- Advance Wars: No thanks to Black Bombs, and the simple nature that having a lot of cheaper units is better than a few good ones (re: Colin), the following units are this:
- Battleships have huge range and are untouchable by pretty much any unit other than another battleship, a bomber, or a sub, but they're incredibly expensive, can only move in oceans (read: not shoals or rivers), and really aren't any more powerful than rockets. You'd be much better off building a set of rockets and something to defend it with, since you could build rockets and a medium tank for the cost of one battleship.
- Megatanks are the strongest land-based units in the game and able to one-punch most other land units. However their supplies are a minuscule 50 fuel and three shots, they can only move 4 spaces per turn, and have only 1 square of vision in fog of war. Since they practically require an APC to follow them constantly and take so long to get anywhere, and are so ludicrously expensive, most players opt to never buy them and choose a fleet of smaller units instead. In fact, in competitive PVP, the megatank (along with the Cruiser) has become a meme where the only time you build one is to signal to your opponent that you have them so outmatched in units, funds, and properties that at this point they can't win and should yield.
- Piperunners have high stocks of fuel and ammo, can target any unit, and do a lot of damage, but as you expect can only move along factories and pipelines, making them practically useless on any map except for ones intentionally designed to make use of them. It is, however, sometimes worth losing a factory on a pipe-less map just to keep one parked near your HQ if your opponent is trying to win by capture.
- The Stealth planes are aerial submarines, able to hide from enemy sight unless adjacent to an enemy unit. Even when discovered, hidden Stealths can only be attacked by Fighters and other Stealths. Furthermore, they're versatile attackers, able to attack any unit in the game (except submerged subs) for good damage. However, they cost more to deploy than almost any other unit and their small fuel capacity is used up in the blink of an eye while Hidden. Stealths need constant resupply (at least once every other turn) to get anything done at all. Combined with the cost, they're more trouble than they're worth.
- Carriers in Dual Strike are this even when compared to the other examples on this list. Their main purpose is launching deadly anti-air missiles with a massive 8 spaces of range, 2 more than a Battleship; this can quickly earn you air superiority and shut down an enemy's airports from a comfortable distance. They can also store two air units. However, they are so expensive and so vulnerable to Submarines that you'd be better off building a Megatank, Battleship, or Stealth Fighter, or really anything else rather than one of these behemoths.
- Carriers in Days of Ruin got a big redesign, trading their ranged attack for the ability to create Seaplanes. The Seaplane is a highly versatile and powerful air unit; it can attack almost anything and tends to hit incredibly hard. The catches? They cost $15000 to build on top of the Carrier's initial cost of $28000, it takes two turns to build the Carrier and then the plane before an attack can commence, each Carrier can only build four of them before running out of materials (which can't be refilled), and their fuel capacity is only 40 (opposed to every other air unit having 99). Constant action and the 5 fuel that's spent at the start of each day can bring this unit crashing down in just a few turns. They only have 3 ammo — even less than a War Tank — and no secondary weapon. The intended use appears to be: build four Seaplanes, keep two in the Carrier at all times to be launched good-as-new next turn. This allows for a very strong offensive, especially since Carriers heal damage to housed air units. The only CO that makes great use of this is Admiral Greyfield, since his day-to-day power significantly buffs Seaplane and naval units and his CO Power replenishes the supplies, ammo, and materials of all units, allowing a single Carrier to build as many Seaplanes as you like, provided you can inflict enough damage to activate the power! Unfortunately you cannot use Greyfield during the campaign, only in skirmishes and multiplayer. In addition, such a strategy means you are left wide open in the beginning run of the game against other COs. If you are unable to protect your Carriers sufficiently, you are toast.
- Catapults in Ancient Empires. They have the longest attack range of any unit and the second most powerful attack. However, they also have numerous disadvantages. Their damage is much more randomised than any other unit, making them slightly unreliable. They are the slowest unit in the game, compounded by their inability to attack and move in the same turn. And they can't attack units next to them, so any other unit can attack them with impunity by moving close. Trying to use catapults as they were used in real life — to attack enemy bases — requires you to wait a while for your catapults to actually reach said base and they'll get destroyed quickly if not protected. Leaving them at your base to defend it makes their slow movement irrelevant, but they still can only attack one unit at a time and still can't do anything about fast units that rush in to melee range. To top it all off, you can buy multiple Archers for the same cost as one catapult, and these archers will be much more versatile.
- The Final-Typenic Special in Battle Moon Wars has the highest base damage in the game, with a thousand point advantage over the second-highest. To use it though, you need to (1) deploy three specific units (one of which is obsolete by the endgame); (2) have those units be adjacent to each other (one unit being a long-ranged fighter unlike the other two); and (3) have those units reach 140 will and have 65 energy to spare (which is a lot).
- Golems in Brigandine do a lot of damage, have high armour with good health, are immune to negative status effects, can throw boulders when they evolve and are the only unit that with a fourth evolution, the Talos. However, they are very slow and extremely inaccurate at attacking (evolving to a Talos improves their accuracy), so even at high levels they'll often whiff their attacks. Additionally their Talos evolution only happens when they reach Level 20, the maximum level. This means the improvement to Talos won't significantly improve their accuracy and good luck keeping a golem alive long enough to reach Level 20. However, in Brigandine Grand Edition there's a magic item that can be found which can evolve a golem much earlier. If your golem becomes a Talos at low levels, it becomes a devastating powerhouse capable of punishing speedsters like pixies and ninjas.
- In Civilization II, III and IV you can eventually build nuclear weapons. These seem very cool and look cool when used. But, they are expensive, take a long time to build, and cannot be built until very late in most games. Furthermore, each weapon can only be used once and despite being fairly powerful, in Civ 4 they still follow the standard rule that no enemy can be knocked down below a certain health threshold by air power. As a result, building a fleet of reusable aircraft is usually a better strategic use of your resources. In addition, Civilization II through Civilization IV have the SDI, which shoots down nukes at a great frequency. Any decent player or AI will render your nukes pretty useless with this.
