Line #56 GoodBadBugs/RealTimeStrategy


1	* The Amiga game ''VideoGame/{{K240}}'' (at least the earlier versions) allowed the player to access missile control for ''any'' asteroid he can see, not just his own. This allows you to tell the silos on an enemy asteroid to launch all its missiles ''at itself''.
2	* ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresII''
3	** If your villager is being attacked by a wild animal, you can throw it off by having the villager start to build something underneath it. Animals can't share space with active construction sites, so it will obligingly walk away until it is off the space. While it's doing that, cancel the construction and get a head start.
4	** In the fourth Attila the Hun mission, you are tasked with destroying three major cities. Destroying the third spawns the massive Roman Army, a force of over a hundred top-tier units...unless you found and killed the placeholder unit on the map, which causes the army to be instantly defeated.
5	** In the fifth Saladin mission, "Jihad!", one of the three cities, Ascalon, is intended to attempt a Wonder victory. However, sometimes the AI for Ascalon bugs out and doesn't do anything. Given as how "Jihad!" is ThatOneLevel even without Ascalon going for the Wonder, this is immensely helpful.
6	** The in game scenario editor can do some interesting things with structures and terrain elements that shouldn't be possible. This has been abused ''thoroughly'' by the modding community creating custom campaigns.
7	** In the first scenario of the Attila the Hun campaign, it's possible to fire both the "Attila fleeing the Hun camp" and the "Bleda getting killed in the boar hunt" events if your timing is good. Because of the first event, the Huns will argue over whether Attila is a worthy leader or an honorless cur, but you get some free villagers to build a new force to fight back for your power; while the second event will make all Hun units instantly join your side upon Bleda's death. This has the practical benefit of giving you Bleda's entire faction with minimal bloodshed and also some free villagers. Another bug in the same scenario can occur if the player allies with the Scythians. While the Scythians will break their alliance with the Persians, the Persians don't always do the same and won't even bother to fight back as the Scythians slaughter their way through their base.
8	** In the fourth Sundjata scenario "Blood on The River Bank", a bug can cause Gbetos to be produced every second on one of your allies' Barracks, resulting in the player having a massive amount of infinitely-generated troops.
9	** In an early version of the game, in "The Crucible", the first Genghis Khan level, Genghis Khan -- an extremely strong and powerful hero with a Mangudai model -- could be converted to player control at the start, making it ridiculously easy.
10	** The AI never builds transport ships despite making docks, at least on lower difficulty levels, making an Island game of deathmatch much easier and regicide impossible to lose because you only need to worry about navy fights.
11	** It's possible to bypass the inability to attack your allies by having non-archer projectile units target the ground that just so happens to be where something of your ally's is at. Since you technically aren't attacking ''them'', the AI will never change their stance to you.
12	** Projectile damage is calculated on impact, not on being fired. Since dead units don't always have the same stats they did when they were alive, if an attacker dies between firing its projectile and hitting something the damage is drastically lower. Cue trebuchets launching enormous boulders at barely-armoured structures and doing one point of damage.
13	*** Also, a bolt from a dead Scorpion can fell trees for some reason.
14	** If a Caravel (the Portugese unique naval unit) tries to hit something really, really close to it, the bolts will actually fly into the air backwards over the ship.
15	** Regicide mode is won by killing the enemy's King unit (which is unique to the mode). In the original release, playing any other game mode after a game of Regicide in the same play session would cause all players to be immediately defeated, probably due to the computer still associating victory with a surviving King unit.
16	* In the ''VideoGame/AgeOfWar'' Flash game, units continue to be built even when the game is paused. Meaning that if your base is under attack, you can stack a very large amount of firepower hiding behind a StoneWall. A case of AwesomeButImpractical, as they then move in single file towards the enemy's base.
17	* ''The Lord of the Rings: VideoGame/TheBattleForMiddleEarth II'' has two great glitches, both to do with custom heroes. One allows the player to give their heroes powers from any class, by clicking from one to the other very fast (there are walkthroughs available for this). The other allows a custom hero to use the self heal power over and over, by clicking the power and then moving instantly.
