All The Tropes

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

Page Discussion

Game Breaker/Video Games/Real Time Strategy (view source)

Revision as of 20:53, 9 April 2017

No change in size ,  7 years ago
update links
VisualWikitext
m (update links)
(update links)
Line 32:
*** ''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.
* In ''[[Dawn of War]]'', an RTS based on ''[[Warhammer 4000040,000]]'', the Necron Lord can get up to 4500 HP, as well as upgrades that grant 6 HP per second health regen, 40% damage reduction from ranged attacks, and the ability to reflect 90% of all melee damage dealt to it. And it has one of the toughest armour types in the game. And that ''still'' leaves an upgrade slot for one of its other abilities, which can be used to grant area-effect cloaking, mass resurrection of Necron units, or blinding the entire enemy army. Slightly balanced by the sheer investment of time and Power needed, though, making this somewhat [[Awesome but Impractical]].
** 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.
Line 69:
*** 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.
*** There also exists a [[Game Mod|mod]] that grants infinite veterancy, which basically means that your units level up akin to that of [[Role -Playing Game|RPGs]]. At the same time, however, [[Up to Eleven|it also means that you]] potentially have a bottomless supply of overpowered units. The best part? Not only does it apply to units, but it also applies to buildings that can do damage, such as nuke silos and defense turrets, buildings that DON'T do damage, such as shields and extractors, and even the engineers]].
* Many people consider the King Tiger in ''[[Company of Heroes]]'' to be this. It's a one time use unit that drains 2000 manpower over the next few minutes after being fielded. It's also slow. However, it has tons of health, is heavily armored, can be called in at a moments notice, does not require you to 'pay' to field it, and and damage done to it can be repaired. It is essentially a supertank that you can call in for 'free' (you don't need to save up for it) and can be added to your existing army to give you a massive edge over the other player. The other player will need to field lots of AT Weapons to take it down, but these are costly and take time to make, and ontop of that, he still has to deal with your existing army while trying to set up and defend these AT Weapons.
** 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.
* The first '''[[Age of Empires I (Videovideo Gamegame)||Age of Empires I]]'' game had the Horse Archers. They can move fast, do a ton of damage, and have a range longer than anything except upgraded Priests and certain siege weapons. The only downside is that they're expensive to make and can't take much damage...at least, not until you upgrade them to [[Up to Eleven|Heavy Horse Archers]].
** [[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).
Line 80:
** 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.
* While not breaking ''[[StarcraftStarCraft]]'''s famously balanced multiplayer, Protoss Carriers with an Arbiter in tow are overpowered in single player scenarios against Zerg. The Arbiter generates an invisibility field, and while being visible itself the computer doesn't bother to go after it if it's stays in the background. As soon as you can build this air fleet, you'll be able to kill AI Zerg with impunity.
** And in ''[[StarcraftStarCraft II]]'', anti-Zerg missions are easy with a large amount of Reapers, who are cheap, attack and move very fast, and do stupid-huge damage to buildings. They can also jump cliffs, meaning they can strike pretty much anywhere, anytime they feel like it.
** In ''[[StarcraftStarCraft II]]'', Protoss players in 1v1 Bronze league are notorious for using "Cannon Rushes", building pylons and Photon Cannons close the enemy's mineral line as soon as possible. What makes this a gamebreaker is that your oppponent will not have anything other than workers to stop the cannon if the rush is fast enough, and the cannon will kill a worker in 2 shots, while the opponent is probably throwing down 1-2 more cannons. The Cannon Rush isn't such a big deal at higher levels of play due to everyone being aware of it and its considerable shortcomings (if the cannon rush fails you have no tech, military or economy to speak of; meanwhile, the cannon itself can be overwhelmed with early t1 units or surrounded by workers if it isn't built fast enough, especially if the opponent is scouting his base perimeter and watching for "cheese" tactics), but newcomers will be overwhelmed and maybe even turned off by this seemingly unstoppable tactic.
* Bloodlust in ''[[Warcraft]] II'' is a spell which triples damage and is cast by the Orcs' primary attacking unit which is already somewhat of a [[Lightning Bruiser]]. The Humans' equivalent get extremely inefficient healing and a spell that only affects two rarely-used units. Needless to say, Orcs have a huge advantage on land maps.
** 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.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1483857"