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^ Thanks. That's in the ballpark, but doesn't quite fit what I'm looking for. The "difficult to master" part is present, as the abilities in question require serious micromanagement of your units to get them into position to trigger, but the "awesome" part is lacking in comparison to other available abilities. These are more mundane, but due to the difficulty level, squeezing every little bit out of your units becomes more important.
Edited by BeerBaronYou've got the intersection of a few different tropes here:
- Difficult, but Awesome covers the part where a hard-to-execute strategy pays off when you can do it.
- Simple, yet Awesome is when something is awesome not because it's flashy but because it's effective and reliable.
- Changing Gameplay Priorities is when a shift in the dynamic of a game (such as higher difficulty settings) means parts that didn't matter before now suddenly matter
Factorio is a good example of the three intersecting: It's easy for the beginner to dismiss trains (and the large amount of infrastructure and fiddly control circuitry that goes with them) as Awesome, but Impractical compared to the logistic robots system. In an experienced builder's sprawling endgame factory, however, a well-designed rail network dwarfs the throughput of even a massive swarm of logistics robots at a fraction of the energy cost.
It's not that the logistics robots get worse or trains get substantially better, mind you- It's just that when you start needing to transport vast quantities of stuff across huge distances, the advantages of trains start to actually matter, and suddenly it's worth all the trouble of investing tons of metal in rails and doing all the wiring for automated loading and unloading stations.
Edited by Scorpion451^ Thanks. Yeah, I can see the multiple tropes at play part, doesn't seem like I'm going to find just one for this situation. I guess I didn't really think about Changing Gameplay Priorities applying to changes in difficulty, but I suppose that does fit the spirit. Good example. Thanks!

I'm looking for a trope to cover abilities that casual/less-than-hard mode players of video games (and could possibly apply to tabletop or card games in more casual settings too) don't really bother with, but that are crucial on harder difficulties.
I see this a lot in the Fire Emblem series with abilities that are difficult to set up, so they aren't really worth the investment on easier difficulties where more straightforward abilities rule the day. Examples abilities with effects like "If unit has <75% health, gets +5 STR when attacking" or "If unit has <50% health, counterattacks before enemy attack", things like that. Abilities like that rule the day in the hardest modes like "Maddening", but get little use elsewhere.
It's not quite an Elite Tweak or Minmaxer's Delight or anything like that. I poured over Video Game Tropes but didn't see anyting that quite covers it. TIA!