18	* In ''Videogame/BattleZone1998'', the Thumper is an EarthquakeMachine. Normally the Thumper wave just causes the typical HoverTank to spin about for a few moments as it regains control, but the Thumper has... interesting effects on the HumongousMecha, which are programmed to always remain vertical. Hit a walker with a Thumper wave and it will send the unit spinning wildly and ''violently'' out of control as it gets catapulted into the distance.
19	* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerTiberianDawn'' and ''[[VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert 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''.
20	** You can use game editors to replace the grenadier's payload with something more entertaining, like a nuclear warhead, then make a game out of using this bug. "Can I time it right so the grenadier flings the grenade far enough away to not kill himself and everything I hold dear?" The answer is usually no. It's a tough bug to use.
21	** ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerTiberianSun'' makes long-range grenades intentional, and documents it as such. Disk Throwers have a fixed, and fairly small, range, throwing a grenade-like projectile in the form of a disc. Those that don't hit a targetable entity ricochet off the ground and travel for about twice their maximum range before exploding. One can then put some grenadiers at twice their range from a stationary target (which conveniently exceeded the range of first-tier defense turrets), force-fire halfway across the distance, and hit the target with the ricocheted grenades. While not infinite range, it's still useful.
22	** In ''Tiberian Dawn'', enemy units treat sandbags as impassible barriers and won't attack them directly. If you act quickly, you can use the bug to trap the enemy in their own base.
23	*** This property of sandbags could be used for all sorts of exploits. By capturing an enemy building and then setting one right next to it, you could build other things there. You could also use sandbags to prevent the AI from rebuilding lost structures since it could only do so in the exact same spot.
24	*** This is also another reason in ''[[VideoGame/CommandAndConquerTiberiumWars Tiberium Wars]]'', later patches remove the ability to build defensive structures from cranes. You can imagine the resulting terror when someone captured a structure in your base and immediately pop out 5 or so sonic emitter turrets or storm columns in the middle of your base.
25	** Sandbags enabled the sale of infantry. When infantry is next to the sandbags, the "sell" icon can be placed so that it overlaps both, registering the context-sensitive "sell" function while still registering as being over the infantry. Sandbags are not registered and cannot be selected, therefore the infantry takes precedent in the sale. One would ''hope'' that [[HandWave only the gear was scrapped and the personnel themselves got transferred]], because [[NightmareFuel the alternative would be much worse]].
26	*** The infantry selling bug allowed a clever player to complete the Nod mission 8 (which required capturing an abandoned GDI base for a MirrorMatch) without selling their Nod construction yard.
27	*** Note that ''[[VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert2 Red Alert 2]] does'' the alternative with the Soviet Cloning Vats, that allow the sale of infantry with an unambiguous death sound. The expansion ''Yuri's Revenge'' makes it even more explicit by moving the ability over to Yuri's Grinder, which also allows the sale of vehicles in the same manner.
28	** It is possible in ''[[VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert Red Alert 1]]'' to make infantry walk on water by order them into a transport and, right as they are about to board, ordering the transport to move away from the coast. Unfortunately, trying the same thing with tanks gives you a nice splash animation and one less tank.
29	** Another bug in ''Tiberian Dawn'' (which was removed with the last official patch) allowed the keyboard 'stop' command to cancel the selling of a defensive structure, leaving you with the infantry that spawns at the ''start'' of the selling process. Combined with the infantry selling on sandbags, this could be made into a very efficient money cheat. Even with this bug patched, a more limited version of the same trick remains possible by selling a Temple of Nod (or, in ''Red Alert 1'', a Missile Silo) and immediately launching its nuclear missile. Since this makes the building execute the missile launch animation, it cancels the selling.
30	** A visual feature in ''Tiberian Dawn'' which makes infantry cut corners when walking around a walled area (since the wall graphics never actually take the whole cell they occupy) allows infantry to walk onto and over the wall, if the move command inside the walled area is given at the exact moment the soldier is technically standing on the wall.
31	** Silos are actually unnecessary, as unused ore/tiberium could simply be used up by building something and then canceling its production, which results in a refund in cash rather than in ore/tiberium. ''Tiberian Sun'' solved this simply by making the game use the cash money ''before'' the silo-stored resource, before ''Red Alert 2'' removed the need for silos, just immediately giving you cash for your harvested ore.