- Every use of a nuclear weapon (successful or not) causes a negative impact to diplomatic relations with every other civilization and a double penalty for successfully hit civilizations (the relation penalty being listed as "YOU NUKED US!"). This can very quickly lead you to a war against the rest of the planet.
- Each nuclear explosion is a serious hit on the global warming scale, and light use of nukes could easily cause the world to deteriorate into mostly swamp and desert areas within a short amount of time.
- In IV, you can build "The Internet" wonder of the world, which grants you any tech that 2 other civs know for free. The problem is: it comes all the way at the end of the game, and if you were early enough to build it, you usually know everything the other civs know and more. However, there is a strategy to beeline to Computers, not trading any technologies yourself and hopefully having saved tens of thousands of research points that way.
- It's worth noting what Civ Rev came up with on the nuke front. For those unfortunate that played the game you'll find out that once you've gone through the majority of the game and finally have nukes you can only use the nuke once. ONCE. You're out of luck if the other player launches a nuke or you choose a bad target.
- The Giant Death Robot in Civilization V. An end-game unit that deals a lot of damage but doesn't get any defensive bonuses. The problem? It uses up 2 units of uranium, meaning you could have build 2 nuclear weapons instead of one GDR. Nerfed in the Brave New World DLC and made a part of the "tank" upgrade tree, effectively turning it into a Walking Tank. It also requires only 1 unit of uranium now, so, with decent supplies, you should be able to upgrade many of your Modern Armor units into them. However, the DLC also introduces the Canon Immigrant XCOM Squad, an upgrade of the Paratrooper that can paradrop at a huge range. Unlike the GDR, the XCOM Squad doesn't tie up any resources.
- Generally speaking you can often tell a Prince-level from a Deity-level Civilization V player by how much value they place on building early-game Wonders. Unless you get very lucky with your city/ruin placement you will waste at least forty turns assembling a single Wonder; time almost always better spent bolstering your defences, training Settlers and constructing your key buildings. This is not a hard and fast rule obviously and Wonders like Stonehenge work very well with a Piety opener; but on the whole you are much better off on higher difficulties just ignoring the entire lot. (Of course, it isn't helped by the fact that the Deity-level AI cheats like no tomorrow, and will be able to claim the Wonders long before you can.)
- Disgaea has a number of characters in each game, but certain games have clearly better options that make using many of the other classes or characters not particularly helpful.
- Asagi in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness is practically worthless as anything except a glass cannon with one option: shoot the target. She cannot learn any skills that aren't magic, and she isn't designed for magic damage.
- Speaking of magic in Disgaea 1, the Nosferatu and Succubus classes are cool concepts that are ruined by the way weapons work. In every title save for Disgaea 1 and 6 (Disgaea 6 allows you to equip normal weapons to any unit), all "monster" units can equip either Magic Monster weapons or Physical Monster weapons which buff the stats appropriately. In Disgaea 1, there are only two Magic Monster weapons, and they're fairly early game, whereas you can just straight buy better physical monster weapons. Thus, despite the cool attacks of both classes and the fact they make for great magical monster units instead of humanoid units, you're better off using humanoids and equipping them with staves.
- In Disgaea 2 and its PSP port, you can unlock numerous classes with varying abilities including complete immunity to certain elements, insta-kill attacks against non-bosses, and various buffs, however they are all absolutely dwarfed by the unlockable Majin class whose ability is "Doubles all stats when it is your last unit". There is basically no reason to ever not use it in the post-game, as said bosses never use only one element, are always immune to status effects and, in the case of Baal, have stats so absurd that even a max level 9999 character will get bodied by him. This is made even worse in the port where you can unlock almost all of the post-game bosses... but again, it's best to just use a Majin.
- For Disgaea D2, Pram has an evility that randomly damages the enemies. One of these random abilities is poisoning every non-immune unit. This works good for regular maps, but is worthless on bosses, and even more worthless during training where poisoned units that die to status and not an attack do not give XP
- Disgaea 5 has the unlockable Asagi class, which has the evility "This evility changes every turn", which means that you can never truly depend on said class for any effective combat since you never know if the next buff it gets is wholly worthless to your strategy. To make matters worse, it's a post-game class, meaning you unlock it after beating the story and basically make one for fun and never use it.
- Makai Kingdom introduces Vehicles, which are big, cool-looking, and have some unique stuff going that should make them a much-desired addition to your lineup. Unfortunately, they tend to be more effort than they're worth. They take up two unit slots each, so you can only field at most four of them; they need a regular unit to act as pilot (and their stats are dependent on said unit's tec stat, taking penalties if it's too low), and leveling them requires combat experience and expending Materials. All their attacks also expend SP (regular units always have a basic move that costs nothing to use), making them unfeasible in drawn-out engagements such as dungeons. (And some dungeon levels outright forbid using vehicles.) Additionally, there's no way to efficiently boost their stats outside of equipment and leveling. While regular units can take advantage of reincarnation/transmigration to boost their stats to insane degrees, vehicles are stuck advancing linearly. Ultimately, there's no point in using vehicles other than novelty, since your regular units outclass them in every way.
- Phantom Brave: Given how utterly reliant Phantom Brave's battle system is on the SPD stat (and the computer's tendency to cheat by simply forcing an another enemy's turn to take priority even if you defeat an enemy to try and prevent them from acting), Axes end up being liabilities in weapon form despite their power since better Axes will only apply heavier SPD debuffs; resulting in a character who can't put any of their high power to use because they can't act. While it is possible to Fuse enough Weeds and items onto an Axe to make it combat-viable and offset its speed penalties, the Mana cost for this is monstrous and Axe skills can simply be migrated onto better weapons with less caveats.
