History GameBreaker / Civilization

* The ’’Gathering Storm’’ expansion added the Mali civilization, which is focused on accruing an obscene amount of gold. Their unique commercial hub, the Sugubu, gives a 20% discount to all gold purchases, including those for units. The Democracy government adds another 20% discount, resulting in a 40% discount on unit purchases. Pretty good, but not broken... unless the Ngarzagamu city-state is in the game. Their suzerain bonus gives a 20% discount on unit purchases for each building in the purchasing city’s encampment district — since an encampment can hold three buildings, this adds up to 60%. So, a Malian city with a Sugubu and a full encampment, under the democracy government with Ngarzagamu as a suzerain, can buy units at a ’’’100% discount’’’. That’s right, they can field an entire late-game war machine without paying a penny. Since the Mali are so rich that the gold upkeep will be negligible, the only downside is that some units require strategic resources to maintain, and too many of those will put you under, but being smart about how many units you purchase and/or having access to a lot of strategic resources make this a non-issue.

* The Theocracy government allows you to purchase military units with faith rather than gold. With the right build this can help you field entire hordes without losing much money (if any).

* Scythia is a monster of war. +5 combat strength against any unit that is not at full health will mean they almost always have an edge on the combat strength match-up - which also hinders enemies further since they already have combat strength penalties when injured. Scythian units healing up to 30 health on kill also gives them an edge in wars of attrition. Their ability to get two Light Calvary units whenever they produce a single one applies well to ZergRush tactics that involve simply swarming the enemy with masses of fast and powerful Horsemen. Their Kurgan tile improvement will also ensure they never run short of money to keep the war-machine going.

* In ''I-III'': The Great Library, which could be acquired early on and gave you a massive tech advantage. Changes in later games make it less overpowered, but it can still be leveraged for some tricky strategies. Like all World Wonders, only one can be built, even if another civ was just about to finish theirs.

* If you're going for a conquest victory, the Fundamentalism government type makes taking over the world really easy. Under Fundamentalism you never have any unhappy citizens, and buildings that normally increase happiness instead produce gold (and never require maintenance). You can also produce the Fanatics units, and each city can support up to 8 of them for free. The only downside of Fundamentalism is that scientific research is halved, which isn't a very big deal if you've already researched all the late-game tech or if you're rich enough to just buy technologies from other nations.

* In ''I'' and ''II'': The Great Library, which could be acquired early on and gave you a massive tech advantage. Changes in later games make it less overpowered, but it can still be leveraged for some tricky strategies. Like all World Wonders, only one can be built, even if another civ was just about to finish theirs.

* The Great Library is a DiscOneNuke is ever there was one. It grants you any civilization advance known by two other civilizations you're in contact with, for free. Rushing to it in the early game while building up your network of contacts can result in your civilization instantly going from the most technologically backwards in the world to the most scientifically advanced, and until you discover Education in the Middle Ages to render it obsolete, you'll continue to periodically get free tech advances as your competition researches alternative tech paths.

* Sumeria is often seen as one. They have the powerful Warcart unit - [[DiscOneNuke Available from Turn 1 with high movesment and combat strength with no weakness to Anti-Calvary units.]] The constant spawning of Barbarian Encampments is a [[PinataEnemy benefit for them]] since clearing one provides a tribal village reward. Combined with Ziggurats for early Science/Culture and you have a civ that hits its maximum power on the very first turn with the ability to steamroll neighbors and mature quickly

* City-States now provide unique bonuses to their controlling Civ, which can seriously impact the game. Such as Valletta allowing encampment and city center buildings to be purchased with faith. Buenos Aries causing bonus resources to grant amenities like luxury resources. Or Carthage adding an extra trade route for each encampment.

* City-States now provide unique bonuses to their controlling Civ, which can seriously impact the game. Valletta allowing its control to purchase encampment and city center buildings with faith. Buenos Aries causing bonus resources to grant amenities like luxury resources. Or Carthage adding an extra trade route for each encampment.

** Death Magic also gives its users the ability to summon skeletons, which make for excellent ZergRush material because unlike Spectres, they don't have a duration limit, so you can field as many of them as you have casters who know the spell. You can even keep building adepts back in your cities but summon the skeletons with your main attack force, so even distance is no longer a problem.

