Game Breaker/Video Games/Real Time Strategy: Difference between revisions

* In ''[[Evil Genius]]'', enemy agents won't show up in your island before you reach the first objective. Therefore, if you build enough lockers to hold 100 [[Mooks|construction workers]], get 100 of them, send them all overseas to steal money, and leave the game running for at least 2 hours, you'll end up with a strongroom holding at least... [[Austin Powers|*Pinky raise*]] ...''Three '''Million''' Dollars''!

** Plus Lord Kane's Smooth Operator ability will freeze any agent he targets with it until he gets into range to actually use the ability. Even your basic worker can knock out a Super Agent if Kane has a long way to run.

* In the game ''[[Star Control]] 3'', the race of Doogs starts out an enemy, but can be converted into friends early in the game. Their ships are maneuverable, relatively fast, have a short-range cannon which can auto-fire on nearby ships, AND can quickly regenerate damage. No other enemy ship in the game comes close to challanging a Doog ship, making basically every battle after you get a Doog ship a matter of selecting the Doog ship and blowing up the enemy ship.

* ''[[Star Control]] 2'' will try to keep you in Earth's solar system until you gather the [[Plot Coupons]] with hordes of tough Slylandro probes. Fortunately, there's a Spathi ship lying nearby that's just ''perfect'' for killing them and gathering resources by the thousand before the game story hardly begins.

** There is one ship that is banned from serious netplay, and that is the Thraddash Torch. While it does have a counter, it can destroy most of the ships in the game without much risk, due to the fact that it's a [[Fragile Speedster]] (in fact, the fastest ship in the game) and has the range to pick just about anything without giving the opportunity for return fire. It also makes the game incredibly tedious when someone does this, because said long-range weapon, while completely safe to use, [[Death of a Thousand Cuts|does 1 damage and has a low rate of fire.]]

*** This ship is principally broken against the AI, which is often not smart enough to avoid running into its secondary weapon.

** Right from the strat, the first game had GDI grenaders. Capable of superior AoE damage against infantry than minigunners and decent damage against structures and vehicles, the Grenader could also be built both early and cheap, allowing a GDI player to just spam them to victory. Though the minigunners were cheaper, the grenader could hit all of them with a single grenade, allowing him to wipe out many times his own number.

*** Fortunately, they were toned down in RA1, where the Soviet version did slightly reduced damage and, to prevent spamming them, exploded upon death, which could set off groups of grenaders like firecrackers.

** In original C&C, the AI would not try to destroy sand bags that blocked its movement. (It would shoot through walls and fences that blocked line of fire, destroying them in the process, but sand bags didn't block [[Lo F]], so they would never be destroyed unless they were close enough to another target to be hit by stray shots). This meant that if you could build a sand bag wall round you base, far enough out from any target, then the enemy would be unable to get in. Then you could extend the wall into the enemy base, and wall off all their unit factories. Or build [[BFG|Advanced Guard Towers]]/[[Death Ray|Obelisks of Light]] inside their base. Or build a barracks in their base (particularly effective if you simultaneously build an Engineer, timed to complete just after the barracks completes, for instant [[All Your Base Are Belong to Us]]).

** ''Tiberian Sun'', before the ''Firestorm'' expansion pack had the bugged Nod Artillery unit, which could always hit it's target, even if the shell itself didn't hit anything.

*** Yuri, the faction added in the RA2 expansion, was an game breaker ''faction''. It's mind control tech was an instant game breaker in and of itself, making any notion of cost-effectiveness totally null, especially as he could recycle these units for cash. Their resource gathering mechanic allowed them expand lightning fast and claim new ore fields that the enemy could never touch, and their flying unit could shut down whole bases with ease in a game where flying units and the defenses against them were both seriously underpowered, and even steal from the enemy directly. Yet, even with all these advantages, Yuri was no worse in direct combat than his foes, with good tanks, rock solid defenses and excellent basic infantry.

*** Rare case of [[Game Breaker]] ''lampshaded in-game'': Demolition Truck + Iron Curtain combo. Let's recount: Demolition Truck is a suicide unit carrying a mini-nuke that explodes if the unit is killed or if the unit is commanded to attack something. Iron Curtain is a minor superweapon that makes the targeted nine units invincible and immune to mind-control for a short time. [[Oh Crap|Do the math]]. At least the original Red Alert had the courtesy of causing iron curtain to wear off very quickly from demo trucks... Lampshaded in Yuri's Revenge in the Soviet campaign where one mission requires you to either use this tactic or spam a metric fuckton of V3 Launchers to crack the enemy base.

** Later patches [[Nerf|Nerfed]] the Mammoth, but its early-game counterpart, the Predator, which had the same weapon upgrade, proved effective against all but air units.