- Replace "nuke" with "Planet Buster" in the above description from Sid Meier's Civilization, but otherwise the situation is the same in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
- Unlike a typical Civ nuke, which reduces the city's population, kills units, and creates pollution, Planet Busters erase the targeted base from the map and creates a large crater (which can even fill with water). Better yet, since you can upgrade Planet Busters with more powerful reactors, this vastly increases their destructive range. AI tends to cluster bases together, so a single Planet Buster powered by a quantum singularity can takes out a good number of enemy bases at once. This can be useful to speed up a conquest victory if the enemy is basically already defeated in the long run and you don't have to worry for other AI opponents, nor for the loss of useful cities that could be added to your empire (particularly if they are rich and have secret projects, the in-game equivalent to Civ's wonders). But in any other cases, you are not only instigating a coalition with every other faction allying against you, and not only triggering massive environmental damage with global warming: the planet itself will react and trigger xenofungus blooms near your developed tiles, and mind worm boils popping up near your cities, like a planetary immune response to you damaging the sentient biosphere.
- You can also equip the rockets with different warheads, including fungus and tectonic. The first one generates a large bloom of xenofungus and the appropriate native lifeforms. The second one raises a volcano. Both are fairly mild and merely annoy the enemy, also putting them in this category.
- Fire Emblem:
- In general:
- The triangle attack gives you a guaranteed Critical Hit, which is nothing to be scoffed at. However, it tends to be restricted to a trio of Pegasus Knight units, and it requires you to position all three around a single enemy. The signature trait of Pegasi is their extreme mobility, allowing them to strike out alone and reach hard-to-find places, so even if you are fielding three or more fliers, bunching them together so they can kill one enemy at a time is probably the worst use of them. And in any case, if you surround an enemy with three different units, you'd be better off just attacking them with three units, which will bring down most anything that isn't a boss (and if you are having trouble with a boss, the low strength of Pegasus Knights means that they still don't do that much damage).
- Heavy weapons tend to be Awesome, But Impractical. If your unit is fast enough, he/she can double attack. Heavy weapons slow him/her down, and while they tend to add some extra damage, they also can stop their wielders from doubling the enemies(or worse, enable their opponents to double them), dealing less damage overall and making it harder to dodge attacks. Heavy weapons can be good for Combat arts in Three Houses, since the weapons' higher Might can do more damage and Combat Arts never involve follow-up attacks, making them especially useful when you want to kill a unit in one hit before it can retaliate, but there are many situations when it's more practical to use a lighter weapon.
- Depending on the situation, Brave weapons can qualify. The ability to have a guaranteed double attack(or quadruple attack if your unit has the speed adantage) is nice, but this only applies if the unit attacks first. The weapons are rather heavy, which makes it less likely that you'll get more than two hits, while the weapons' might is often lackluster for a weapon of that value.
- The "Est" Recurring Element is a character that is obtained very late and underleveled, but possesses very high growths. Put in the work to get them fully leveled, and they will be incredibly powerful and cap stats left and right... but at that stage in the game, most characters are already capping stats left and right. Their extreme reliance on growths and lack of time to build up Supports or Weapon Ranks also tends to result in them being outperformed by your longtime party members. Though they will usually add up to being stronger in sheer stats, their sheer power is rarely more than overkill, and when playing for ranks, doesn't much compensate for the maps where they're still being built up and a liability.
- In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, there's the Dragonstone glitch. Using a promotion item on Bantu or Tiki causes them to gain a massive amount of defense, to the point of breaking the game's cap. This makes them effectively invincible... which causes enemies to now ignore them completely. And since they can no longer have enemies attack them, this means they can't counterattack them, turning them into a nonfactor on enemy phase. They still have some tactical use, like blocking off certain zones, but the inability for them to fight off multiple enemies becomes painful quickly.
- Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 has Mareeta. She has one of the most offensively-loaded kits in the franchise; after going through various events and promoting, she has Luna (reduces enemy defense to 0), Astra (attacks five times), and Adept (attacks an additional time), along with the Nihil skill (shuts down any enemy skills and negates crits) provided by her personal sword, which is a brave weapon (always attacks twice as if Adept were active) with very high might and increased crit rate. She also has 5 FCM, so she basically always crits, and her offensive growths are very high. So what's the problem with her? Well, first, being able to one-round almost any enemy in Thracia is not a hard task, with many enemies being weak and many of your units being able to access easy crits or use ludicrously strong weapons. And second, Mareeta happens to have 3 base Strength and Defense, and while her Strength growth is high, her Defense isn't. This makes it rather difficult to find a place for her in an army, as she tends to be either too weak (her initial performance) or ludicrous overkill that very little warrants (her performance when invested in). And the few times that you do encounter an enemy that Mareeta might have a fair fight with, the game generally hands you an equally good or better method, such as paralyzing them with status staves.
- Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade:
- The Armor Knight triangle attack stands out for almost never seeing use. This is due to the game as a whole being a low point for the Armor Knight class, thanks to its giant maps, so you don't really want to deploy any of the three available ones, especially when one is considered a running candidate for the game's worst unit. And even if you are deploying all three Armors, the distinguishing trait of an Armor Knight is its low mobility, which means getting them into position to use it is at best irritating.
- The S-rank Light tome, Aureola. While S-rank weapons in Binding Blade are generally incredibly powerful (high Might, usually reasonable weight, a big stat boost, tripled power against dragons), Aureola rarely sees use because it's locked to one class, Bishops... and said class is a promotion of Priest, a class that can't attack before promotion. That means to get Elen or Saul, the main characters in that class, to use Aureola, you need to promote them pretty early (keep in mind, staff units gain XP slowly) and have them keep attacking on a regular basis rather than actually healing, when neither is all that great offensively and they both have a long way to go. Most legendary weapons have at least one character (usually a prepromote) who can feasibly start using them with relatively little trainingnote . In the case of Aureola, the only character who can do that is Yoder... who joins at a point where there's effectively five real chapters left in the game, and who still needs to get in a significant number of attacks before he can use the tome, when he's a Squishy Wizard designed for support and utility rather than combat. Oh, and even after all that, Aureola is the weakest of the legendary tomes, so a user needs to double to one-round dragons, something Yoder isn't fast enough to do without statbooster investment. This problem was much of the reason that later games introduced the Monk class, an alternative to Priest that specializes in light magic.