32	** In the unpatched ''Red Alert 2'', Soviets could get free infantry by building a cloning vat and constructing walls around their barracks. They would get a refund because the walled off barracks automatically cancelled the infantry's production, yet a free soldier would still appear in the cloning vats. Before patches, sending a unit into a Tech Hospital for healing while you had a cloning vat would also produce a clone of that unit when they emerged.
33	** In ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGenerals'' and its expansion pack, newly constructed units spawn inside their production buildings. Normally they follow a set exit path, but by quickly giving them an order you can make them move through the building (in any direction), stop, or even shoot while still inside the building. This was heavily exploited in competitive play.
34	** In ''Generals''' expansion pack ''Zero Hour'', when the Chinese faction used an ECM Tank to disable a unit, if they canceled the attack right before it would be considered disabled, the player would be left with a mis-colored tank.
35	** Using a Microwave Tank on an unfinished Supply Drop Zone to disable it would screw up the drop timer in such a way that the (now finished) Supply Drop Zone would become active again and ''immediately'' summon a plane to drop cash rather than only 2 minutes after it finished construction. Many a GameMod try to fix this exploit, since the official patches never did.
36	** The Laser General in Zero Hour had a range bug with his base defenses. The defenses would fire a burst of three lasers at passing targets, and like the other USA base defenses, can share their target with other nearby defenses to increase their range. However if the unit targetted was killed before the burst was over, the assisting lasers would fire the rest of their shots on the next nearest target... Which might just be the opponent's dedicated anti-defense units that are designed to fire out of range, or even their own base defenses.
37	* In ''VideoGame/CrusaderKingsII'', there is an event in which a ruler with the Lunatic trait can [[CaligulasHorse appoint their horse Glitterhoof as chancellor]]. Naturally, the game does not allow Glitterhoof to get married or be granted land in the usual way, but due to an oversight he can be appointed as the successor to a bishop, including a powerful prince-bishop who rules a province or two. If this happens, he'll gain some courtiers of the same culture as him, i.e. more horses. These ones are treated by the game the same as regular human characters other than their appearance, and can marry humans and produce children who have a 50% chance of appearing as horses. Several people have made use of this to create powerful world-spanning horse empires. (The best-known example being detailed [[https://imgur.com/a/K1utf here]].)
38	** This later became an AscendedGlitch when randomised starts were introduced. As well as having the usual mode that mixes up the traditional historical countries, there was also added an "animal kingdom" mode which replaces several cultures with a variety of different animals. There are no restrictions on marriages or children.
39	* ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar II'''s expansion has an excellent bugged skill in the form of Command Mastery. It drops the energy cost of abilities for anyone who gets the Force Commander's Battlecry buff. The thing is, it doesn't reset when the Battlecry buff fades. And it's self-stacking. Apparently the Force Commander's really an excellent bard in disguise.
40	** Normally when you play the Imperial Guard in the expansion pack, if a squad is suppressed, a Commissar can execute one of the squad to break suppression. But in the Beta for Retribution, if a squad only had the Commissar left and it was suppressed, you could still have him use the ability, in which he valiantly executes himself for cowardice on the field in order to inspire himself to fight harder. [[ObviousRulePatch This is specifically forbidden by the tabletop rules.]]
41	*** "[[BrickJoke Emperor forgive me...]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sgimfISzPs#t=84 I have failed thee.]]"
42	** There's an amusing bug where a corpse doesn't stay still but instead floats skyward in an ever-expanding spiral.
43	* There's an interesting one in ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar: Dark Crusade'', where saving and reloading a game while playing as the Orks causes the engine to forget how many troops you actually have and reduce your effective headcount from 100 (or 104 in the campaign) to ''24'', without destroying any of your troops. While this is something of a GameBreaker, because it can be done multiple times to bring an army of 200+ Orks, it's very much in the spirit of the Ork race, who favour a green-skinned form of the ZergRush. It does have one disadvantage: If your Waaagh! resource was at zero due to the population hitting its cap, you will be stuck building low-level units until it regenerates.
44	** On occasion, unit animations get mixed up, so you end up with corpses that keel over and die ''in midair'', [[ParanoiaFuel Necron corpses that just stand there unmoving,]] or even a Commissar refusing to let death prevent him from doing his duty, looping his "Execute" animation over and over again until his body fades away, his spirit carried straight to the Golden Throne.
