YMMV / Forge of Empires

• Evil Is Cool: Several of the province owners often evoke this, especially the ones from the bonus quest.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Great Sword Warrior of the Late Middle Ages can defeat basically every troop from the Old Ages and even some from (slightly) later ages. It is extremely versatile and contains high defence and offence.
  • With buildings, the Alchemist from the High Middle Ages require low population, low cost and high supply rate per space, thus allowing them to be placed basically everywhere in the town. The small space and population costs also allows you to spam them in conjunction with repeating quests as a means of generating goods and FP packs.
  • The Arc. There's a reason this is the most popular Great Building by far: The boost to Great Building contribution rewards. This means that Great Buildings can be levelled up at less cost to the owner due to the increased FP awards allowing outside contributors to donate more without losing FP, while said donors reap greatly improved medal and blueprint gains to increase their base size and unlock higher building levels. At high enough Arc levels and at certain Great Building levels, it's even possible to have the FP gained from first place be more than half the FP cost to level the building, meaning you simply donate half the cost and gain the rest as profit.
  • Hover Tanks from the Future Era have two very powerful abilities: Stealth on Plains and Force Field. This makes them incredibly tanky against anything short of high-powered artillery, especially since their stealth means they often get the first strike even against longer-ranged opponents. While said high-powered artillery exists in the Future Era in the form of the Rail Gun, Hovers have been known to have great success against Arctic Future and even Oceanic Future units. If you play your cards right, you can even have a Hover Tank as early as the Industrial Age, at which point the sheer statistical difference alone is enough to crush Guild Expedition and Battlegrounds.
• Goddamned Bats: The Barbarians of the Early Middle Ages Bonus Quest are this or even outright Demonic Spiders. A single barbarian has lower defense than even the Spearfighters of the early Bronze Age, but do a decent amount of damage by itself to make up for it. However, they often fill up an entire battlefield, and once one dies, the others gain attack and defense bonuses. Without the proper strategy of weakening them all, a player can find themselves being wiped out by a small Barbarian force that suddenly is on the level of Colonial Age units.
  • The Mounted Archer, also from the Early Middle Ages, is a notorious pest if you spend any notable amount of time in that era. They actually have one less attack than an Iron Age Archer, but because they're on a horse they have the turn speed and movement of Fast units except they can also traverse rocky terrain. Because of this, it's entirely possible for a fight to begin with your units already under fire, with artillery units at risk of taking heavy damage.
• Moral Event Horizon: Kaiserin Konstanze was a bitch to begin with, but then she returns in the Late Middle Ages and becomes even worse, sending the heads of 20 of her own citizens just to spite the player.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Several festive decorations, such as the Necropolis, a massive version of the cemetery, and the Abandoned Asylum, can count as this.
  • Kaiserin Konstanze, the mad queen of Sturmhohen, and King Darkblood of Mount Kilmore.