- The Eclipse tome reduces the target's health to 1 every time, but its accuracy is absolutely horrendous, making it not uncommon to see an enemy wielding it who has a 0% chance to hit most of your units. However, it is very useful for breaking walls, as those are impossible to miss. The prequel improves its accuracy somewhat, but also made it so that it halves HP instead, meaning it goes from a funny gimmick to simply worse than every other long-range tome.
- Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
- The Luna tome. It's an Armor-Piercing Attack with 0 MT, meaning it essentially deals the wielder's Magic in damage. Thing is, enemies also tend to have miserable Resistance to begin with, and Luna weighs a ton, so most of the time, you'd do more damage off a doubled Flux. This pretty much limits Luna solely to killing bosses, who usually aren't that big a threat anyway. Canas also doesn't really have the Magic to put Luna to work; Athos does, but he doesn't join until the last chapter anyway. That said, its ability to kill bosses meant that it had its accuracy cut in half in Sacred Stones, which made it basically useless.
- Gespenst, the ultimate dark tome. 23 Might... and 20 weight, ensuring an 11-13 point drop in Speed. You won't be doubling with it, meaning a simple Flux hits harder in practice.
- The legendary weapons are all absurdly heavy to compensate for their power. Hector is strong as a bull, so he has no problem with this, but Eliwood and Lyn will almost never have enough constitution to wield their respective weapons without a massive speed penalty. If it weren't for their effective damage bonus against the final boss, you'd be much better off giving them lighter, generic weapons that let them continue to double-attack. And even then, Lyn really shouldn't be fighting said boss, as even with an effective weapon, she still struggles to damage the big guy.
- The Nosferatu tome. In theory, a Life Drain tome sounds awesome, and it definitely is in other games... but when your Druids are struggling to wield boring ol' Flux, Nosferatu risks putting them in doubling range. This means a lot of encounters with enemies involve the enemy smacking the Druid, the Druid using Nosferatu to heal up, and then the enemy smacking them again and undoing all the healing Nosferatu just managed. It isn't much better in The Sacred Stones.
- Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
- While the Trainees in most Fire Emblem games tend to narrowly avert the impractical side so much as be Cool, but Inefficient (while it can apply to just about any character in the game, the presence of grinding helps avert the impracticality by and large, with it merely becoming a matter of the resources needed), in the case of promoting Amelia into a General, it qualifies. She has a stat distribution of a Myrmidon, so she's very likely to cap Speed and just demolish the enemy at max level on average... despite being locked in the class with the worst movement of any promoted class in FE, when the more Boring, but Practical Paladin Amelia gets there far quicker for less investment. However, weirdly, this is a case where the Awesome factor helps make it popular than the impractical part turning off potential fans, given it's practically memetic among the fandom to turn Amelia into a General due to the sheer coolness factor that comes with it. This eventually culminated in Amelia's debut in Fire Emblem Heroes being based on her General sprite, with even veteran fans admitting the class choice is endearingly hilarious.
- The S-level Ivaldi tome, but for a weird reason. This becomes even more important when deciding to equip your Bishop with either. The light tomes will have doubled might stat when used against a monster, but in the hands of a Bishop, the Slayer ability will triple the might stat. A-level Aura has 12 might whereas S-level Ivaldi has 17. Under normal circumstances, a Bishop will triple its might when equipped with this. However, the S-Level Ivaldi does not benefit from Slayer. Despite being a Sacred Weapon, its might is doubled instead of tripled (Sacred Weapons will have double might by default against monsters). So, under a Bishop, the base might of Aura is 36, while the base might of Ivaldi is 34. Also, Ivaldi is also the heaviest tome. Now try to fight a whole floor of draco zombies. Guess which one you'd prefer to use? Fortunately, sticking an Aura tome on a Bishop while the Ivaldi is given to a Sage or a Valkyrie is a perfectly valid strategy.
- Gleipnir and Naglfar both continue the trend of ultimate dark tomes being powerful but unusably unwieldy. Both have Might in the mid twenties (23 for Gleipnir and 25 for Naglfar), but both are stupidly heavy (20 for Gleipnir and 18 for Naglfar), ensuring a 10 to 13 point drop in Speed. What's worse, unlike the other ultimate weapons, neither of them deal effective damage against monsters, the most common enemy type in the endgame.
- One of the two possible triangle attacks in the Tellius duology is with the three brothers Oscar, Boyd and Rolf, whom unlike every other triangle attack in the series is limited to bows than a class type, meaning that if you seek to divvied up your party equally among classes, it becomes slightly more practical to use... which even then, if you're playing for keeps, it's still impractical; Rolf is regarded tier-wise as a resource sink that doesn't have enough pay-off to warrant the cost of investing into him, and while Oscar and Boyd are both solid units in both games, bows are regarded as the worst weapon-type in both games due to a lack of enemy combat phase when equipped with them. Combine this with the overwhelmingly arcane method of acquiring the triangle attack of the three brothers, and this also means that there's only really one instance in both games the attack would be usefulnote , and that's it.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening:
- War Clerics/War Monks, which are a healing class that can also (famously) use axes to attack. Unfortunately, most units who have access to the class have much higher Magic than Strength, and anyone with War Cleric access can also promote to a Sage or Valkyrie, which both put that Magic stat to better use with tomes. This includes both Lissa and Maribelle, the two starting units with War Cleric access. Bolt Axes can mollify this somewhat, since they scale with Magic instead of Strength and have good base stats to start with, but they're also an example of this trope since you're just using them as a tome substitute, anyway, and tomes have much more variety in effects.
- Glass weapons. They do as much damage as the top tier Silver weapons and can be used by anyone who can use the weapon type. They also last roughly as long as you expect weapons made out of glass to last (in fact, 3 hits may be giving glass too much credit).