45	** A Bigmek attached to a squad shares his teleport ability with them. But if he's killed, the ability doesn't disappear for a very short time, allowing the squad to teleport away. Perhaps he left the instruction manual on it?
46	** The Tau have one in ''Dark Crusade'' where the Vespid Stingwings take only a few seconds to build. They're not that strong, but when your base is being destroyed it can make a sizable difference.
47	** Flamers generally deal little direct damage; their main duty is to break enemy infantry's morale. However, Tau Crisis battlesuits in ''Dark Crusade'' can be equipped with heavy flamers that deal absolutely devastating damage to anything caught in the fairly large [=AoE=]. They're the only flame weapon with a three-digit damage rating, and the conspicuous zero at the end implies an oversight that wasn't intended this way. However, since Tau AI players rarely, if ever, upgrade their Crisis suits with anything, few players complain about this highly useful close combat asset for an army that's sorely lacking in viable close combat capabilities.
48	** An amusing one in ''Winter Assault'''s campaign, where attaching Lord Crull to a squad and detaching causes him to respawn at your base. You can use the new Crull to attach and detach from a squad until you have an entire attack force of Lord Crull(s).
49	** In the next-to-last Disorder mission in ''Winter Assault'', Taldeer's defenders and the Eldar base you need to destroy are programmed to consider each other as enemies for some reason, meaning you can have a unit kite the defenders into the base and watch the Eldar attack each other. People disagreeing with your vision, Taldeer?
50	** ''Soulstorm'' has one in the Necron stronghold where the Deceiver steals your ground forces. If it claims your hero, you can rebuild him and have them fight.
51	* In ''VideoGame/{{Demigod}}'' (lovingly ripped off and improved from ''[[VideoGame/DefenseOfTheAncients DotA]]''), one of the characters has an ability that allows him to, instead of dropping healing mana/health potions on death, drop a potion that does a sizeable chunk of damage. You can kill yourself with this potion. By doing this, you deny any enemies attacking you the kill, and you gain gold and EXP as if you had killed a demigod of your level (which you did!)
52	* In ''VideoGame/DuneII'', a building that constructs troops could be surrounded by walls or other buildings to block it off. When a unit is built in a walled off building an airlift will pick it up and drop it in a nearby open spot. If you have no available airlifts (either you have none, or all are busy), then one will come from off screen, perform its function, and leave (also occurs if you lose your last harvester). If another unit calls an airlift just with the right timing, said airlift will pick it up and bring it where it needs to go, and will on random occasions, remain as a free airlift unit (normally one of the most expensive and useful units in the game, and very high tech). This allows access to airlift units much earlier then they should be available, and for free.
53	** At least in MS-DOS version, range and precision of weapons depend on the game speed. High speed increases range and decreases precision, and vice versa. At lowest speed missiles hardly miss and at highest speed they hardly hit the intended target. Meanwhile, specification range for sonic tank is only available at maximum speed, and at minimum speed it's only 2 squares. This is useful even in large battles, but in small skirmishes, when you can set speed for every shot, allows to neutralize enemies and give your units sniper precision.
54	* ''VideoGame/EmpireEarth'':
55	** An interesting one involving the AI: they'd attack the first unit to attack them until the unit died or was out of sight. So send a ranged unit to attack melee soldiers, they'll follow without fighting the rest of your army currently ripping them to shreds. While less useful in later ages, what with the disappearance of melee units, it still does wonders for your self esteem to lead Alexander's army without losing a single man.
56	** Bombards have a weird one where sometimes they suddenly fire a ''stream'' of cannonballs at the target, and since these do splash damage just about everything in the area is hilariously screwed. The downside is that the bombard won't fire again after that and must be destroyed.
57	** Partisans are infantry who can shoot at all ground and air targets (including planes, where normal infantry can only shoot helicopters) available one era before aircraft and AntiAircraft guns, serving as a CurbstompCushion if the enemy gets to the modern age early. However, it also means that Partisans can shoot at not only the low-flying planes of WWI but also later planes (including jet fighters and nuclear bombers) and even ''satellites''.
