Depraved Gamer Tactics

King of Posters
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This is a phrase I picked up from the duckfeed.tv boys to indicate a strategy that feels, perhaps, counter to the spirit of the game. I would more narrowly define this as “an action that takes advantage of a game’s design in a way that was likely not intended, and would not work more than once against a human opponent”.

My most recent example is in Heroes of Might and Magic 3: The Succession Wars. I am currently facing an army that is an order of magnitude larger than my own - I have no way of even scratching them in a fair fight. So instead, I have been taking a hero with a single black dragon, charging at their castle, then casting the Armageddon spell (which massively damages every creature except my black dragon, whomst is immune to magic) and running away. I then rehire my hero and do it all over again 2-3 days later. It costs about 4500 gold per attempt but it’s costing them waaay more.

And of course, this would not work against a human because they would just take their massive army out of the castle and wipe me out. Which is still a risk here, BUT much less so because the AI is pretty darn stupid.

Another example is, IIRC, from Red Alert 2. The AI tends to highly value destroying ore trucks, and I remember driving ore trucks around as decoys so that I could get all their units in a small area and then surround them. Stuff like that.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t count something like “using the same move over and over in a fighting game because you know your human opponent can’t handle it.” This is annoying, sure, but it’s a valid tactic that your opponent can overcome with enough practice.

What’s your favorite depraved gamer tactic? I wanna hear how you exploited weird edge cases in games.

EDIT: changed to Depraved because shnozlak rightly pointed out the previous word choice sucked

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i will save scum forever

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I wish more games acknowledged save scumming in its text. We can’t let Undertale be the only example people know about!!

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Actually now that I think about this map, one of the fortune tellers that popped up as a dialogue box in like, month 2 told me that I would need to use magic specifically against this guy. Do you think the map maker knew about this particular degenerate gamer tactic?

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I always live in fear they’ll do this more haha. Practised occasionally it’s cute but it can feel a bit like the game developer showing up in your house and asking a lot of personal questions. I expect them to stay on their side of the fence!

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If you pause in ZZT, pressing an arrow key to move will automatically unpause the game after you move. However, if you press P to pause immediately after moving, you will move nothing else will get a chance to act. (An easier way to do this is hold down P while using the mouse controls, as the speedrun does.) It’s a very useful tactic for dealing with certain unfair situations that would normally require lucky timing.

I should note that there is one game that can detect if you are cheating using this method, and punishes you accordingly: Bubbas Bubbles by WiL.

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In PC RTS of yesteryear Total Annihilation there are two factions: The Core, and The Arm. They have the usual smattering of roughly-equivalent units and a handful of late-game behemoths that are tactically distinct. Generally things are pretty well balanced.

Every player starts with their Commander, and this unit should be protected at all costs. Killing an enemy commander, depending on game settings, is either an instant loss for the player controlling it, or (especially in the early going) a devastating blow to their build order and it produces a huge, very destructive explosion to boot. If you can find and kill a commander early it’s a very short route to winning.

The base land-attack unit for The Arm has a weak (but very high rate of fire) gun. 5 or so of these little robots can encircle an enemy commander, and through sheer rate of stimuli in the form of damage, an AI-controlled commander is paralyzed by indecision and can’t decide which enemy to kill first. It’s very easy to hunt down an enemy’s commander and kill it if you are playing as The Arm and playing against AI. A human player would leverage a Commander’s very powerful secondary weapon to wipe out one or two of the attackers, actively build/deploy reinforcements to turn the tide, etc. But if you catch an AI commander out just far enough from supporting units, you can wipe them out with very cheap early-game units.

This doesn’t work with the early-game units of The Core – their pew pew lasers are just not rapid enough to truly stymie an AI commander. They’ll manage to pick one or two enemies off and then out-attrition the remainder.

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I used to be really good at drifting the taxi into a wall at the destination in Crazy Taxi to the point where you just go into an infinite glitch drift with the tip money flowing in nonstop.

I’ve never bothered to check to see if this is a good strategy or not. You do lose time this way. But I always find myself tempted to do it when I play.

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One of the things that makes Hitman great is that there are ~5 different styles of play, each equally comic and degenerate, and definitely in opposing spirits although it’s impossible to pin down “the” spirit of the game.

You can beat it by dressing up in the costume of people you don’t look like at all and confidently walk into high-security areas, trusting in how awkward it would be to question you. You can raise the alarm and stand behind a doorjamb, gunning down the dozens of guards who rush into the chokepoint, Hotline Miami-style. Or you can sneak around tossing coins around corners, relying on the universal behavior of walking away to check out the noise and crouching to pick up the shiny money

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ENTHUSIA has a peculiar career-mode where you progress by improving your ranking by doing races and earning respect-points (or whatever it was called) that tally up over some median calculated over a number of races. However, aiming for the top isn’t the real goal here, there’s a special race you want to be eligible to participate in, called King of the year race (probably made up, but that’s what i remember!) and iirc, two laps around Nürburgring Nordschleife, and it can’t be a racecar.

