Good Bad Bugs/Video Games/Real Time Strategy: Difference between revisions

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* ''[[StarCraft]]'' has quite a few bugs which have been incorporated into the metagame, the most prominent being the mutalisk stack, a pathfinding bug which causes air units to occupy the same space, making focus-firing impossible. Not surprisingly, the developers are ''breaking the engine'' to [[Ascended Glitch|incorporate stacking into the sequel]].

** Of course, who can forget that both the Terran Valkyrie and Protoss Corsair from the expansion were specifically designed to deal with those stacking air units.

** Honestly, making custom maps for [[StarCraft]] requires using many [[Good Bad Bugs]] and a substantial amount of [[Dummied Out]] content, in addition to some odd (non-glitch) quirks in the game. The most common example is Hyper Triggers, which cause triggers in the map to execute much faster (almost once a frame, as opposed to once every two seconds); this requires adding four triggers to the map that always execute and do nothing but repeatedly call the Wait action, which normally [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|pauses a trigger's execution]]. (On the other hand, running hyper triggers will cause chaotic effects if the Wait action is used normally; this is one of the main reasons for [[Not the Intended Use|Death Count timers]].) Extended Unit Deaths are another example, where a condition that checks how many times a player has lost a certain type of unit is used to read other portions of the game's memory, such as how many HP a unit has (which, oddly, the game does not normally allow). Computer-controlled Medics will try to heal injured allies anywhere on the map, causing the Medic to move; this can be used to detect a unit being injured. AI Dark Archons will move to cast Feedback, which drains a caster's energy and damages it based on the amount drained, at infinite range if it will kill a non-hero, which can be used to detect either damage or spellcasting. The list, as they say, goes on.

* In ''[[StarCraft II]]'''s single-player campaign, once you max out Zerg and Protoss research, you can redo previously-completed missions, and the game will deposit some free research points in the research console (without telling you). If you check the console, you get credit for them. Why is this good when you've already completed the research? Extra research points are converted into credits, and even if you found every normal research point in the game and did every mission to collect every single credit, there isn't enough money to max out all the armory upgrades. On the other hand, by utilizing the bug after every mission, you will always have super-units except for the mission you first get them.

* ''[[Stronghold]] Crusader'' has a glitch that, upon pausing the game, suspending the activity of a building, resuming it and then unpausing the game, marks the building as unoccupied without firing the current worker, making another worker take up the job while the old one kept working.A player could repeat this glitch at their heart's content with interesting results, such as feeding a 100+ people fortress off a single apple patch with a dozen farmers, immensely speed up transportation of materials, or fill up the armory in one single production cycle.

* ''[[Command & Conquer]] [[Command & Conquer: Tiberium|Tiberian Dawn]]'' and ''[[Command & Conquer: Red Alert|Red Alert]]'', the first two entries in the series, both have a bug where a grenadier can throw his grenades across an entire screen if you change the target halfway through him throwing it. Particularly pronounced in the DOS versions. If you had radar, the grenadier could ''fling his explosive payload across the map''.

* ''[[Warcraft]] II'' had the lumber bug: having your peasants start harvesting trees then immediately canceling and building your town hall would net an extra 100 lumber. It was never patched because it actually improved the game by speeding up the slow-paced beginning of a match, and was recommended to use in all tournament games. The [[Updated Rerelease]] fixed the bug but also gave every player an extra 100 lumber to start with.