58	** In ''VideoGame/EmpireEarthII'', the Imperial Leader for the first five epochs has an ability that cuts build time for Wonders and City Centers by half. In the next five epochs, it instead decreases the build time for any building ''except'' Wonders and City Centers. But units don't instantly upgrade when changing epochs, so with some foresight and city planning it's possible to upgrade to epoch 6, [[RealTimeWithPause pause the game]], lay down the foundation for the second Wonder near the Leader, and have him use his ability before he's replaced and loses it.
59	** From the same game, footsoldiers are divided into two categories: Heavy and Light Infantry. During the pre-gunpowder ages, Heavy Infantry are armored melee soldiers (swordsmen and spearmen) while Light Infantry are archers. With gunpowder, Light Infantry switch to mortars while Heavy Infantry become riflemen and machine gunners, meaning that Light Infantry cannot shoot helicopters but Heavy Infantry can. So in a modern-vs-primitive match, you could very well see your attack helicopters die to cavemen beating the choppers' shadows with clubs while the archers run around, unable to fight back.
60	* ''VideoGame/EvilGenius'' had a few of them, which were very useful if the player knew how to exploit them.
61	** Lord Kane has two of the most useful bugs in the entire game. One of his powers forces any group of enemies to cower in fear before him, even soldiers and veterans. If you force Kane to physically attack the cowering enemies before he finishes his animation for the power, he will do so, but the enemies will ''still be cowering in fear'', allowing you to easily kill off a few of them before they get a chance to hit Kane. His other power erases all heat from a single target. And, for no apparent reason, also forces them to stand perfectly still while Kane runs up to them to use it. If Kane is far enough away, the target will be a sitting duck for so long that even a lowly construction worker can single-handedly take down the mighty John Steele.
62	** Double clicking on a minion will make him salute the camera (and thus salute you), but, ironically, they will still salute even if they are abandoning you because of low loyalty. This is a great way to prevent important minions from escaping, since you can tag them for capture, then keep double clicking on them to force them to stop running and thus get beaten by everyone else in the vicinity.
63	** Another useful bug allows one to be rid of meddling super agents indefinitely, long before discovering the methods to actually eliminate them, provided the player can baby-sit them long enough. Super agents have an easy time breaking out of a cell if they are captured, and if you leave them unattended, they will escape. However, if a prisoner is tagged for interrogation, they cannot escape. They will wait for someone to come along and take them to the device you chose, no matter how long it takes. This includes super agents. In fact, super agents have it worse because they will also wait for the Evil Genius avatar to arrive at the scene to laugh maniacally which, depending on the layout of your base, can take quite some time. As long as you watch them carefully, you can effectively juggle any number of super agents around your lair without ever giving them a chance to escape and cause damage.
64	** Until you kidnap the maid in one of the game's first missions, you will never be attacked. You won't get any more missions, of course, but by then you are able to go out into the world and steal cash. Simply set up your basic base, rob the world blind, come back a few hours later, let the world cool off and forget about you, and get back to work several million richer.
65	** If you build a multi-sectioned strongroom, then make another one, and then delete the first one, it will double your money.
66	** There's a bug that will permanently disable a Super Agent (or anyone for that matter) without even having to defeat them. You first need to have the Moko and The Matron in your employ. Have Moko run up to your target and use his ground-pound ability. Then have The Matron use her shock therapy ability on the target before he/she gets up. If done right the target will be locked into a loop of electrocution animation. People so glitched can still agro you minions but can't attack or take normal damage which means that you could have a pile-up of minions beating ineffectually on a guy having a constant seizure. Funny but not productive. To solve this issue a capture tag which will be effective at dealing damage. You can trap them in prison using one of the above methods or you can torture the agent with an smarts draining device and then repeat the glitch process once he's been escorted outside. The smarts damage from the shock therapy will lock the agent in "in need of assistance" and since he's already outside the base he doesn't need to be escorted. Take that John Steele!
67	* ''VideoGame/{{Homeworld}}'' has both the F2kzzzz and "probe bomb" tricks, which both exploit different bugs for viable strategies in the game.