** The expansion introduces Mechapedes, fast-moving units that can be equipped with a variety of weapon modules. With enough micromanagement, just a few can wipe out an enemy force without exposing their weak points to serious damage.

** The Black Hand gains the Purifier Warmech, which was suppose to be a primitive version of the Avatar. In theory it's a costlier Avatar with a built-in flame thrower in lieu of the upgrading ability. While it resolves the Avatar's initial problem of not being able to deal with infantry, it also made the Purifier completely immune to it's hard counter: commandos. On top of that, the Black Hand has the Purifying Flame upgrade, which allowed all their flame-based weapons to deal extra damage to vehicles (normally fire damage deal almost negligible damage). Because the flame thrower is programmed to fire without the unit needing to target, a group of 6 Purifiers can literally walk right through the opponent's base, torching anything short of flying aircrafts without so much as raising their arm-mounted lasers.

*** ''Red Alert 3: Uprising'' is just packed to the gills with gamebreaking units, suspiciously almost all of them Allied units. There's the Harbinger gunship, with insanely heavy armor, and dual weapons capable of catastrophic damage against armor, or nearly insta-kill guns against infantry. There's the Pacifier mobile cannon which is AMPHIBIOUS, and when it sets up, produces an extreme range cannon as powerful as the Cruiser in ''RA1''. The Future Tank X-1 is pretty much super effective against everything, and weak only against the most powerful armored units. The Cryo Legionnaire freezes up ALL units within a rather large radius in front of it, and these frozen units can be broken into a bunch of pieces by the weakest units in the game. The only non-Allied unit that comes closer to gamebreaking is the Japanese Giga Fortress, but even that is hardly as powerful as the Allied units.

**** Suffice it to say there's a reason why ''Uprising'' doesn't include any sort of multiplayer.

** Not to mention his ability to temporarily turn into the Essence of the [[Eldritch Abomination|Nightbringer]], an invulnerable killing machine that could rip apart even the strongest units without even trying.

*** And the third [[Expansion Pack]], ''Soulstorm'' made it even more broken with the Essence Of The Deciever ability.

** The mass resurrection alone is a bit of a [[Game Breaker]]. If you lose a lot of troops, you can just bring every one of them in a small range back to life. And you can do this even when your populations are maxed out, giving you a larger army than you're normally allowed to have!

** The icing on the cake? Once killed, the Necron Lord can be respawned where he died, all upgrades intact. Frequently this means inside the opponent's base, which an upgraded Lord can easily solo.

** The ''Dark Crusade'' [[Expansion Pack]] also gave us the Tau's ridiculously effective rushing ability and the Eldar's late-game strength (several invisible bases, untouchable economy, automatic wraithlord spam, etc).

** Sgt. Cyrus in ''[[Dawn of War]] 2''. In the beginning the scrawny scout is good for little more then, well, scouting. Once he obtains the sniper rifle, the collection of explosives (satchel charges, proximity mines and remote-controlled bombs), learns to use all that stuff without breaking stealth and to stun enemies, he becomes death incarnate whom only the limited number of supplies prevents from clearing the whole maps alone. Even then Cyrus can kill ''bosses'' single-handed.

*** In the ''Chaos Rising'' expansion pack this last limitation seal is removed from Cyrus when he learns how to make unlimited explosives and "healing potions" out of his stamina and throw mines in bundles that can take out a whole enemy squad or a tank. Now everything just dies. In fact, most of the high-tier abilities of your team in CR are ''really'' overpowered, especially considering that you can access them early in the game by reassigning skill points. Avitus has unlimited artillery strikes, Tarkus has unlimited frag grenades he throws three at a time, and he can force enemies (including shooters!) to engage him (and only him) in melee where they'll take damage simply by fighting him while dealing only minor damage themselves thanks to his defensive aura. Dreadnaught can deal tremendous damage and stun foes in both melee and ranged combat, and can attack in self-repair mode. And Force Commander has a good chance to kill ''any'' enemy unit with a single shot, and can replenish everyone's Energy extra fast, meaning you'll spam all the aforementioned goodness non-stop. Suddenly the final boss being THE [[That One Boss]] makes much more sense.

*** And in ''Retribution'', Cyrus can regain energy in stealth mode, which means soloing the map with him is the surest way to win.

** In the original ''Dawn of War'' and its first expansion, ''Winter Assault'', one could build as many super-powered high-tier soldiers as your population cap allows, meaning that one can build 5-7 Terminator squads, Possessed squads, Nob squads or Kasrkin squads (depending on faction) and just have them attack-move to hostile base. Later expansion packs limited their number to 1.

*** The "uber-units", the most powerful unit available to each faction, was limited to one from the beginning however. Except for the Space Marine's Land Raider, allowing a player with enough resources to swarm an enemy with a collosally powerful tank that could also transport aforementioned Terminators. This was later fixed as well.