* The Statue of Zeus World Wonder gives you a free Ancient Cavalry unit every 5 turns. Said unit has 3 attack (when the best Ancient Age defender is the strength 2 Spearman), defends at 2, has 2 movement points, and best of all an extra hitpoint (in a game where the most a standard unit can have is five). Since retreat odds for mounted units are tied to hitpoint totals, they're notoriously resilient as well, both on the attack and defense.

* Armies. Not the standard troops you march around the map, but the special unit you can create with a combat-spawned Great Leader. Load them up with three of the same unit for an (invisible) +1 attack/defense/movement bonus, and the combined health of all three units (four with a certain Small Wonder). They also heal incredibly quickly, even in enemy territory (normally impossible without a late-game Small Wonder) and the AI will never attack them unless it has a ''much'' more advanced units (as in, two eras ahead) or literally no other targets on the landmass.

* Although a very late game occurrence, as soon as you unlock the Giant Death Robot and have sufficient uranium, opposing armies are essentially completely and totally ''fucked'', especially if you combine them with Stealth Bombers. The combat penalty against cities is all well and good, but even with that, a percentage off of ''150'' combat strength is all but irrelevant, especially if you happen across a civ that's still playing with swords and musketmen (and there's always one). It's entirely possible to blitzkrieg your way across about 10 cities in a few turns if you're canny about placement.

* In ''Realism Invictus'', Charge Mounted Units have the same collateral damage feature that catapults have in vanilla Civ 4, except unlike catapults, chargers are typically fast enough to avoid interception by the enemy and have a withdrawal chance, which lets them potentially survive an otherwise-suicidal charge into an enemy stack. With enough cavalry, even [[ScissorsCutsRock specialized anti-cavalry units]] like Spearmen and Pikemen [[DeathByAThousandCuts can be reduced to easy kills]] regardless of defense bonuses, and the War of Attrition doctrine you can pick up early on gives them a unique set of promotions including first strikes, greater withdrawal chance, and ''blitz''[[note]](multiple attacks per turn, named after the promotion that grants the effect in vanilla)[[/note]]. Having horses in ''RI'' is enough to turn the whole war game around.

** Keshiks and Camel Archers are so powerful that some players actually consider them a ''[[GoneHorriblyRight detriment]]'' to playing as Mongolia or Arabia in multiplayer, because any human player who knows well enough will prioritize getting rid of [=Arabia/Mongolia ASAP=] in the Ancient or Classical Era (even to the point of [[EnemyMine dogpiling]] with other players), rather than let them live and risk facing hordes of mounted archers later on.

** Keshiks and Camel Archers are so powerful that some players actually consider them a ''[[GoneHorriblyRight detriment]]'' to playing as Mongolia or Arabia in multiplayer, because any human player who knows well enough will [[DangerouslyGenreSavvy prioritize]] getting rid of [=Arabia/Mongolia ASAP=] in the Ancient or Classical Era (even to the point of [[EnemyMine dogpiling]] with other players), rather than let them live and risk facing hordes of mounted archers later on.

** Keshiks and Camel Archers are so powerful that some players actually consider them a ''[[GoneHorriblyRight detriment]]'' to playing as Mongolia or Arabia in multiplayer, because other human players will [[DangerouslyGenreSavvy prioritize]] getting rid of [=Arabia/Mongolia ASAP=] in the Ancient or Classical Era, rather than let them live and risk facing hordes of mounted archers later on.

* The salt luxury resource. Gives a base bonus of +1 gold and +1 food, and when improved adds +1 production and another +1 food. In the early game, when food is critical to rapidly grow your population (and therefore scientific output and the ability to work additional city tiles), being able to add to your food alongside your production can make a city unstoppable. This is especially the case as no other luxury resource (barring certain Pantheon bonuses) gives simultaneous increases to production and food when improved. Oh, and salt can be improved with only Mining (certain resources require two techs like Mining + Calendar, or even three like Mining + Bronze Working + Calendar), and can be improved in less than half the time of a resource on marsh or jungle. Did your starting location spawn next to two or three salt resources? Congratulations, you will dominate the early game, even on higher difficulty levels. Conversely, did you spawn in the midst of al lot of jungle? Enjoy having practically no production capacity and not being able to exploit any jungle-located resources until you research the three previously mentioned techs, allowing other civs to roll over you as you're just getting started!

