History ArtificialStupidity / FireEmblem

* While enemies with status staves usually display ArtificialBrilliance, Fracture users are the exception. They'll always use their staves if someone is in range, even if no other enemies can attack that unit (and therefore inflicting Break is entirely pointless). They don't have especially good target priority even if enemies ''are'' in range of a unit.

* While enemies with status staves usually display ArtificialBriliance, Fracture users are the exception. They'll always use their staves if someone is in range, even if no other enemies can attack that unit (and therefore inflicting Break is entirely pointless). They don't have especially good target priority even if enemies ''are'' in range of a unit.

* Leif's Engage Skill allows his users to always counter enemy attacks with the most advantageous weapon, even if it wasn't currently equipped, which sounds amazing - a foolproof way to avoid being Broken and to counterattack at any range! However, when it comes to deciding ''which'' weapon is most advantageous, the AI can be a bit... single-minded. In particular, it ''really'' likes to equip the Light Brand, a magic sword which is very good on units with high or even decent Magic stats, and very bad on units without them. Naturally, low magic units are just as likely to end up with the Light Brand foisted unceremoniously upon them.

** Another assist-related example comes from enemy units Assisting their allies into places where they can't move, such as an infantry unit repositioning a cavalry unit into a square surrounded by forest and ocean tiles. In particularly bad cases, units might be assisted into places where the ''player'' can't reach without appropriate units, either, creating an soft-lock that can only be resolved by surrendering.

* While most of the examples of stupidity in ''Heroes'' are typical to the series, the skill system means that a new case is added: assist skill loops. Units who aren't in range of enemies will prioritize using assist skills over anything else, meaning that it's possible for the AI to get caught in loops of doing nothing but using assist skills on each other while ignoring the player's units. For example, a unit might use Pivot to jump over their ally each turn, only for that ally to use Reposition to bring them back to their starting square, and then keep doing this until the player brings their units into range.

** And then the ''Conquest'' route of ''Fates'' averts rule number 2: if the enemy's goal is to cross a line on the map (such as the infamous Chapter 10), the AI knows this, and it seems to have at least one turn of lookahead — if it's a choice between attacking [[WeCannotGoOnWithoutYou Corrin]] or moving out of range so it can reach the objective next turn, it will ignore 12 games of precedent and ignore combat odds with Corrin for the chance of winning the map outright. It's not much, but it's a startling DifficultySpike for the AI to think ahead like that.

* In Chapter 3, your NPC ally Hans [[LeeroyJenkins wastes no time charging a heavily fortified enemy bunker and getting himself beaten to a bloody pulp]]. Fortunately, you have absolutely no reason to bother keeping him safe in terms of either gameplay (there are no hard rewards) or story (he's an asshole who started the fight completely unprovoked, and [[HateSink he's]] only going [[MoralEventHorizon to get worse from here]]).

* ''Fire Emblem'''s AI uses a method of determining target priority that leads to what many human players might consider very odd decisions. Enemies often target units that they can't actually damage, or they may attack less relevant units when they could much more easily target your Lord or other, more significant units. This is mainly due to the fact that the AI generally tends to prioritize causing fatalities above all else, meaning they attack all things in range and especially target units with HP below a certain threshold (ignoring the probability of actually hitting or causing damage to any given unit). This system was implemented from the fifth game in the franchise onward in order to keep the game moving along at a decent pace; earlier games would have units ignore characters with very high Defense or Evasion stats, which made for some long, tedious battles.

* The AI is programmed to avoid counterattacks if possible--if it can attack a unit without receiving a counter, it will almost always do so, unless it can deal damage. This means that, for instance, the AI may ignore a SquishyWizard in favor of chucking handaxes at a sword-wielding paladin on a fort, even if one would die in two hits and the other can tank a dozen.

* ''Fire Emblem'''s AI uses a method of determining target priority that leads to what many human players might consider very odd decisions. Enemies often target units that they can't actually damage, or they may attack smaller units when they could much more easily target your Lord or other, more significant units. This is mainly due to the fact that the AI generally tends to prioritize causing fatalities above all else (ignoring the probability of actually hitting or causing damage to any given unit). This system was implemented from the fifth game in the franchise onward in order to keep the game moving along at a decent pace; earlier games would have units ignore characters with very high Defense or Evasion stats, which made for some long, tedious battles.

