Video Game Cruelty Potential/Video Games/Real Time Strategy


 * Age of Empires and games derived from it make killing civilians a sound tactical move. Then again, most of the games are set before the Geneva Conventions and most civilians can take up weapons and attack the enemy anyway...
 * Dungeon Keeper 2 gives the player access to prisons, torture chambers, traps, fight pits, a temple where you can sacrifice your minions, and rigged casinos. So many possibilities...
 * Capture a group of heroes and convert all but one of them. Feed your converts, heal them, and train them while giving the odd one out only the barest amount of food and healing to survive the prison. Then drop the unconverted one into a pit and put his former friends on the sidelines to cheer as he's beaten to a pulp over and over.
 * Capture a hero. Drop him in the torture chamber and keep him barely alive until he gives some information. Reward him by dropping him in the fight pit with your meanest monster before returning him to prison and letting him starve to death, becoming a skeleton.
 * Line the walls of your hero lair with torture devices, so the heroes that serve you live surrounded by screams as you torture their former allies.
 * Take the monsters you don't want and lock them a sealed room without food, money, or beds. Wait until they get angry and revolt and burn them down with lightning. Have your imps send them to prison and let them rot into skeletons or vampire fodder. Or simply beat them into unconsciousness or death.
 * When Payday comes around, grab every minion in your domain and drop them in the Casino. Switch it to rigged and let the money roll in. Once you've got back some and the monsters begin to show displeasure, switch it back to normal and put the monsters back to work.
 * A monster displeases you? Stick it somewhere surrounded by lava so it can't reach the exit portal and wait for it to turn on you. Send your creatures to beat it up, then torture it into serving you. Repeat.
 * The PC and Amiga game Syndicate, where evil corporations use squads of cyborg hitmen to duke it out in bloody campaigns of espionage and terrorism, and where plenty of innocent civilians would end up getting caught in the crossfire even if you weren't aiming for them on purpose (and let's be honest, you probably were. Maybe you even have brought the flamethrower for that reason.). And if that wasn't cruel enough, you could even use mind-control devices to round up herds of civilians and use them as meatshields.
 * Why use them as mere meat-shields, when you could arm them all with miniguns, or - god forbid - gauss guns. (Of course, if you wanted to be really cruel to your mindless minions, you could lead them on to a train track or other soon-to-be fatal area.
 * Is it a subversion that the persuadertron (the Mind Control Device) would let you take over and own the enemy agents without firing a shot, provided you first took over a large enough number of civilians?
 * That one is probably closer to Mercy Rewarded, as the persuaded agents get a permanent spot on your team if there's a vacancy.
 * Even since Dune II, RTS players have been running over infantry in tanks. The crunching sounds just encourage you.
 * In a later game, Emperor: Battle for Dune, the Harkonnen light vehicle is the Buzzsaw. Unsurprisingly, it is good at destroying spice fields and infantry.
 * Way back in 1986 you could do this in the Origin Systems adaptation of the boardgame called Ogre, overrunning infantry with an AI-driven mega tank was not just fun but standard, orthodox tactics.
 * In the spinoff of its spiritual successor Command & Conquer, the first person shooter Renegade, you are actually encouraged by the tutorial to squish people while in a Tank. "Now you can practice Squishing!"
 * Feeling bored? Try marching your troops across a Tiberium field for shits and giggles.
 * This is actually a viable tactic. If your enemy's base is close to a tiberium field, letting enough infantry die in the field and morph into visceroids causes them to eventually merge into very dangerous large visceroids, which will soon start attacking the base. It's probably not as efficient as just attacking with the infantry units in the first place, but it's so deliciously sadistic!
 * Against human players this is a viable tactic because they will have to focus on the attacking visceroids, since they do not register as "enemies" and your units would not engage them autonomously. The little buggers also move extremely fast, making actually clicking them a difficult task as well. If left alone they can destroy entire bases within minutes.
 * In Command & Conquer Generals you can totally obliterate your enemies with more than one superweapon (either with Particle Cannon, Nuclear Missle, Scud Launcher) take your pick.
 * In Company of Heroes, not only can you run over infantry with tanks, but Sherman tanks can be upgraded with mine flails, a collection of weights attached via chains to a spinning motor. Their primary purpose is to destroy mines, but there's no reason why you can't use it on infantry.
 * Countless Critters of several Warcraft games have met their bloody end at the hands of various troops, thanks to myself and others.
 * Crusader Kings has this in spades, though some of it is governed by Random Events. You can assassinate little children to inherit titles, kill your wife for a new one if she doesn't provide you a proper heir, burn churches, revoke titles from your vassals for no reason at all, ruthlessly pillage enemy lands with your troops, force heathens to convert at swordpoint, and even steal relics.
 * One of your neighbours criticises your jousting ability? Declare war, invade his lands, wipe out his family line using assassins and strip him of all his titles. If you want to be a real bastard, you can do all this and force them to become your vassal - there's nothing quite like having them slave away under your command until the day they die, at which point their family line will end and you can seize their lands.
 * Mech Commander allows your mechs to target and destroy civilian objects such as houses and cars (although you get no bonus for doing so--apparently civilian casualties are of no importance in the 31st century), and has the "lordbunny" cheat, which allows for infinite artillery strikes. While this has the obvious potential use of decimating enemy forces, it also can be used to annihilate huge numbers of civilian targets without wasting your mechs' ammo. You can call in dozens of artillery strikes to raze entire cities to the ground and, once all civilian buildings have been flattened, set the forests on fire, probably condemning Bambi to certain doom in the process.
 * In both Pikmin games, you can have control over put to 100 cute little vegetable minions whom you can do anything you want with, including throw all of them over cliffsides, feed them to bigger creatures, and my personal favorite, taking all my non-blue Pikmin and drowning them in a nearby body of water.
 * In StarCraft II, there is a level in which you control the Odin, a souped-up prototype Thor in the streets of the capital enemy world, and you're playing as a Tychus Findley.
 * Subverted you spend most of your time attacking Dominion forces, while civilians are unharmed in all the chaos.
 * In a mission in Sacrifice you have to destroy a tree for one Pyro but if you kill all the peasants around the tree Charnel rewards you for it.