- Fire Emblem Fates:
- Unlike most games in the series, Corrin and Kana's Dragon forms via Dragonstones are this. The Dragonstones all give major buffs to most of your stats except Speed and Skill, and early on in the game you'll find yourself able to one-shot a major amount of enemies with how strong your Dragon form is, while also being your main source of magic damage in the game. However, it's also hit by a significant handicap: it cannot double, at all. This means that while Dragonstones peak in the early game, the late game has it much more unreliable for tanking and taking down the opponent with one blow, especially against tankier units, due to the sheer disadvantage being unable to double effectively means. This often leads to most players outright skipping using Dragonstones and instead use the Yato, which both gradually upgrades over the course of the route you're on, which only further serves to obsolete Dragonstones as the damage you do with your Yato eventually completely outstrips what even the more Awesome, but Impractical Dragonstone+ can do, while also giving +4 Stat bonuses to two (and on the Revelation route, four) stats dependent on the route, and has no downsides outside of being locked at close-range. The Nohr Noble's class ability to equip tomes only serves as the final nail in the coffin, as you can forge yourself a forged Thunder tome that has 1-2 range and none of the downsides the Dragonstone has.
- The Bifrost Staff revives a fallen character, a major rarity for the series. Unfortunately, it only has one use, you only get it two chapters before the end of the game, you need an S rank in staves to use it (which only Maids and Butlers can reach, so if you haven't been training any you're out of luck) and unlike earlier revival staves in the series it's a lot more restricted: it can only bring back someone who died in the current battle and you don't get to choose if there are multiple casualties, since it'll just revive whoever most recently died.
- Fates does away with Breakable Weapons, instead giving each weapon above D rank drawbacks to compensate for their otherwise freely abusable power. This has the consequence of making them quite often a worse choice than the D rank weapon. For example, a B rank weapon will usually reduce your relevant offensive stat (Strength or Magic) and your skill (determines chance to hit) by 2 after every combat the weapon is used in, which recovers by 1 at the start of each of your turns. If you use this too liberally you'll be hitting like a wet tissue even with the powerful B rank weapon (if you hit at all), so you're going to need to at least have another weapon handy.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses
- Petra's unique skill dramatically increases her Critical Hit rate against enemies that are below half health. Since a critical hit deals triple damage, that's quite a boost, even with Petra's lackluster Strength growths, and is usually enough to result in a One-Hit Kill. Unfortunately, most enemies with below half health are weak enough that you can finish them off without the aid of a critical hit. Monsters are an exception, but there are other ways to inflict severe damage on them, such as Blessed weapons or certain Combat Arts.
- The "Defiant" skills grant eight points to certain statistics while the user is below 25% health. Not only is it difficult to get your units to that level of health, but said units are very easy to kill if they're that low on health.
- The Crest of Blaiddyd (Dimitri's Crest) doubles the Might of Combat Arts when triggered. However, it also doubles the durability cost of said Combat Arts, making you burn through Dimitri's weapons that much faster. This is particularly a problem in the late game, when Dimitri will usually be wielding pricier, lower-durability weapons.
- Astra, the combat art gained by mastering the Swordmaster class. While it hits five times, each hit is very weak, which generally doesn't justify spending the extra durability to use it. By comparison, the Fates version of Astra was only reduced to half damage, randomly triggered, and each hit had a chance to crit (which, at triple damage, made it one and a half times as strong as a normal hit), making it especially devastating in Ryoma's hands, and in the Jugdral games, the attacks did full damage, making it a de facto One-Hit Kill when triggered (albeit almost always overkill).
- Recruiting all the students on a file without New Game Plus benefits. While this gives you a wide variety of characters to use, it's also immensely difficult to actually accomplish without Save Scumming, and it can lead to experience being spread too thin if you try to use all the students.
- The rare Crescent Sickle lance has immense durability (especially if forged) and decent accuracy, but is heavier than even the Steel Lance. The forging material is also rare, only being obtainable by breaking the armor of the Crawlers and Titanus. That being said, their durability makes them great for Combat Arts.
- Most of the Relic-related combat arts, with the exceptions of the Crusher's Dust and Aymr's Raging Storm. The Lance of Ruin's Ruined Sky and Areadbhar's Atrocity especially stick out; Sylvain can use Swift Strikes with any lance for more damage overall (including with the Lance of Ruin!), and Dimitri's great Strength means that Areadbhar will do more than enough damage with normal attacks, not to mention his Crest means he can very well break the weapon.
- The Saint's Relics. Unlike the Heroes' Relics, which are essentially more powerful regular weapons with Unique Combat Arts, these Relics have abilities of more unique weapons, possessing a Renewal effect along with the abilities of weapons like the Horseslayer, Brave Bow or the Hammers respectively, and unlike the Hero's Relics they can be used by anyone, with corresponding Crests only increasing the healing effects they have. However, the material needed to repair them, Mythril, is quite possibly the rarest material in the game along with Agarthium and, when combined with forging the Rusted legendary weapons which cost 10 to Forge and Repair, have very limited uses, especially in comparison to Heroes' Relics that require the comparatively less rare Umbral Steel. This gets alleviated slightly with the third DLC where feeding the animals around the Monastery can get you forging materials, including Mythril, but it can still be an issue. Not helping is that the Sacred Weapons barely have more durability than the Heroes' Relics (most have 30 uses, whereas the Relics that aren't Thunderbrand and the Vajra-MushtiNote have 20), and whereas the Relics are all E-ranked weapons and can have their negative effects counteracted againstNote, all of the Sacred Weapons require A-rank at base.
- The Rusted Legendary weapons. Like the Heroes' Relics, they are more powerful than the base weapons and have insane benefits, such as Parthia's low weight and Hauteclere's unusually high hit rate. That being said, forging them from their rusted forms costs 10 Mythril and another 10 to repair them, meaning that if you were to somehow get your hands on all of them, you would need over 40 mythril. Needless to say, this often subjects them to Too Awesome to Use.
- The Bolting spell, an artillery spell that can hit from 10 spaces away and do severe damage from almost certain safety. However, all three units who can learn this spell have some major drawback making it difficult for them to take advantage of it; Manuela has a bane in Reason, Hilda is a Magically Inept Fighter who favors physical classes like Warrior and Wyvern Lord, and Constance is paid DLC.
- Meteor is even more awesome and impractical than Bolting, as it has similarly long range and might, and does splash damage to adjacent units. However, it only can be cast once per battle(twice if you have the skill to double Black Magic usage).