* Then there's the behavior [[FanNickname fans have termed]] "Matthis Syndrome", which involves recruitable enemies ''attacking the very characters who can recruit them.'' This often leads to absolutely ridiculous cases of GameplayAndStorySegregation, most notably with the character it's named after, who will willingly attack (and most likely ''kill'') his sister Lena, all the while calling out for her in his battle quote. He's the most famous example, but there are others, such as Astram having no qualms about attacking his lover Midia or Wendell openly attacking you despite saying he has "no love for war". Granted, ''some'' enemies in the series are smart enough not to attack their friends/relatives/lovers, but it's impossible to know which without risking it.

* In some games, if the AI uses [[StandardStatusEffects status staves]] while multiple units are in range, it will always target the unit lowest in the deployment order. In some games, this can be worth keeping a manakete around, even if they don't fight, because as long as you put them last in deployment and with the bulk of the army, it's extremely likely that the AI will go after their massively overkill 20+ Resistance and not your wyvern rider with 4 Resistance or your bishop capable of healing it instantly. Add the fact that these staves tend to wear out after only a handful of uses, and parking a manakete in status range for a few turns becomes a funny way to just flat-out solve the problem.

* The vast majority of bosses in maps with a Seize objective, and very often ones with a Kill Boss or Rout objective, will not move. For Seize bosses, this makes some sense--if they move off the objective, then [[InstantWinCondition they effectively forfeit the chapter]], and being on a throne or gate provides some pretty hefty defensive bonuses--but Kill Boss and Rout bosses really have no reason to not face the player alongside the rest of their troops. It's especially silly if the boss doesn't have any ranged weapons, in which case the player can simply plink them to death with bows, magic, handaxes, and javelins, while the boss just sits there and wonders where their life went wrong.

* Enemies also have absolutely no experience with such advanced concepts as "strategic retreat", "regrouping", or "mixed unit tactics" beyond, as stated above, going after the most vulnerable unit available. However, this is circumvented by good level design and the player's general mindset... Usually. Having a single little soldier charge blindly at you when his allies are still too far away to assist is an unfortunately common occurrence.

** Another good example of this is Thea from ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade''... ''again''. She (and her unit of Pegasus Knights) can attack her sister Shanna or ''her boss'' Klein (whom she even has a conversation with at the start of the map). And since Klein is a Sniper, if he gets attacked at range, he'll pretty much kill them in one shot. Klein himself can also potentially kill his little sister Clarine in the same level.

* [[VillainTeleportation Witches are able to teleport anywhere.]] Instead of being the bane of players like one would expect, they're a prime example of AIRoulette. Most of the time they'll go for Archers or Mages, who are able to fight back at them, instead of someone who can't. However, they do have a tendency to at least [[ArtificialBrilliance go to a space where they can get an Avoid bonus...]] which doesn't mean anything if they're against a magic-user, since magic negates field bonuses in this game.

* In Chapter 1, your foes are inexperienced students in a mock battle in which they aren't fighting to the death. Naturally, they make extremely bad tactical decisions such as putting an unarmored archer on the front lines or going LeeroyJenkins out of formation.

