A friend of mine and I were discussing how today's games simulate advanced difficulty settings. We found that there are rather fustrating patterns. 1) The super-grunt. This particular ploy is found mostly in Civ-style strategy games. Or games that are based of a Risk-type battle system. What seems to happen is this seemingly weak grunt can take out almost if not all of your attacking forces. This is annoying because it usually tied in with... 2) The super unit factory. It seems that at no matter what you do the CPU player can mass an army in 2 secs, while it takes you 3-4 minutes. Now on game with fog o' war it becomes quite frustrating when you finally make it to the base you find that the opponent doesn't have the resources of the buildings to do what has happened. 3) Psychic countering or blocking. Ever played Soul Calibur 2 on the Ultra Hard level? If you have, you know what I speak of. In several game types not just figting games this happens. In Medevel: Total War the CPU has been known to suddenly have reinforcements to quash your attack. In Soul Calibur II, even the best mixtures of high, mid, and low attacks will be parried by the computer. SCII isn't the only fighting game to do this but most seem to. 4) The overpowered CPU characters. This is usually found in the fighting games. Play Capcom vs SNK, and King of Fighters series. The CPU character will kick your tail up and down screen. The CPU Rugals, Geese, Akumas, and Orochi Iori can take damage like a soldier, however, you play with those characters, they take damage like Mr Glass from Unbreakable. And we have excepted this but should we? And how can it be changed would the approach that SC2's Conquest Mode, VF4, and ESPN NFL 2k5's VIP uses. These three examples use player tendency statistics to emulate actual human behavior and skill levels?

I agree - there's nothing more frustrating in fighting games, then when the CPU opponent is able to do things that a human player cannot. Especially when it passes the "well, maybe a really really good human player could". The SNK games were some of the worst offenders. Also, Dead or Alive's parry move would be used by the computer at times when you knew full well that a human player would not have been able to. That made it so hard to actually improve your skill by playing the computer, because your timing and approach became based on the CPU's fighting pattern, and not a real-world use of the character.

But, looking at SCII's campaign mode, I'm not really sure how you could do it differently. The parry, soul charge, and other such techniques were considered advanced techs, so naturally, the higher the difficulty, the more the computer used them, even to the point of it getting rediculous. But, the example you gave with fog o' war is just blatent cheating.

Well, think about this a human player can guess your next move from your previous play, however instead of game designers trying to implement this into a game they would rather let the computer cheat to easy victories. It is not the games fault for being told that you can do this, this, and this, but the player can't do the same. It's the designer that has to say we want our AI to acutally have a plan of attack. I mean in strategy game this should be easier to implement as chess algorithms have been around for about 30-40 years. Plus the average strategy game does not require a lot of speed between move does it. Also if the single-player mode is suppose to lead you to the multiplayer/VS mode, why is it that the single player mode unrealistically emulate competition. And I'm not talking about unimaginative play style. I mean blatant You can't do this crap. I believe that one of the few games that I have played that didn't blatantly cheat was Marvel vs Capcom 2. Oh, it still does the CPU avatar doesn't take as much damage as you at higher levels. But then the computer doesn't do things that humans can't do.

One of the better games that I found in this respect was Total Annihilation. Since the AI could be programmed by anyone with the savy to, it was impossible for the computer to cheat (as in using resources it didn't have or taking less damage from the same attack). There were some really tough AI's out there and it was due to the fact that some of the AI designers were long time hardcore players.