest two difficulties have a percentage increases to your chance to hit as well as giving buffs to defense and accuracy for your last solider if the rest of the squad dies. All but the hardest difficulty have a built-in system that makes Gambler's Fallacy not actually a fallacy as each miss on a shot with at least 50% chance to hit will give a stacking buff that increases your squad's accuracy until a shot hits. Ironically this all typically results in players assuming the higher difficulties are unfair when actually it's just that the easier ones are cheating in your favor. Of course, both have a Game Mod to disable the cheating.

Valkyria Chronicles makes up for its oftentimes rock-stupid AI by cheating at every opportunity. The most obvious example is that Imperial forces can call in unlimited reinforcements, while the player has access to 20 units at most. In some missions enemies have an uncanny ability to snipe you from halfway across the map (try leaving a sniper unit in the sniper nest in Chapter 4 and see how reliably tanks from all the way on the other side of the map can blow them away.) And then there are Enemy Aces, who all have freakishly high evasion, the worst one being Sytreet the Lynx, who can and will dodge literally everything you throw at him while standing out on the open with no cover. In every other port of the game, enemy interception fire stops as soon as you aim your weapon. In the Steam port, however, it continues on until the firing reticle appears, which in some cases can be enough for the enemy to kill said unit before they can even do anything (and get ready for your Lancers to soak up plenty of bullets in the excrutiatingly long time it takes for them to ready their lance.) Naturally, this doesn't apply to your own interception fire, and your units will politely stop firing the instant an enemy unit gets ready to aim. Selvaria has a unique version of the Heal All order that heals all units to full health. Your own version of the Heal All order only heals a third of every units health. You don't even get to use this order in the DLC campaign where you play as Selvaria.

In the first two Advance Wars games, the AI flagrantly ignores the rules of Fog of War. In such maps, you can neither see nor attack enemy units unless they're in your visual range. The AI, however, does not have this restriction, and will thus snipe you with impunity from halfway across the map even when your troops are well out of its vision. The only saving grace is that it does follow the rule of being unable to see or attack any units in cover, such as forests and reefs, unless it has a unit parked directly adjacent to it, so hiding your valuable units in these spots is crucial just to level the playing field. Dual Strike at least toned it back somewhat: the enemy AI still knows exactly where your non-hidden troops are, but it can no longer attack them if they're not in visual range, making parking your units out of cover much less suicidal. It wouldn't be until Days of Ruin, however, that the AI finally started following all of the rules.

While the main story of Soul Nomad & the World Eaters isn't especially guilty of this, the randomized "Inspection" maps are: An effect available to both the player and the AI is called "Antimatter," and it grants everyone in a squad a huge evasiveness buff at the cost of making them a One-Hit Point Wonder. At least, as long as they're not the boss of an Inspection map, in which case they will recieve a huge evasiveness buff with no drawbacks whatsoever. If an enemy squad is killed with a counterattack and one of your squads is supposed to move next, then the game will push their turn back to let another enemy move first. This is most noticable when you're severely overleveled, watching as every enemy on the map charges to their death one after the other, while the indicator at the top of the screen insists your turn is coming up any moment now.



Wide-Open Sandbox

The Rhino Tanks are the definition of Badass in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, being incredibly rare to find unless you get a six-star wanted level, or obtain one from the military base (which will give you a five-star wanted level). However, these vehicles are very heavy and definitely not nimble when you drive them. However, if you manage to outrun the police, FBI and army in your souped-up Infernus and tear through the countryside, prepare to have the horror of your life when a Rhino Tank bursts out of the woods and charges straight for you at speeds upwards of 120 miles per hour. Speaking of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, one mission wants you to pursuit Freddy on a bike. The guy must have had his ass stapled to the seat and was testedly able to ram a firetruck strategically parked in his flight route out of the way (or he swerved while driving 200 mph. Or used the tunnel effect. In any case he must have cheated). And when finally an angered player one bullet short before a Rage Quit had his sweet Troll revenge, parked a Packer before the alley and saw Freddy taking off, landing on the balcony of the house ahead, and collected the object of desire (Freddys indestructible bike)...it wasn't indestructible any longer.

Breakable Weapons are a staple element of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but they only wear out when you use them. Weapons and shields wielded by enemies (or NPCs) are indestructible. This is better than the alternative, though, because stealing weapons and shields from enemies is your primary means of acquiring them—you can't buy them anywhere, so the only other sources are treasure chests and the small number of "decorative" items found in settlements. It'd be pretty annoying if most of your weapons were in poor condition before you even got to use them.

