Good Bad Bugs/Video Games/Turn-Based Strategy: Difference between revisions

* The original ''[[Civilization]]'' had the Settlers bug: if you ordered a Settler unit to perform some multi-turn task (like irrigating or mining a square), it'd usually stay inactive until the task is completed, which e.g. in case of mining a mountain would take up to 9 turns. However, if you canceled its current action and then ordered it to do it again, the engine would interpret it as if the Settler already spent a turn doing it and continue from where it "stopped". This trick could be repeated until the task was complete. Sure, it's a lot of manual clicking but it allowed you to fully irrigate/mine the area around AND''and'' build roads your city in a few turns, which is crucial at early stages when every Settler counts.

*** On the contrary, ocean roads bestowed their improved movement on any seagoing unit. A ship could carry cargo halfway across the map if you have a railroad in place for it. You'd have to end a unit's turn when it's loaded into the ship, but other than that you can go VERY''very'' far.

** In ''Civilization IV'', getting a Great Person would allow you to expend that unit and put research towards a new technology, initiate a Golden Age, build a unique building, boost your culture, etc. Also added in this game was the ability to give multiple orders at once to a unit, by holding shift while clicking their abilities. It was soon discovered that holding shift and clicking on the abilities of the Great Person did not cause them to be deleted. One game advanced from the Ancient World to the modern Industrial Era through the continual brilliance of Moses. Sadly, this bug was fixed with the expansion packs.

** In ''Civ 5'', on the higher difficulties, you can leech the gold boost that computer players get by exploiting them with a good army; take over one or two cities, then offer one city back and peace for a whole lot of gold. Go to war 10 turns later, repeat. Usually, conquering a civ only gives you a small fraction of their gold and the rest is lost (for game balance and other reasons), but this way, it can be extracted from weaker civs. This one isn't entirely a [[Game Breaker]] since it requires some work and might even make a little sense, besides the computer being far too slow to learn what you're doing (if it ever does). Before the 2011 patches, there were ''a lot'' of other ways for players to mess around with numbers in unintended ways.

** ''[[X-COM]]'' allowed yourYour soldiers tomay throw grenades through the ceiling. This was incredibly helpful when there was a Muton on the roof.

** ''X-COM'' had anotherA gem of a bug: Whatever you set the difficulty to, [[Dynamic Difficulty|the game played on the 'Beginner' difficulty]]. This bug went unknown for years, because the game was THAT damned hard. And it gets better: when [[MicroProse]] was throwing together the mission pack sequel ''Terror from the Deep'', they solicited feedback from players. A big chunk of players who responded were hardcore strat gamers who complained that the game's higher difficulty levels weren't hard enough. [[MicroProse]]'s response? Make ''TFTD's'' Beginner difficulty equivalent to what Superhuman was supposed to be in ''UFO Defense''.

*** There's also the pathfinding bug in ''UFO Defense'' for the blaster launcher, where the majority of the time the enemy units would launch it directly above themselves, even if there was a roof above them, leading to many times in indoor maps where there would be numerous random explosions going on out of your line of sight for, from your perspective, no reason.