Amusingly Underwhelming Force

[doom3607]

This thread's for people to mention any instances they've seen in games where a force that everyone is convinced is utterly overwhelmingly powerful is demonstrated to not be so, in a funny way. I'll start.

A few years back, I was playing a long, long PBEM game of Space Empires 5, set up so players could leave or join at any time, creating a sort of generational universe, with debris and stuff left behind from older empires. It had a modhammer empire as well, which occupied exactly one system and had a fleet with weapons nobody else could get. After a while, one large alliance started taking over the universe, exterminating everyone else. People were convinced the modhammer was going to take them out to allow the game to continue, since nobody else could stop them. So they sent almost 75% of their fleet at the modhammer, as an amusing way of destroying those ships to make them no longer a threat.

They utterly crushed the modhammer.

They lost ships hundreds if not thousands to one, but they happened to outnumber the modhammer tens of thousands to one, so everything was fine. After that, the mods massively upgraded their ModNaughts (tm) to be able to handle that sort of thing, and crushed the alliance anyway, once they'd finished laughing.

Anyone else?

[Zaune]

The most spectacular example I can think of is the latest version of the Hidden Fun Stuff from Dwarf Fortress. Spoiler

There are a couple of methods by which the player can, if they so choose, dig into Hell. Immediately after doing this, a horde of bizarre demonic entities charge upwards towards the surface slaughtering everything in their path... or try to. It's eminently possible to actually defeat them, albeit with heavy casualties, and one or two enterprising players have actually built colonies down there.

[doom3607]

Yeah, that's a good one. I heard it mentioned one person moved all his food production/storage and dining areas down there, just for the "Tonight we dine in hell!" jokes.

[Zaune]

Mind you, I'm not altogether certain it's actually unintentional. Notice the fact that Hell is largely made up of a mysterious ultra-dense and heavy stone called Slade, which happens to be Stuart's surname.

[Omeganian]

Do you mean something like this?

[doom3607]

Well yes, but it seems rather likely that the Terran cheated to build those defences. It's funnier when a completely unexpected asskicking is delivered to an obviously superior force, entirely legitimately.

[Karza]

No cheats necessary there. I've done that myself and I'm the worst SC player on the planet. You don't even need that many bunkers. Just build a line of 4-6 bunkers, and have a bunch of marines and tanks hide behind them, with a handful of SCVs to repair the bunkers. If anything, the problem is those cruisers getting carried away and annihilating some zerg building which fails the mission.

[doom3607]

Then the force is clearly not completely overwhelming, as opposed to, say, the legions of hell and a modhammer. Still, kinda funny to watch the bloodbath.

[Simon_Jester]

The force required to defend your base during the mission is much, much weaker than the force required to defeat the final Zerg onslaught at the end. Thus, the Zerg attack is meant to be "overwhelming" in relative terms; you don't need to be that determined to build up something that can take it on, but if you simply constructed defenses appropriate to your needs during the mission, you're going to be overwhelmed.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I'm a BIG fan of Masters of Orion 2 (not 3, 3 never existed). Once you get some advanced tech like plasma cannons and subspace teleporters, you can build some insanely powerful ships. In one game I had conquered half the galaxy, and a race of industrious insects had the other.

They sent to me a massive Armada of 650 ships, 200 of which were death-star sized. They made a beeline for my homeworld (it happened to be on the border due to game development). I saw them coming and I stopped them with 3 ships.

Each had a teleporter to immediately warp to point blank range, guns capable of firing in all directions but directly behind them, and damage multipliers on the guns, as well as their own time-warp field that doubled their effectiveness.

My three ships destroyed the entire armada without taking anything more than explosion damage from enemy ships. After that battle, the bugs surrendered.

[doom3607]

Holy SHIT. Oh, right- the Klackon aren't creative, so they could very well have had only shit weapons...

Regardless, that's a good one! But the AI was acting smarter than normal there, too- usually they just keep suicidally attacking me, even when I'm clearly going to kill them all with no difficulty at all.

[PainRack]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the Antareans in Moo 2 and 3, as well as the Orion system.

The Orion system was a game-changer, given the correct fleet structure, race, tech and ships, one could easily get hold of advanced teched ship early in the game, pawning virtually every other empire.



Also, HFS in Dwarf Fortress... wasn't the colonisation due to an unintended feature where the demons stop spawning?

[doom3607]

Meh. I think it may have been perfectly intended that the demons stop spawning, being driven into extinction'll do that.

ANd I'm not sure Orion and Antares really count, since they clealry weren't designed to be even that hard to beat. I mean, the Guardian is just to delay people getting the stuff so they can't instantly annihalate everyone else, and if you can reach the Antarans, you almost definitely have the means to beat them.