Miscellaneous/Unsorted

Casino/Amusement Park Games

Many arcade games are programmed to only make the jackpot or grand prize possible to hit once out of so many games. This is usually set via some kind of mechanism inside the machine, behind the coin box, or in the operator menu activated by a button behind the coin box for games with a monitor. One common implementation is to have a setting can go from 1 (or some other small number) to some maximum value X, or alternatively a "difficulty level" with each level mapping to a numerical setting in that range. Every game, the machine rolls a random number from 0 to X-1. If the roll is less than the setting, the jackpot can be won on that game; otherwise, the machine rigs the game to be Unwinnable. The other common implementation is to allow setting a minimum number of games that must pass since the last time the jackpot was won before it becomes winnable again. This is why some arcades will have one of those "stop the light" games with a four-digit progressive jackpot that hasn't been hit in over 1,000 games in spite of skilled players who can hit the jackpot at least once every 10 attempts on the same game at other arcades. Here's how Cyclone works. The jackpot light lights for the same amount of time as the other lights, but the jackpot window is smaller than the 20ms light window. This is to keep people from figuring out that the jackpot has a smaller window than all other lights, and to keep peopel from figurig out the skill setting with a video camera. The default is 3ms. If the jackpot light is lit, but you are not in the real jackpot window, the machine jumps to a nearby light. The easiest jackpot setting is 20ms. A one frame link in fighting games is 16ms, and within human reflexes. A 3 ms window can be hit maybe 1 in 10 times, if you actually find it, which is difficult because the game is lying about if you were early or late. If it's set on 1ms, it's impossible to hit reliably without a high precision robot, so that's often coupled with the winability setting which expands the window to 20 ms to match the light every X games. The game is not legally allowed to make it actually impossible, but it is allowed to make it practically impossible. The default setting (3ms, zero winability) is legal, but the 1ms+winability setting really stretches the laws.

On British pub fruit machines, when a player spins a winning combination he is given the option to go higher/lower for the chance to win the next biggest payout. The machine decides in advance how far the player will be allowed to go, and there will come a point where a player who chooses to go higher/lower is guaranteed to lose regardless of the option taken. This has been proven by the Fairplay campaign, who ran the fruit machine software on a PC emulator, saving the game state before the choice is made. The machine cabinets are now required to display the message "This machine may occasionally offer a choice where the player has no chance of success". The British National Lottery online games do exactly the same thing. For instance, there is a game where you can guess whether the next ball from the machine will be higher or lower, giving the illusion that skill is required to win. However, whether you will win or lose the game is decided beforehand. Sometimes it's funny to deliberately choose the least likely answer and then watch as a highly improbable sequence of balls emerge - again and again. Sometimes you can get an extra high low win by going low on a 2, or high on a 11, forcing a 1 or a 12 to come up, which is then followed by another winner you wouldn't have had if you didn't. When the win for tat guess is predetermined, it's best to go against the odds.

Coin-operated pub quiz machines were fair for a few years after they first came out, until the makers realized that some Renaissance Man types were making serious money off them. The response was to introduce gambling elements to the games that reduced them to Luck-Based Mission even for people who knew all the answers to the questions. Some games even introduce elements ostensibly requiring manual dexterity - for example, on Bullseye a player must hit a prize segment with a dart, and Battleships involves hitting it with a revolving turret. However, even when aimed perfectly, the game decides whether or not the shot will hit. When the rules were changed to stop that, they resorted to having a separate database of "spoiler questions." Ones which no one can reasonably be expected to know the answer to. If you get good enough, they start throwing them at you. The game keeps track of the spoiler questions that have already been asked, so it can keep asking new ones as needed to break a winning streak.

Stacker machines actually decide—before the game has even been played—whether the player is allowed to win a major prize or not; this means it's possible to "waste" winning games, as well as make your way to the end but never have a chance of winning. If the last square stacks up, it simply moves another step before stopping after you press the button, oops, you missed. Though this is understandable, as the major prizes tend to be expensive things like game consoles or MP3 players, it is cheating nonetheless. The machine doesn't cheat for the minor prizes, but that's because nobody cares about winning hair scrunchies. In case you had any doubt, there's no warning of this (at least in Canada). It's probably the same trick the Cyclone games use, but the manual does not explain what the tightened timing window for when the game doesn't want you to win actually is. But it's almost certainly 1ms or less.

machines actually decide—before the game has even been played—whether the player is allowed to win a major prize or not; this means it's possible to "waste" winning games, as well as make your way to the end but never have a chance of winning. If the last square stacks up, it simply moves another step before stopping after you press the button, oops, you missed. Though this is understandable, as the major prizes tend to be expensive things like game consoles or MP3 players, it is cheating nonetheless. The machine doesn't cheat for the minor prizes, but that's because nobody cares about winning hair scrunchies. In case you had any doubt, there's no warning of this (at least in Canada). Claw Machines. Good lord. It's amazing how many people don't know this, but almost all claw machines are rigged in various ways. For instance, many machines lower the claw slowly and then pull it up quickly, tending to drop the prize with this sudden motion. The most common method of rigging a machine is to rig the claw so that it only actually closes tight enough to grip a prize every so often. If the machine is set to grip a prize, an experienced player will almost always win...but these instances are rare. On some machines, you get a chance to win every X amount of plays. Someone in-the-know could let other people play until the machine is ready to spit out a prize, then swoop in and take it. However, most modern machines use a Random Number Generator. Also, it's often easier to grab a prize if it's lying on its side...and more often than not, the items (usually toys) are placed upright or some other way to make grabbing even more difficult. Since claw games are really popular in Japan, quite a few of them are less about luck and more about skill. It boils down to how few coins you need to put into the game to get the item which is carefully placed to be manipulated out, rather than lifted out. To elaborate, claw machines in Japan will often feature a single object placed in the center of a flat surface, and the captured object is then traded for the actual prize. Players are expected to make multiple attempts, nudging the object closer to the goal each time. If a player accidentally moves the object into a disadvantageous position, they can flag down one of the arcade operators to reset it to its original placement and start anew. In the end, you've paid a reasonable price for the item, but the prizes are often specialty pop culture items that cannot be found in retail stores (apart from secondhand shops in the months that follow).

