Game Breaker/Video Games/Turn-Based Strategy: Difference between revisions

** Also, in ''Dread Lords'' and ''Dark Avatar'', the Mind Control Center wonder is bugged and instead of giving its advertised effect (near-instant defection of influence-pressured planets), it gives an even better flat 100% boost to your civilization-wide Economy. Of course, you again have to be Evil to get it - basically making Evil the game-breaker alignment. Of course, in the ''Twilight'' expansion, both are fixed.

* Psicorps in ''[[X-COM]]: UFO Defense''. Hard as hell to acquire, as you need to capture a psi-using alien that is blasting you with said psi-abilities ([[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|often straight at the easily affected guy that it can't even see]]), interrogate the alien, research the tech, build the required buildings, then wait until the month ends for results from said building. If you're ''extremely'' lucky, you'll have this by the 4th month, else you might have to wait until the lategame aliens show up. But it was well worth it. First off, you get to see the Psi-Defense stat of your units, eventually allowing you to get a team entirely immune to psi-attacks. The abilities themselves are powerful as well. The more accurate skill causes the target to panic, making them an easy kill. The other skill is Mind Control, a skill so powerful that you can use it to win the final mission ''on the first turn singlehandedly''. Apocalypse nerfed it from [[Game Breaker]] to merely stupidly powerful (the second was merely so hard [[Nintendo Hard|you actually needed it to win on the higher levels]]). You can use it to mind-control a zombie, kill it, then you have a pet Chrysalid.

** And then there's the [[BFG|Blaster Launcher]], a weapon that could send a missile out the door of your transport, over the heads of your units, down through the door of the UFO and up the elevator shaft to [[Dungeon Bypass|blow a hole]] in the otherwise impregnable UFO hull material. Or alternately just take out a [[Humongous Mecha|Sectopod]] in one shot. It's successor, the DPT Launcher, was nerfed in a way you can only fire it underwater... unless you consider that you troops can still reaction-fire it! Not to mention that one of the resources necessary to make ammo for it is more abundant in the sequel.

*** You can actually stick any craft weapon on any ship capable of dogfighting. Cue the Plasma Cannon: not overly powerful or fast, but it's range exceeds that of any UFO except the largest Battleships, it's ammo is free, and it has plenty of the stuff. And you can order your craft to fire from their maximum combat range, hence making even your lowly Interceptors effectively invulnerable. Battleships are immune to this tactic and do deal massive amounts of damage, but this can be mitigated by attacking them with multiple ships at the same time - the damage gets spread out (dividing repair times amonst the ships present) and the UFO goes down faster (meaning it deals less damage in the first place).

** [http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Smoke_Grenade Smoke grenades] are remarkably effective at decreasing the aliens' initial advantage; just drop it at the foot of the transport's ramp, before leaving, and the chances of the aliens' reaction fire hitting the redshirts drops drastically. [http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Proximity_Grenade Proximity grenades] are sworn by for many players to mine UFO exits and buildings aliens might be hiding in. Both together are a potent combination, especially if you've mined a Zombie that turns into a Chrysalid.

** In a custom start, a water mage lord can start with the [[Infinity+1 Sword|Staff of Drowning]] legendary artifact that can decimate enemy armies.

* ''Lords of the Realm 2'' allows you to raze a foe's crop fields to annihilate their agricultural economy. There's also a minor exploit that allows you to produce armies consisting of only one soldier (normally a minimum of 50). Taken separately, one is a relatively balanced tactic and one is pointless. Combined, you can quickly swarm over your enemy's fields and cause a serious amount of damage with only a few soldiers.

** The character creation "personality test" (which determines your starting merc's special abilities and, well, personality) [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this: One of the items you can pick from an army surplus store is "a pair of night vision goggles and the illustrated manual 'Daytime - an unnecessary hazard'".

* In unpatched ''[[Heroes of Might and Magic]] V'', the Necromancers were obscenely powerful because of an unfortunate synergy between the fact that their Necromancy skill allowed them to raise a sizable percentage of all living enemy creatures as skeletons, in a game that allowed you to upgrade your skeletons to skeleton ''archers'' on turn 2. Some neutral-monster-bashing later, and you have a stack of archers numbering in the thousands, growing to the tens of thousands, in a game where a single stack of the weakest units numbering 1000 is (supposed to be) a rare event. Cue one-shotting ''anything''. Cue inevitable nerf, by restricting number of creatures raised per week and causing enemy casualties to be raised by creature level. Yes, necromancers were nerfed by allowing them to raise more powerful creatures.

** Which is NOTHING compared to those fucking ghosts from [[Heroes of Might and Magic]] II. For every unit they kill, a ghost is created. Combined with the large number of wild low level creatures with low defense, building up a 1000+ army of ghosts is very easy. This makes maps where your enemies get ghosts all the more painful since if you lose a single fight against them, their armies can potentially get STRONGER even if you kill all of their other units. I'm looking at you Ghost Planet...

** Demonology and the "Summon Elemental" spells in [[Heroes of Might and Magic]] IV border on this. Especially if the character with the spell or ability also gets their hands on a [[Artifact of Doom|Demonary]] or [[Amplifier Artifact|Ring of the Elementals]].

*** To clarify further, the bug was that a unit with magic immunity was immune to all attacks from magical creatures, even non-magical attacks. It was supposed to make you immune to attacks like fire breath and stoning gaze as well as magical spells, but not claws and teeth. So an immensely powerful monster like a Great Drake simply could not harm a unit with magic immunity. The last official patch fixed this bug.

** Some strong enchantments, like Time Stop or Zombie Mastery. Hard to cast, but upkeep costs are modest.

** Death has two spells giving [[Immune to Bullets|Weapon Immunity]], Wraithform and Lycanthropy... but worse are Evil Presence (crippling unrest) and Warp Node (it sucks mana back in, and the victim needs a lot of mana to have a good chance to disenchant it - a vicious circle).

** High Elven longbowmen do full damage at any range. Two longbowman units can often clear the field of enemies entirely without magic, and then you give them alchemical assistance.

* [[The Undead|Undead Hordes]] in ''[[Disciples]] 1''&''2''. One can get ghosts with physical immunity pretty early in the game. And then [[Curb Stomp Battle|easily kill]] all those [[Giant Mook|giants, trolls and krakens]] for large amounts of gold and exp, which in turn would allow to kill more dangerous enemies, such as dragons and enemy heroes. All handicaps enforced by such strategy are counterable. The most practical way to deal with such party is to [[Nuke'Em|bombard them with most powerful spells available]], which works only slightly better due to the fact that your whole army consists of [[Squishy Wizard|Squishy Wizards]] (while the survivors of normal army would be easy pickings for exp). And computer doesn't do that.