- Desperation, the mastery skill of the Cavalier. While being able to strike twice before your opponent can retaliate does sound useful, it unfortunately forces the Unit to become a Glass Cannon; like Vantage and Wrath, the Unit needs to be at half HP or under for it to activate, but unlike them, it only activates when the Unit is attacking. This means that to use it consistently each turn, you would need to have your units rely on their dodging ability to survive, which can be difficult for Cavalier units due to the speed penalty and -10 to their Speed Growth. The only natural Cavalier who it can potentially work for is Ingrid, and that's provided that you also put her through a speed-based class-line like Pegasus Knight and give her skills and stats to help her Evasion.
- Fire Emblem Engage
- This game introduces the "great-" weapons. On the plus side, they do a lot of damage and knock the target back a space if they hit, Breaking the target (thus preventing them from counterattacking the next turn). On the minus side, they not only cannot make follow-up attacks, but they hit after the attacked unit's first and follow-up attacks.
- The Tower of Trials and Emblem Weapon Augmentation. The Tower of Trials allows your party to obtain crystals to upgrade Emblem Weapons, and depending on the Trial, you can even grind some levels. However, this can be both time-consuming and, in the case of Relay Trials, at the mercy of other players who may or may not want to complete the Trial, and Relay Tickets are limited. The rewards for the trials are useful, though the augmentation also factors in how many playable characters reach the highest Bond Level of the Emblem whose weapon you want to upgrade, and that leads to more time-consumption with the sheer number of Characters, Emblems, and the Weapons themselves to the point it doesn't seem worth it. *
- S-rank weapons are powerful and can give Engage Attacks a hefty boost, but most of them have little else going for them. Weapon Level in Engage is determined solely by a unit's Class, with no way to increase it unless a unit has a blue weapon proficiency to raise their class weapon rank by one, and not all classes allow for an increased weapon rank; not many of the Classes in the game go above A-rank even with extra proficiency, and most of the ones that do are limited to only that weapon type.* S-rank weapons are also among the heaviest in the game, so a unit needs both good Speed and Build rolls to use the non-Smash variants effectively. They can do work if the unit was built with the purpose of using an S-rank weapon in mind, but if it doesn't pan out, sometimes it is genuinely better to simply sell the weapon and use the gold to upgrade something else.
- The S-rank staff, Nodus, restores all allies' Engage meters to full upon use, making it useful to immediately reactivate Engage mode for all of your Emblem Ring/Bracelet bearers in a pinch after the previous one expired. It's a very strong boon on paper, but not only does Nodus only have a durability of one, you can only get one Nodus in the whole game, though with the addition of the Ancient Well in Version 1.3.0, Nodus has a small chance of being obtainable from there from a random pool of items. Unless you've levelled Hortensia,note you likely won't be able to justify using this outside of the Tower of Trials (where inventory isn't saved after the run).
- After completing the Fell Xenologue, you are given the Enchanter and Mage Cannoneer classes as new class change options for your units, both of which offer a unique style of gameplay, with Enchanters being able to access the convoy without Alear, and Mage Cannoneers offering significant long-range combat with a unique weapon type not used by any other class. Accessing these classes however, requires a unique class-changing item instead of Master or Second Seals: a Mystic Satchel for Enchanters and a Mage Cannon for Mage Cannoneers; while you get one of each for free after completing the Fell Xenologue, getting more requires you to go to the shop, where just one Satchel/Cannon costs a staggering 28,000 and 63,000 gold (respectively) even with the Silver Card. And even then, the Enchanter and Mage Cannoneer tend to be outclassed by other classes available in the base game, with the Enchanter having low stat caps in everything bar Dexterity, Speed, and Luck, while the Mage Cannoneer has no means of close-range combat without relying on Emblem weapons.
- In general:
- Galactic Civilizations has the Terror Stars, clear Expys of the Death Star, which can be used to obliterate the enemy star system. Drawbacks? Let's see, it takes an extremely-high level of technology, as each stage of construction needs a prerequisite tech. It takes a long time to build and uses many resources (on top of building constructors). When it is built, it takes ten turns to bring its only weapon system online. Then, once you have it, it can only move one "square" per turn, making it useless unless you build it right on top of the enemy. In the first game, at least, any station could be turned into a Terror Star, meaning they had other purposes, so the Terror Star could also support fleets or spread influence. In the sequel, it's a different type of station. Also, habitable worlds can be quite rare depending on galaxy settings, so it may not be beneficial to destroy the enemy star instead of simply taking the planets. And as if that wasn't enough, it also has no weapons, so it needs to be babysat a great deal.
- Gihren's Greed: You might be tempted to build as many Super Prototype machines like Gundams as you can afford... but a small army of GMs would be much more cost effective.
- A specific example is the Dolos-class available to the Principality of Zeon. During the One Year War era it has the highest health points available, its main guns outrange just about everything else (even during later years like the Grypps War era or both Neo-Zeon eras), and it can carry the largest number of units aboard. To build just one, however, you spend enough money and resources to build up to four Musai-class or even two Zanzibar-class ships. Furthermore, the main guns are the Dolos's only weapons, and have a minimum range (meaning that once up close, even a humble GM could sink a Dolos given enough time). It is also easily the slowest moving ship in the game by a wide margin, meaning it's really most effective as a semi-mobile gun emplacement. Worse, the other Zeon ships are more versitile: the Zanzibar is capable of entering Earth's atmosphere unaided (making it possible to deploy an invasion force almost anywhere and retreat if things get too rough), while the Musai can eventually be retrofitted into the Eldora-class, which also gains atmospheric flight capability.
- The various Mobile Armors can be this as well. While much more powerful than Mobile Suits, they are also much more expensive. Many of them come with I-Fields which allow them to totally No-Sell beam weapons, but they're still vulnerable to melee weapons and solid ammunition. Their biggest weakpoint, however, is how much energy they expend per attack, especially their area of effect attacks. If cut off from supply lines, even the likes of the Psyco Gundam or Alpha Azieru can quickly run out of energy and be slowly cherry tapped into oblivion.