Many video slot machines are programmed with weighted reels, so that some stops are more common than others. This is virtually always used to make "near misses" happen many, MANY times more often than an actual win, in order to make the player think he's close to winning and continue playing. For example, the "Red White Blue" slot machine pays out the jackpot for hitting a red 7, a white 7, and a blue 7, from left to right. But for one configuration, each reel only has a 1/64 chance of hitting the properly-colored 7, a 3/64 chance of hitting the blank right above it, and a 3/64 chance of hitting the blank right below it - which means the proper combination is 27 times more likely to line up just above the pay line than it is to be actually hit, as well as 27 times more likely to line up just below the pay line. (And this is a milder case; it's not uncommon to make the adjacent blanks each the legal maximum of 6 times more likely than the jackpot space.) In addition, the white and blue 7's are 6-7 times more likely to show up in each of the other reels - red-blue-white is 49 times more likely to be hit than red-white-blue, and blue-red-white is 126 times more likely. note Note that the law requires reels to be independent, so the odds of the blue 7 hitting on the third reel, for example, must be the same regardless of what symbols hit on the first two reels. However, it's legal to simply make the blue 7 common on reel 2 and rare on reel 3, and the white 7 common on reel 3 and rare on reel 2, which is how the game achieves these near misses. This does, however, depend on jurisdiction, as in some places the only requirement is that the machine pay off at least the state minimum percentage of play in, and how it does that is of no concern to the gaming commission.

slot machine pays out the jackpot for hitting a red 7, a white 7, and a blue 7, from left to right. But for one configuration, each reel only has a 1/64 chance of hitting the properly-colored 7, a 3/64 chance of hitting the blank right above it, and a 3/64 chance of hitting the blank right below it - which means the proper combination is 27 times more likely to line up just above the pay line than it is to be actually hit, as well as 27 times more likely to line up just below the pay line. (And this is a milder case; it's not uncommon to make the adjacent blanks each the legal maximum of 6 times more likely than the jackpot space.) In addition, the white and blue 7's are 6-7 times more likely to show up in each of the other reels - red-blue-white is 49 times more likely to be hit than red-white-blue, and blue-red-white is 126 times more likely. Japanese pachisuro (a.k.a. pachi-slot) machines spin until the player manually stops the reels, attempting to time the button presses to line up a winning combination. However, the machine is legally allowed to skip up to 4 symbols after each button press before stopping the reel; this is most frequently done to make the third reel skip past a winning combination. (The slot machines in Pokémon also do this, since they're based off pachisuro as opposed to Western slot machines.)

A particularly glaring example would be the casino game tournaments in the otherwise above-average Hoyle Casino 2011 PC game. While the human player sits at third base, the human must always place bets prior to the AI bots at seats 1, 2, and 4 deciding how much they are willing to stake. You can change your bet amount, but the bots will then do the same. In real tournaments, you're at least given the option of making a secret bet by writing down your bet amount and handing it to the dealers, to prevent other players from basing their betting on how much you stand to win or lose. This option does not exist in Hoyle Casino because, frankly, of this trope.

The arcade redemption game Tippin' Bloks was fair (i.e. the jackpot could be won on every game), although it would adjust itself to be harder for a while after a couple jackpot wins - it would spawn blocks on the opposite side of the screen, but you still had just barely enough time to catch them. But then many arcades discovered they were losing money on the machine due to people who practiced the game to the point where they could win the jackpot more often than not. This prompted the manufacturer to create a software update, which makes the game drop blocks so fast that they're impossible to catch in time, making the game Unwinnable by Design.

Animal Kaiser is a terrible offender at this. In order to attack your opponent, you need to get a higher power roll than them. So the game often rigs your attack roll in the opponent's favour, especially against the final one. If you stop your roll last, you'll roll one level lower than your opponent (even when it was supposed to stop earlier- they make it roll to the next number!). If you roll first, the opponent roll one level higher than you. Either way, you're screwed! And if you got a "Doubling", which is the highest roll possible? The opponent will also get a "Doubling" and draw with you, forcing both to roll again!



In-Universe Examples