* In ''[[Pikmin]] 2'', you get purple Pikmin. They can kill around 90% of the enemies in a few throws, making most bosses ridiculously easy (in fact, this game's Prima guide just says to throw purple Pikmin on said bosses). Their weakness? They're slow. Yellow Pikmin in the first game may also count due to their ability to carry bomb rocks.

* The first ''[[Battalion Wars]]'' has Anti-Air Vets, which for being multi-hit along with causing knockback to any land unit except the [[Mighty Glacier|Battlestation]] causes high damage with ''each hit''. Want to know how bad this gets? A lone one can ''solo the two Battlestations in the final mission''. That isn't even anything close to within their job description and they manage it anyway, along with cutting down all of the infantry along the way including the [[Death of a Thousand Cuts|Acid Gas Vets]]--in fact, Flame/Acid Gas Vets are supposed to do this job. Assault Vets in the first game, as well as Bazooka Vets in the sequel, can't even compare to this.

** However, let's not let either off the hook, partly because both, like the Anti-Air Vets, are infantry who can pull evasive maneuvers against enemy units, which isn't a bad thing considering the games generally center around infantry, but also because both get overboard with their power:

*** [[Fragile Speedster|Assault Vets]] in the first game deal Heavy Tank armor piercing damage with each shot. Of course, this also means that a manually controlled Assault Vet can turn destroying heavy units (except the Battlestation, which is mercifully immune to the bullets) into a game of balance-the-meter to keep shooting rapidly without suffering the overheat. Something is wrong when a lone unit can kill the local [[Demonic Spiders]] effortlessly. And something like this that can happen sums it up:

'''Frontier Vet''': Never knew what hit 'em! }}

*** [[Glass Cannon|Bazooka Vets]] in the sequel have been toned up from the shoddy damage that a lone one deals to ''Light Tanks''. However, problems arise because against infantry, they are [[Mighty Glacier|Mighty Glaciers]], with good potential for ''[[One-Hit Kill|One Hit Kills]]''. In addition, a lone manually controlled Bazooka Vet can solo [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-9r1WL-qpk&fmt=18 an already nicely guarded Battlestation] or [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4j70KwM5kk&fmt=18 2 Battleships]. A lone Mortar vet can solo a Battlestation more easily, but they just run into trouble with evasive infantry. The Lone Bazooka doesn't.

** The idea for "balancing" was the Consortium was the comparatively high prices their units had, but the existence of the Palace at a planet vastly increased credit revenue far more efficiently than Imperial or Alliance mines and only took up one building slot per planet. It is flagrantly obvious that Petroglyph never bothered to balance this faction.

*** [[It Gets Worse|It was worse]] at launch when the only space unit the Consortium needed was their fighters, which due to an oversight was so OP it could take out any other units in swarms, which it was totally possible to have since they were cheap. Whats worse is Petroglyph knew about the tactic but still took months to patch it.

* Tzar: Burden of the Crown had a faction where you could spend money to create "relics" that could increase your units stats. Game broken when you could play with unlimited resources and have units carrying relics that increased stats by 10 times.

*** The release version included balance issues that had been identified in the beta but not actually addressed, including the Cybran Mantis being ''ludicrously'' overpowered in the early game and the UEF Broadsword gunship likewise in the late game; both were nerfed repeatedly.

*** This only really let the ridiculousness of the Aeon become apparent, though; typically having the best or at worst the second best of every unit type. Aeon were all but impossible to beat on water maps, trading the useless deck gun of other faction subs for a second torpedo attack and having a basic T1 tank that was amphibious; they also had a missile defence which couldn't be overwhelmed at all, a T3 artillery which was pinpoint accurate and fired twice, and the Harbinger, a Siegebot which had the best cost versus damage of any unit in the entire game. The Aeon superiority on maps with water was at one point so severe that ''all'' water maps were removed from competitive play.

*** AA weapons used to have no priority system of any kind, leading to a common tactic of building a gigantic number of cheap-as-free Air Scouts to support a Strategic Bomber attack; this effectively made air defence a waste of time.

*** An attempt to make the UEF T3 mobile sonar into something actually useful accidentally turned it into a ridiculously overpowered motor torpedo boat, requiring ''another'' patch to stop the ridiculous sight of flotillas of things which were technically buildings chasing battleships around.

** The Western Allied counter to that would be the American Pershing, which is close but not quite up to the King Tiger's power. But unlike the once-per-game-if-you-loose-it-you're-screwed KT, you can literally SPAM these things ath the Germans from here to doomsday as long as you have the funds avalible. And suddenly it's the GERMANS who are having their tanks chewed up and spit out like paper. ALL OVER THE MAP. And as long as you keep some engineers nearby to do the obligatory repairs, these things gain experience easily, which makes them only more dangerous. Suffice it to say by the end, the German elite armor will struggle to scratch these things.