** All of these exploits were [[ObviousRulePatch succinctly dealt with]] in the first major patch. Disbanded units no longer give gold and damaged units cannot be sold, period.

* FallFromHeaven features the [[LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards All-In Death Magic]] strategy. Generally, the game balances "training combat units" and "training wizards who summon combat units" against each other by having summoned units be very weak, short-lived, and expendable, whereas combat units are expensive but powerful. A pit demon has base power 5 but the equivalent melee unit, the champion, has base power 8; this balances the fact that if the champion dies you need to train another one, which costs resources, whereas if the pit fiend dies you just summon another one, which doesn't. The problem with All-In-Death Magic is that while the Specter, the mid-level necromancy summon, has only base power 3, it also has [[FragileSpeedster Move 2]], [[StandardStatusEffects Fear]] and [[MinmaxersDelight Affinity]] For Death Magic, the last of which gives it [[LightningBruiser +1 base power]] for every source of death mana you control. It is very easy to get three or four death magic nodes in your empire, at which point the free Specter can fight toe-to-toe with the expensive champion, letting you destroy any enemy army by sitting back and sending in wave after wave of expendable summons while your wizards stay far enough away to be in no danger.

* The salt luxury resource. Gives a base bonus of +1 gold and +1 food, and when improved adds +1 production and another +1 food. In the early game, when food is critical to rapidly grow your population (and therefore scientific output and the ability to work additional city tiles), being able to add to your food alongside your production can make a city unstoppable. This is especially the case as no other luxury resource (barring certain Pantheon bonuses) gives simultaneous increases to production and food when improved. Oh, and salt can be improved with only Mining (certain resources require two techs like Mining + Calendar), and can be improved in less than half the time of a resource on marsh or jungle. Did your starting location spawn next to two or three salt resources? Congratulations, you will dominate the early game, even on higher difficulty levels.

** In an example of truly broken balancing: in the late game it was possible to purchase multiple units at once stacked together as a corps or army. While an army of three mechanized infantry, as an example, buys for about eight-thousand gold, it could be sold for as much as ''twelve-thousand''. A player with enough money to buy a single army could do so, then sell it back for the money to buy another plus extra, multiple times, allowing them to accrue a truly unlimited amount of money '''in a single turn'''.

* Selling units. When units are deleted, the player is refunded a sum of money that often outweighs the expense necessary to get the unit in the first place, which leads to several exploits ranging from minor to severe:
** One simple trick during a war is to sell a military unit that has been too weakened to possibly survive another attack, using the money to fund more troops. While buying a replacement unit costs more money than what is received from selling the original, it does help with the survivability of an army in the long run.
** Cavalry units tend to sell for high amounts, and it is possible as early as the Ancient era to accrue several bonuses that improve production values for cavalry units, making it easy to churn them out in as few as one or two turns[[labelnote:*]]on standard speed[[/labelnote]] and then sell them immediately for profit. When playing as Scythia, who get two units instead of one when building light cavalry, the profit from this method borders on obscene.
** In an example of truly broken balancing: in the late game it is possible to purchase multiple units at once stacked together as a corps or army. While an army of three mechanized infantry, as an example, buys for about eight-thousand gold, it can be sold for as much as ''twelve-thousand''. A player with enough money to buy a single army can do so, then sell it back for the money to buy another plus extra, multiple times, allowing them to accrue a truly unlimited amount of money '''in a single turn'''.

** In an example of truly broken balancing, in the late game it is possible to purchase multiple units at once stacked together as a corps or army. While an army of three mechanized infantry, as an example, buys for about seven- to eight-thousand gold, it can be sold for as much as ''twelve-thousand''. A player with enough money to buy a single army can do so, then sell it back for the money to buy another plus extra, multiple times, allowing them to accrue a truly unlimited amount of money '''in a single turn'''.

* Unlike the normal games, Civ Rev only has ONE nuke. Guess what happens when you're the first to get it? And guess how far down the line SDI is?

* Some of the Unique Units in ''Civilization IV'' also have a vague Game Breaker-esque status. The Incan Quechua is available from the beginning, cheap and cost-effective against archers, making early rushes for the Incas much easier than any other civilization can pull them off. Also, the Roman Praetorian, which is an early Classical Age unit... with an unit strength more common for the Medieval Era.