- The Indoraptors in Jurassic World: The Game. All the hybrids cost quite a bit of food and DNA to create, along with first having to level and combine the base species, but both Indoraptor versions take it up a notch. They’re the most powerful creatures in the game and nothing can defeat a squad of three of them in battle. But the cost is high to create them. Both eat a ton and The gen 2 Indoraptor can deplete even the maxed out stores of hacker players by the time it’s level 40. The heal time is also days long unless you spend dino bucks.
- A few of the highest-level cards in Lost Kingdoms 2 were like this. It was rare that you ever actually had 8 levels in any element which would mean that the various high-level cards would cause you to Cast from Hit Points, and by the time you got them a lot of them were simply ineffective. Great Turtle is an incredibly durable independent monster with a volcano on its back — who tended to miss almost constantly, and Ice Skeleton had similar problems as it was really slow. The Emperor, who can only be gotten from the final dungeon either by capture or a 1 in 6 chance, can either randomly kill all monsters of one elemental type (and the hardest opponents are typically Neutral, which is unaffected), or act as a glorified Capture Card. Yes, you could get most monsters easily this way, but enjoy having to go back through an hour-long Bonus Dungeon to get another one.
- The Rainbow Array Synergy from Luminous Arc. Hitting the damage cap (999) and pretty cool looking...at the cost of deploying all seven Witches (in a game where eight characters is the maxmimum Arbitrary Headcount Limit) with max Flash Points to pull it off. It's simply more practical to use multiple, two-person Synergies. The player have to go out of their way to set it up to use Rainbow Array.
- The Stellar Converter in Master of Orion II is normally a very powerful, very useful weapon, particularly for planetary defense. However, its function to obliterate an enemy planet instead of bombing it, conquering it, or (if you're telepathic) mind-controlling the population. This normally serves no purpose whatsoever, as the goal of the game is to expand (it's one of the Xs in 4X). Having no planet means you can't expand, save for a tiny outpost that doesn't help you much.
- The only potentially good reason to do it is to obliterate a toxic planet (which, for some reason, can't be terraformed), as long as there is a colonizable planet in the system. That way, you can colonize that planet and rebuild the asteroid field into a usable barren world, which can be eventually terraformed into a terran, or even a gaia world.
- Small and tiny worlds can be upgraded too, since all asteroid belts terraform into medium sized worlds. Only for the obsessive compulsive, though.
- More or less useless in Master of Orion III. It still wipes out a perfectly good, conquerable colony, but it just does so but turning the environment into nigh-unterraformable hot slag, which makes recovering the planet far less practical than in the previous game. Could potentially be good for dealing with Harvesters.
- Mordheim: City of the Damned:
- Two-handed weapons look awesome and hit hard, but they're tiring to use (subsequent attacks after the first become weaker and more costly) and just carrying one hurts the character's dodge and initiative ratings immensely. Attacks performed with two-handers also increase the opponent's chance to dodge them by 10%, so odds are good you won't even do any damage at all. Somewhat less the case with Halberds, which don't come with the 10% to enemy dodge malus and are the only two-handed weapons which allow the user to Parry — with a high weapon skill, a halberdier can be formidable on offence and defence.
- It's rare to see people equipping heavy armour on their characters. Though it offers substantial damage reduction, the reduction in evasion as well as the abundance of weapons that can bypass a chunk of armour (and these tend to be the slow, heavy, hard-hitting weapons that dodge units would laugh at) means that the protection will oftentimes not add up to much.
- The Skaven's Impressive unit, the Rat Ogre, is a poster child for this. The Rat Ogre has the potential to become just as strong and tough as the Ogre fielded by the Human Mercenaries, its attacks cannot be parried — unlike those of an Ogre — and it's only slightly slower than your average Skaven warrior (not to mention that it can also achieve a decent Dodge rating and has a pretty high Initiative). The problem? It's Stupid and its maximum Intelligence -- the stat on which Stupidity rolls are based -- is ten (for reference, that's nearly as low as it gets). This drawback can be compensated by having another warrior use the Guidance skill on the Rat Ogre, skipping the Stupidity test entirely... but that means someone else in your warband has to invest skill points on Guidance, that you have to spend the money to train it, that said warrior will have to spend 3 Strategy Points per turn just to keep the Rat Ogre operational, and that you'll have to keep the Guidance unit away from any melee, since the skill cannot be used if said unit is engaged. Oh, and this unit better have a high enough Initiative to act before the Rat Ogre, otherwise everything will go to waste.
- One could argue that all Impressive units are this trope. Yeah, they're scary as hell, hit like freight trains and take a massive beating before being brought low, but they're often (but not always) slow as molasses, can't enter buildings due to their size, and can't gather Wyrdstone or loot. Why take the one Impressive when you could instead take two Hero units? Together they can ruin your opponent's day just as much as the Impressive can, but they can also split up and cover more ground and do things your Impressive can't.
- The Last Stand perk. Good news, your unit now never has to take All Alone tests when fighting multiple enemies at once. Bad news, they can now never flee or disengage from a fight either, which can leave them stuck in a bad spot.
- In Piratez, you eventually get the ability to build tanks. Not the automated track drones, or even the automated flying drones; you can build real tanks the size of troop transport, with huge cannons and anti-gravity engines. Unfortunately, being a Sky Pirate, you have no practical use for them, as they are horribly slow when compared to supersonic aircraft you normally hunt. Therefore their only real use is to be sold for cash.
- In SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays, there's the Gundam Sisquiede, both the pre-order Titans version and the freebie AEUG versions. It is one of the first Gundams you can obtain right off the bat outside of the Phoenix Gundam lineage that you start with, has the powerful I-Field Launcher that can pierce defenses and has the powerful Offensive Mode 1 and 2. However, it has too many downsides. First of all, the I-Field Launcher is the only range attack until you gain access to Offensive Mode 2, it has a prohibitive energy usage of 25 EN per shot — meaning that it only because useful as part of a Raid Group and with a lot of its level up bonuses focusing on its EN amount — and it only being a beam weapon means that its useless in water stages or against Iron-Blooded Orphans units. As well, it's the first unit to not evolve into other units and while the DLC units do the same in not evolving into other units, they all have much more useful weaponry.