And what is this "MoO 3" you speak of? There is not, and never has been, any such game.

[Cykeisme]

Do underwhelming enemies in RPGs and FPS action games qualify for this thread?

[Manus Celer Dei]

The Hunters in Halo are kinda a good example of this. Complete bastards until you realise it's pitifully easy to dodge round behind them when they swing their shield and kill them with one pistol shot to the back.

[doom3607]

Definitely.

[Starglider]

Battle for Wesnoth has quite a few examples of this, on the many missions with 'escape from XXX before invading forces destroy everything' as the objective. Since they're balanced to be playable with just the starting cash (no decent units to recall), if you've been carefully keeping your units alive and levelling them up you can usually handily destroy the entire invading force, in half the time limit or less.

[The Vortex Empire]

Happens a lot in Rome: Total War when you're the Greeks. I remember one time, I was defending some city whose name I don't recall. My garrison was just my General and his bodyguard, a unit of Cretan Archers, and two units of Militia Hoplites. I was besieged by two full stacks of Carthaginian troops. They outnumbered me something like 20 to 1, so I resigned myself to trying to kill as many as possible. I deployed my troops in the city center so they wouldn't break, with my General and the archers backed into a corner and the hoplites forming a phalanx in front of them. End result of the battle: All enemies dead or running away, I only lost like 60 men.

[Purple]

I just had a situation like this now. Playing Dwarf Fortress (my 1st game too yay!) and than out of the blue I got my first ever invasion! So like, I was petrified. There they come about a dozen or more goblins all coming toward my gate. And all I had was something like 2-3 axe dwarfs.

5 minutes later they come to my draw bridge, I open it up and they march right into my small army. About a minute later the goblins are all dead and my guys are like not even wounded. And I am all like WTH.

[doom3607]

Heh. So many examples of utter idiocy! You'd think that BfW would have balanced for what you had coming in, and the Carthaginians would have just pin-cuishoned you all, and... no, the Goblins have no excuse for winning that battle. The Random Number God was with you that day, O Great Purple Cube, clearly Prophet of the Random Number God, Lord of all Video Games!

[CaptHawkeye]

Pretty much every group, nation, company, etc in Oblivion. "Armies" are like 4-5 guys and a huge sacking consisted of 10 Deadra and an Alligator.

[Scottish Ninja]

Heh. So many examples of utter idiocy! You'd think that BfW would have balanced for what you had coming in...

To be honest, I hated that feature when it was in Homeworld 2, because it felt like you were being punished for managing your forces well and keeping them alive, instead of being rewarded like you ought to be. IIRC the best thing to do was to scrap most of your forces before the mission end so you got most of the resources back and then faced smaller forces in the next mission.

[Highlord Laan]

The Encalve in Fallout 3: Broken Steel. Hell, in all of FO3 in general.

Here, the whole game talks about how scary, evil and well-neigh unstoppable they are. Come time for the mission, I'm rolling them alone with the Brotherhood's "elite" Knights and Paladins riding in on my coattails. The only thing I had on that could be called overpowered was the T51b from Fort Constantine, but no helm because it looks like squished ass. Other than that, it was Sydney's 10mm SMG, a basic assault rifle, seven frag grenades, forty Stimpacks (I used three) and fourteen purified waters (used one).

The Brotherhood Outcasts gave me more trouble when I showed up and said "Nice fort. I'll take it."

[Rekkon]

I had a good one from back when my friends and I were playing C&C Generals. I was experimenting with non-tank spam GLA (the terrorist faction) tactics since their armor is the weakest of the three. My friend was China, probably the general specializing in tanks. Aside from some early resource skirmishing, we both built up until midgame. He cranked out a proper red army tank horde, while I produced a modest number of rocket buggies and purchased every upgrade for them. I provoked him by sneaking up and blowing away an Overlord from beyond its cannon range. He immediately gave chase with his entire armor column. Cue at least five minutes of yakkity sax while my buggies outran him, pausing frequently for mass salvoes that picked off his mighty war machines one by one. He had no artillery and no air support and thus no way to hit me or force me to battle. After a full circuit of half the map, he finally said frak this and charged my base. Even with my buggies nipping at his heels, he had plenty of tanks to be a credible threat. GLA defensive structures are not all that great. Of course, his headlong charge sent him straight into the large minefields I had liberally sown in every available approach avenue (I had, on occassion, been known to plaster up to 80% of the map with demo traps) . None of my core buildings were ever hit, and the second wave of rocket buggies was ready to join the first.

[doom3607]

Hmm... does anyone think that may not actually count? I mean, he won through good tactics, not just attacking them, clearly suicidally, and winning anyway. Regardless, still funny to hear of this idiocy.