* Archers will often go straight after mages, which are often the only units (aside from other archers) that can counterattack from that distance. They may even do this if they need to be one square from your Lord to do so. Other enemies will see a line of five soldiers and will ''all'' choose to swarm either the one riding a dragon who kills things in one hit, or the heavily armored one who doesn't take damage. In most cases, unless they are scripted to do otherwise, the AI will choose to attack any units that get into their attack range, even when they are going to do no damage on the target.
** The whole suicidal [[ShootTheMageFirst attack on the mages thing]] is actually explainable. The AI is aiming to cause ''any'' fatalities it can, no matter the cost to its own units, and mages tend to be... ''[[SquishyWizard rather bad]]'' at taking physical damage [[note]]on the flip side, mages tend to be pretty good at resisting magic attacks; physical units tend towards the inverse (i.e. good physical defense, poor magic resistance)[[/note]]. Keep in mind that winning a match in ''Fire Emblem'' is quite easy--winning with everyone alive is the rub. Given a 1% chance of [[OneHitKill an instant kill]], and a 100% chance of doing half of the max HP of the target, the AI will go for the 1% instant kill chance ''every time'' and hope it gets lucky [[SpitefulAI just to spite you]]. Most of the time, you will laugh at the foolishness of the computer, but when its attack successfully connects...
*** To be more precise (at least in the GBA ones), the AI first targets any units it can deliver enough damage to kill in one hit, regardless of the likelihood to hit or the damage that it will receive, and if it can't kill anyone, then it goes for the one that it can deal the most damage to, again not counting likelihood to hit. The issue is that the people with the lowest defense are generally your magic users. They also happen to have ungodly dodge most of the time (at least for Sages), and are fully capable of one-shotting most units in the game once they've been trained. The GBA games do not take into account whether they'll be counter-attacked at all, leading to sending a Sage out in front of your army and letting him destroy half the units on the map being a legitimate strategy. And because of the way probability to hit works in this game, a 30% chance to hit is really more like a 10%, and that's the sort of hit rate opponents often get.
*** That said, while the AI doesn't tend to consider whether attacking a unit will result in the AI dying, it can also be easily manipulated by the fact that it does the opposite, being ''too'' fearful of counterattacks unless they think they can kill whatever they're attacking. Take, for instance, a situation where the AI has the choice of attacking a high-level Sniper (attacks only at range) or a low-level Myrmidon (attacks only at melee) with its melee unit. As long as the melee unit isn't strong enough to one-round the Myrmidon, the AI will invariably pick the Sniper, even if the Sniper has twice as much Avoid and Defense and can step back and one-shot them next turn, and the Myrmidon does ScratchDamage. Ironically, this can actually impede the AI's goal of killing as many characters as possible; as long as a unit can survive a single good hit, even if a second hit would kill them easily, you can count on the AI to ignore them in favor of missing javelin tosses at an axe-user plonked on a fort.
*** If a unit gets brought below a certain health threshold and can be damaged, they suddenly shoot up in the AI's targeting priority; after all, dealing 5 damage to a unit with 15 HP is a lot scarier than dealing 10 damage to a unit with 40 HP. However, the AI is known to do this even for fairly tanky units where they have no chance of killing them in one turn. A particularly funny offender is Fae in ''The Binding Blade'', who has very low base HP but very high Defense and ''insanely'' high Resistance; it's not unheard of to see magic enemies focus-firing her with their Bolting and Purge tomes and barely scratching her.
** This has applications beyond power-leveling. Many ''Fire Emblem'' veterans know that the best way to save a mission that's going pear-shaped is to unequip your strongest character's weapon. Picture this: the enemy has three Swordmasters standing next to a mission-sensitive character, who has only a few HP left. In order to win the map, the enemy need only attack with a single unit. Yet if you move an armored unit up and unequip their weapon, any enemy unit within range will immediately abandon their attack on the almost-dead Lord and attack the armored unit instead, even if they can't damage it.
** The DS games add yet another wrinkle to the whole thing: the AI is aware of crit chance, and so will deliberately target characters with a low LuckStat in the hopes of managing a CriticalHit. This in spite of the fact that it will rarely have a crit chance above the low single digits, and the fact that several rather powerful and fairly tanky units also have disproportionately low Luck: see Jagen and Sirius.
** Notably, the fact that the AI will attack even if it has no chance of damaging you is a deliberate measure: in the earlier games in the series, having too much Defense or Evasion will cause the AI to turn up its nose at you. (It's particularly evident if you use the Dragonstone glitch in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemShadowDragon'', or use Altenna or Forseti Ced in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGenealogyOfTheHolyWar''.) As this made combat considerably more tedious for those characters and could potentially turn having lots of Defense into a PowerUpLetdown, it was changed from the fifth game onward so that the AI will throw its units futilely even if they have no chance of doing any damage, allowing the player to clear out lots of weak enemies.

** The whole suicidal [[ShootTheMageFirst attack on the mages thing]] is actually explainable. The AI is aiming to cause ''any'' [[FinalDeath fatalities]] it can, no matter the cost to its own units, and mages tend to be... ''[[SquishyWizard rather bad]]'' at taking physical damage [[note]]on the flip side, mages tend to be pretty good at resisting magic attacks; physical units tend towards the inverse (i.e. good physical defense, poor magic resistance)[[/note]]. Keep in mind that winning a match in ''Fire Emblem'' is quite easy--winning with everyone alive is the rub. Given a 1% chance of [[OneHitKill an instant kill]], and a 100% chance of doing half of the max HP of the target, the AI will go for the 1% instant kill chance ''every time'' and hope it gets lucky [[SpitefulAI just to spite you]]. Most of the time, you will laugh at the foolishness of the computer, but when its attack successfully connects...

* Hubert's Paralogue, which involves protecting several mages from Demonic Beasts, zig-zags this. The mages start out using Gambits, which destroy the Demonic Beasts' barriers and don't allow the enemy to retaliate, which is a smart choice for the situation. Unfortunately, when those Gambits run out, the Mages fight back against the Demonic Beasts with their spells in close quarters, which will allow the Demonic Beasts to retaliate and likely kill them.