This means you had to plan your way into this race by not trying some races which could drop you off the top 5? 10? places or so, have a car you are confident in taking to Nür, know your opponents (which are balanced/chosen according to the ranking your car has), so you had to know if you can make it against what’s on the grid, and then you have to win it, not bin it.

So, you could reload savestates and try to get it the first year round, which is no fun, or you take it as it comes, i.e. if you fxxked up, had to wait for next year.

Missed it in year 1, lost in year 2, and went prepared into it in year 3, using the NSX TYPE-R, having scouted the opposition that the game may throw at you, unlocked all improvements that the game offered for the NSX, planned the races that i would be locked into the race even if i failed one right brfore the KotY event, and blitzed the opponents in that year.
Spent the fourth year collecting remaining/missing cars, and it somehow felt like i cheated somewhat to get it?
Would have been more exciting to win it in some exotic supercar, e.g. the V12 Vantage or SLR McLaren, i guess…

… but then they shouldn’t have offered the NSX in the first place :smirk:

(n.b. last game that did try to make the NA2 NSX a DLC car was Forza Horizon 2, which i barely played because they didn’t give me the NSX, so that’s not really an option either, hmmm :thinking: )

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I dont generally like the word “degenerate” because while Im no word scholar I think it ties back to eugenics.
ANYWAY

Metal Gear Solid 5 lets you throw a smoke grenade into your own jeep rendering you invisible to enemies while driving. The enemy will not alert if they cant see you because you are “in smoke”. Of course the smoke is trailing behind the jeep and your face is fully exposed.

Ive found in some tower defense games you can create 2 paths to a goal and make an enemy walk back and fourth forever taking hits as long as you can block and un-block a short path choice over and over again.

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oh good point, i changed the thread title and my initial post. thanks for pointing that out!!

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Ah, Zappa’s ghosts–

:woman_shrugging:

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yeah it’s kind of weird upon reflection. i think doing it to a human gives it a different tone - like, i can and should learn from whatever weird crap you’re doing, but an AI will never learn anything. so i can just repeat the same bullshit forever until i make a mistake or get bored.

but it’s literally the same behavior so i’m not entirely sure why i draw the line. i think i just have more respect for someone whipping my ass because i suck

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It’s funny, I used to use the strategy I detailed above in Total Annihilation in Skirmish Mode to basically hobble the AI right from the jump and then just sort of build an interesting base and sneer whenever a convoy of pitiful enemy units smashed themselves against my defenses. Just a very chill tower defense kind of experience until I got bored of it and decided to mop up the rest of the enemy. There was no challenge whatsoever if I played this way and I think that’s what I wanted.

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i cant think of any specifics but exploiting the ai to use the same move over and over and countering it is always fun.

also standing still in crashman;s room is great

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Echo (2017)'s premise is that the AIs learn to imitate what you do. (It just leads to meta-depraved strategies about deliberately teaching them to play badly though.)

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i can’t think of any examples off the dome but

i love heroes 3 and had no idea about this mod til just now so cheers to that

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In the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, if you hit the “create zoombini” button two times as fast as possible while generating a zoombini, it will make two identical zoombinis. I would just make every “shipment” of zoombinis a series of twins, with each pair of twins having minimal possible differences from the next (all twins the same but with a different colored noses, etc). This makes the game twice as easy, minimum, in every single puzzle. Some of the puzzles are rendered so trivial by this trick that even the hardest difficulty levels of the game become routine.

I discovered this as a young child and kicked the game’s ass. It was good for me, because it helped me think about WHY the puzzles were hard or easy, and what levers the game was manipulating to increase difficulty for me. It leads inevitably to the conclusion that most of the difficulty in zoombinis is player-created. Creative players who love randomizing zoombinis or creating a diverse range of cute little characters for themselves at the start of the game are designing themselves the nastiest possible puzzles in the late-game. The whole game becomes a metagame of zoombini design.

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I forget which game it’s in, but in one of the KoF 90s games, the final boss had a critical weakness: sweeps. You could just crouch and sweep the boss over and over and it always worked. Definitely cheese.

In Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, using the “cybervision” ability in campaign and then aiming down a thermal scope gives you perfect wallhacks. Practically required to get through the “Realistic” difficulty.

Total War games are chock full of these sorts of exploits. I really love Legendoftotalwar’s series about “recovering impossible saves” because he truly lives and breathes Depraved Gamer Tactics. This save in particular (where someone constructs the most evil puzzle possible) really demonstrates how fucked up it can get.

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