68	** The F2kzzzz glitch basically puts several different command queries for scouts together to make them flying ninjas of doom. First, you press the F2 key, which sets the scouts to evasive, making them slightly faster for a cost in firepower. Then, you press "k," which initiates the kamikaze attack. Normally, this would be lethal, but by then pressing "z" repeatedly on the keyboard, you initiate a special up to eleven ability for scouts that makes them even ''faster'', so fast in fact, that they prove ''too agile to '''die'''''. As a result, the scouts become nigh impossible to kill and trail closely behind enemy fighters, shooting the entire way.
69	** The probe bomb trick takes advantage of the unusually wide area of effect for scuttling a probe, thereby enabling you to kill any number of unfortunate strike craft to wander in range.
70	* ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'':
71	** Attacking someone at just the right time as they enter one of Bard's Magical Journey portals will cause them to fly off the top of the screen and take several seconds to land. Sadly, no-one has yet been able to utilise this strategically.
72	** If an attack that locks onto a target locks on just before they teleport away (eg. by using the omnipresent recall ability), the attack may still chase them all the way to where they end up, miles outside its actual range. Hilarious if it was a projectile - hilarious for ''them'' if it was a FoeTossingCharge or similar and you just ran past all their turrets and into the [[InstantDeathRadius nexus laser]].
73	*** Similar effects can also occur if the user is displaced just as their gap-closer lands, leading to Threshs flying halfway across the map to the a Death Sentence victim that just sent them flying.
74	** It's been patched now, but for a while it was possible to kill the [[RidiculouslyCuteCritter Poros]] that wander around the Howling Abyss map by guiding them into the nexus laser.
75	* Both ''VideoGame/{{Myth}} I'' and ''Myth II'' have an excellent bug: the menu pops up when pressing Escape, pausing the game. What the game doesn't do is prevent you from giving orders when the menu is active, thus this can act as an active, if not tedious, pause.
76	* ''VideoGame/OgreBattle64'' contained an item duplication glitch that would allow players to create as many weapons and [[RareCandy stat-boosting items]] as needed, provided you already had at least one of whatever you were trying to copy. Given that certain powerful character classes had very specific stat requirements, which could otherwise be tricky to meet (not least because of the trademark "alignment/charisma" system), this came in very handy when a great upgrade was just a few points out of reach.
77	* In ''VideoGame/PacificStorm'', before being patched, if you controlled directly a submarine (not tested with another warships) you could accelerate it indefinitely. Cue a submerged WWII sub going at, say, ''more than a hundred kilometers per hour'', far faster than in RealLife.
78	* In ''VideoGame/StarcraftII'''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. This one has unfortunately been fixed, as you weren't supposed to get enough money per playthrough to afford everything. Sorry, achievement hunters!
79	** Patch 5.0 very briefly broke the way Terran Command Centers loaded [=SCVs=]. With a specific order of actions, it allowed Command Centers to load anything, including ''buildings'', on them, with an incredibly ridiculous potential. You could load Refineries to relocate vespene geysers (with the opponent all too unaware that this ever happened, as while the geyser looks unoccupied, it technically still was), load defensive structures like filled Bunkers or Planetary Fortresses (or Zerg Crawlers and Protoss Photon Cannons) to get a bona-fide DeathStar that wipes out anything on the map, load the aforementioned Planetary Fortresses to relocate them (as they otherwise cannot lift off) or, in an extreme case of MindScrew, you could load the Command Center into ''itself'', making it vanish from the map while still technically existing (providing Supply and preventing the InstantWinCondition of getting all buildings destroyed, while also still potentially carrying whatever it had, allowing Terran players to effectively delete vespene geysers). It doubles as a GameBreakingBug because it was impossible to fight back against (and in fact forced Blizzard to disable Ranked Matches until the bug was fixed), but it also brought untold hilarity.
80	* ''VideoGame/{{StarCraft\|I}}'' 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 [[AscendedGlitch incorporate stacking into the sequel]].
81	** 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.
82	** By using fan made map editors, a bug similar to this allowed for an entire new game type known as Stack Defense (Stack D for short) which consisted of players using "lights out" commands to "turn off the lights"--activating fog of war even where the player controls units. Usually this would be considered a disadvantage, but it happens that the game doesn't particularly care if you warp in 20 Photon Cannons on the same spot as long as Fog of War is covering that spot when it happens. Then turn the "lights" back on and you have either several structures on the same spot (so that you can't tell there are more than one [[MoreDakka until they start shooting at things]]) or overlapping structures forming a wall.