** While the King Tiger can be a tough nut to crack, it by no means "breaks" the game. It's rather slow, and a single sticky bomb essentially makes it immobile, or at least slow enough to be taken out by pretty much anything with good armor penetration and/or long range. The turret is very slow, so the KT can be kited by anything that hasn't got its engine blown or tracks damaged. KT is excellent at soaking damage, so the American or British players shouldn't focus on it unless it's alone, but doesn't exactly destroy everything in sight within seconds. Considering the things that have been in the game (and have been removed or tweaked since then), KT seems like pretty much any "ultimate" power of any company\doctrine of any faction, and is by no means unstoppable.

** If anything, the Commonwealth's artillery is a game-breaker. Once the Artillery doctrine abilities are acquired, every British artillery piece on the map can shell the enemy's main base simultaneously, reducing all that work to rubble, and forcing the enemy to slowly rebuild his entire production capacity. Setting up three or four 25-pounder artillery pieces takes a bit of resources, but then again the British have amazingly powerful defensive emplacements to boot, and can just sit back and gather resources for a while. Even a King Tiger can't stand up to a couple of British AT emplacements - they're some of the most powerful AT weapons in the whole game.

** [[Fridge Brilliance]] and [[Truth in Television]]. For the time period, horse archers were devastating, capable of swooping in, spraying the enemy with arrows, and then beating a quick retreat before the enemy could marshal its forces. Hell, even today that'd be a viable strategy against anything less than a fleet of attack helicopters.

** The series also has elephant-mounted warriors. The Elephant Archer in the original has as many hitpoints as ''buildings'', and the Persians' War Elephant of the second game is probably the strongest unique unit (good for the Persians, since they're otherwise kind of a limited civilization in-game).

** Except that Titans have their own counters: Magic units. Build enough of these, especially the ranged ones, and the slow titans will suffer [[Death of a Thousand Cuts]].

*** Not to metion that A) They can't cross water, B) they can't be healed, C)they are really freaking expensive and D)They can only be built at the top of the tech tree and take a long time to dig out, which may cripple your economy as workers uncovering it arn't gathering resources.

** Additionally, the "Mage-Bomb" tactic is one strategy that can be game-breaking in the single-player campaign; If you're human, it involves making a [[Glass Cannon|Mage]] invisible and then sending that invisible Mage who can cast Blizzard into the enemy's gold supply lines and then raining a deadly ice storm upon the line of workers harvesting gold. It is devastating, if not decisive against the enemy's army production. Playing as Orc, the same strategy is done with Death Knights, and an Invulnerability & Haste spell cast upon the caster.

** Also, in ''Warcraft III'', the Orc Blademaster hero. He's among the fastest heroes, also among the toughest with his high armor score and agility, and with Critical Strike acting over his item-boosted melee damage, is easily the highest direct damage dealer hero. But the real kicker is his Wind Walk - a spell that not only allows him to move even faster and, at higher levels, stay invisible most of the time, but allows him to make rapid escapes whenever threatened by letting him move through other units and hence escape traps. Needless to say, he's one of the best hero rushers, excellent at hero killing, very hard to kill himself if properly used and generally a pain in the neck for any opponent, with no clear weaknesses.

* The Noble Werewolf from the final [[Majesty]] 2 expansion is easily the most powerful hero ever seen in a Majesty game. Nobody else even comes close. By the time an average hero would get around 1k HP the Werewolf has 4-5 times as much, making them extremely difficult to kill. They also get ridiculous health regeneration and a large array of conjuration skills and powerful melee attacks that allow them to simply wade into a crowd of enemies and wreck total havoc. What really makes them devastating, though, is how easy they are to create compared to other top tier units- you only need a level 2 palace and a decent amount of gold to start recruiting them. The standard Human faction really has nothing that can compare.

** This is somewhat balanced out by the fact that the Monster faction which the Noble Werewolf is a part of has no basic healing units, which cripples them compared to Human armies early on.

* In the single-player campaign of ''[[Sacrifice]]'' Sirocco the Dragon can be obtained at James' 2nd level. She is the [[Hero Unit]] of the dragon, Persephone's ultimate creature, and will one-shot wizards, buildings, creatures, and practically ''everything'' for the next 6-7 levels. She also flies and, to add insult to injury, can resurrect your other creatures. On the flip side, she will abandon you if you don't play for James, Stratos or Persephone. {{spoiler|And, if you play for Stratos, once he backstabs Persephone.}}

 

[[Category:Game Breaker]]

[[Category:Real Time Strategy]]