- You can build a Dyson Sphere in Space Empires IV, but it costs so much time and resources as to be highly impractical most of the time.
- It's even worse in Space Empires V — unlike in IV, the spheres take up almost half the system map, rather than just one sector in the middle... and any planets existing inside the sphere will be destroyed when the sphere is constructed! Hope you didn't have a colony there...
- In the classic 4X game Stars! you can build orbital mass-drivers to fling minerals around your empire at high warp speeds, so as to avoid the need for freighters, which are slower and could be intercepted by the enemy. Now if you read the game's help file, you might notice that there's a table for damage inflicted by uncaught mass packets. That's right, if you fling minerals at an enemy colony which doesn't have a mass driver to catch them, the minerals will hit the planet and inflict damage, just like a meteor random event! Unfortunately the amounts of minerals required to inflict decent damage are rather high, and you'd be better off building a war fleet and attacking the enemy colony the old-fashioned way... if the enemy colony did have a mass driver after all, congratulations, you just gave your opponent free minerals!
- In Star Wars: Rebellion, a Turn-Based Strategy game set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the Empire could actually build Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers, but the cost in resources made them impractical. Anything they do can be done more cheaply with regular ships. The Death Star is especially impractical since it is vulnerable to fighters, the cheapest space units in the game.
- Plus if you actually use its planet-destroying capabilities of the Death Star — the main reason why you'd build the thing to begin with — the resulting outrage will probably cause most of your planets to secede from the Empire, and neutral planets to align themselves with the Rebellion. It would also deprive you of a useful planet that could generate resources or use construction platforms.
- You could say they merely inherited this trait from their film incarnations, as mentioned on the Film page.
- The tank in Valkyria Chronicles are immune to everything except anti-tank mines and artillery, can sweep anti-personnel mines, crush a lot of barriers, and damage enemy tanks without needing to hit the radiators. But they can't take bases, and their low movement ability and the fact that they require 2 CP to use at all means that on levels that don't strictly require the use of a tank, it's often easier to not step on the mines, go around the barriers, and circle around the enemy tanks to hit them from behind. Later games in the series reduce this factor by making the tank a 1 CP unit like everything else.
- The Edelweiss from a story perspective. Is very durable, only requires two operators and can aim 360 degrees. Even though it's quite old by the time it's taken back out of storage for the events of the first game, it's still quite capable of holding its own against newer tanks. Its high cost of production, however, prevented it from being mass produced, leaving it as an Ace Custom.
- Warhammer 40,000: Gladius: The Baneblade super-heavy tank of the Astra Militarum. Imagine a tank the size of a city block with eleven guns and exceptionally thick armour that can withstand the combined firepower of entire armies. But it's slow. Really slow. So slow in fact that enemies can very often just move around it, and getting it anywhere you'd like it to be is a frustrating exercise. Unlike the similarly powerful Tesseract Vault (from the Necron units list), it has no way of slowing enemies down or trapping them to bring its astonishing power to bear. So it's a scary presence on the board, but quite unlikely to actually contribute to your victory.
- Obliterators from the Chaos Space Marines DLC have Assault Cannons (massive leadthrowers that pulp infantry and threaten vehicles from long range), Heavy Flamers (roast infantry at close range) and Power Fists (pulverize tanks up close). They would be an ideal take-all-comers unit... if they didn't have to alternate the weapons each time they made an attack. So if an Obliterator shoots someone with the cannon then they have to fight someone in melee before it's ready to fire again, and vice versa (if an Obliterator punches someone in melee then he needs to shoot before he can melee again). Also unlike many other units in the roster, they are not Chaos Champions so they cannot gain mutations (they're already constantly mutating due to a virus). Even though their Autocannon is a bit weaker, Havocs are cheaper and more consistently useful fire support and you'll have no shortage of good close combat troops to protect them, and they can gain several benefits from their shooting every round.
- The Fury interceptor from Xenonauts. Blazingly fast and long ranged, it can obliterate any UFO anywhere on the planet with a 100% chance of success on autoresolve. The problem? Well, apart from its Singularity Torpedo obliterating the target so utterly there's no wreck left to get resources from, it requires an investment of at least 2 Singularity Cores (one to research, on for each Fury built). Said cores can only be gotten by shooting down a Battleship UFO and raiding the wreck. The Battleship UFO is also the strongest UFO your interceptors need to take on during the game. Essentially, you can only get the Fury once you've proven you no longer need it.
- The other use for Singularity Cores is the Singularity Cannon, a highly accurate infantry that does massive damage in a huge radius. Unfortunately, you need the Predator armor just to be able to fire it, and even then it weighs the soldier down to about 2/3rds of his regular action points. And that's if the soldier carries nothing but the Cannon, with no spare ammo. Every other shot slows the soldier down further. And it costs nearly all action points of a turn to fire the damn thing. Still, it's the more useful option, especially if you have a second Predator-equipped soldier carry the reloads for the Cannon. Realistically, you can't get a shot off more than once every 3 turns, but on the Very Definitely Final Dungeon it can still be a godsent to wipe out whole rooms at once.
- The GBA version of Yggdra Union has the Fanelia. It's an item that instantly kills enemies if you use one of the 5 elemental based skills. However, by the time you can equip it, the only enemy you encounter is immune to those skills. Too bad.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Dungeon Dice Monsters:
- Level 3 and 4 Dice usually offer the strongest monsters and items in terms of stats and ability. The higher level a Dice is however, the less Summon Crests on the Die. This makes it harder to summon Level 3 and especially level 4 monsters or items compared to the weaker Dice.
- Exodia the Forbidden One has his Instant-Win Condition fully transferred over from his card game counterpart to here, but you need to get pretty lucky to summon his Level 3 limbs and Level 4 head. Because you have to summon them, the Exodia Pieces are also at risk of being destroyed pretty easily due to their low stats.
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