83	*** Lights on/off stacking has some bugs of its own. The maps have a maximum unit limit onscreen at one time, maximum number of objects, and buildings. Meaning if you stack fifty cannons in one spot, you'll end up with only 5 or 6 of them firing at one time, and depending on the wave of enemies the map spawns, you can have ''none of them firing at all!''
84	** This overlapping movement proved so useful in simply getting a huge aerial army from point A to murder target B, that when Blizzard's next RTS, VideoGame/WarCraftIII, had some issues with large groups of flying units, they '''patched in''' a modified version of the bug - one that turns off the moment they reach their destination, shooting the units out at high speed into focus-firable formation.
85	** Honestly, making custom maps for ''VideoGame/StarCraft'' requires using many GoodBadBugs and a substantial amount of DummiedOut 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 [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin 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 [[NotTheIntendedUse 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.
86	* ''{{VideoGame/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.
87	* In vanilla ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander'', it was possible to fire a nuclear missile and have it detonate right above your base (or possibly an opponent's base). The reason? The missile could physically collide with aircraft, essentially turning air units into ghetto nuclear missile defenses. This was mostly fixed in ''Forged Alliance''... except for the experimental UEF Novax satellite, which could still block nukes due to it technically not being counted as an "air unit" by the game (as a KillSat, it's immune to all weapons and can only be taken down by destroying its command center building). Most fan community mods revert this change, bringing back the possibility of accidental nuclear annihilation.
88	** Anti-air defenses originally had no target priority system of any kind. This led to the common tactic of launching swarms of extremely cheap t1 air scouts to support strat bombing snipes, and effectively made building air defenses largely a waste of resources. This was also partially fixed in ''Forged Alliance'', though the target priority can still occasionally glitch out, meaning that mixing fighters with anti-air for air defense is still prudent.
89	** As all munitions can technically collide with any unit, this quirk can lead to tanks shooting into a hill trying to hit the enemy on its other side or even flocks of fighters getting accidentally shot by a artillery shot.
90	** Like ''VideoGame/TotalAnnihilation'', the game also shares a bug where you can block an enemy factory with destroyed units. It's quite a bit harder to pull off in ''Supreme Commander'' than in TA however due to the better pathfinding however.
91	** An attempt to make the UEF T3 mobile sonar into something actually useful accidentally glitched and 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.
92	* ''VideoGame/TotalAnnihilation'' has quite a few of these. [[http://www.angelfire.com/ga/gnugs/ You can see many of them on the Gnug clan's site]].
93	** Commanding long-range turrets and artillery to force-fire at the ground in front of them would force their barrels to elevate and hurl shells far beyond their usual range in that direction - albeit at much reduced accuracy. A similar "feature" allowed submarines (normally anti-sea only) to attack land units on the coast by lobbing their ''torpedoes'' in a parabolic trajectory.
94	** Bombers have zero reload rate; if you can time their attacks well enough, you can make bombers drop an endless bomb stream.
95	** A particularly game-breaking trick is to send a unit into the driveway of a factory and kill it, preventing it from building anything until the unit is reclaimed.
96	** It's possible to share Metal Makers with a multiplayer opponent, depleting his energy stores. This is quite nasty for the other player since it prevents their commander from using their D-gun along with slowing their production.
97	* ''VideoGame/WarcraftII'' 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 UpdatedRerelease fixed the bug but also gave every player an extra 100 lumber to start with.
98	* ''VideoGame/WarcraftIII'': Since {{knockback}} has to be triggered into the game, it can lead to some very strange situations on maps that use it, like a GrapplingHook overshooting its target and catapulting itself over walls, boundaries, and over the horizon.
99	** Units that use the same animation model (for example, the Archer unit and Dark Ranger HeroUnit) can have the same skin applied to them with very different results. For example, putting an Archer skin on the Dark Ranger [[EyesDoNotBelongThere moves her eyes to her cheeks,]] while her filled-in eye sockets [[GlowingEyesOfDoom continue to burn.]] Similarly, playing around with Myrmidon and Royal Guard skins gets ''massive'' dorsal fins and bizarre weapons.

Context GoodBadBugs / RealTimeStrategy