Demonic Spiders in 4X titles. These will happily rain terror on your Player Mooks for days on end.
- AgeOfWonders: has a variety of fantastic, powerful units that can serve as this to someone starting with low level units and fortune poor enough to stumble across one. The taker of cakes, though, is the Syron. These spawn when a mana source is razed as some sort of punishment for wanton, or even strategic, destruction of resources. Incredibly powerful and entirely immune to all forms of magic and elemental effects and with stats above most units of their rank, they serve as a nasty surprise to anyone not expecting them. They also bear the unique alignment of 'true neutral', meaning they will not side with you, opting to go on a highly destructive walkabout. If, by some means, they are placed in a group, they will promptly rebel and most likely destroy said group. Precisely one unit in the game can possess them forcefully, turning them into a horrific addition to an army.
- Civilization:
- Barbarians. They aren't much trouble early on, when they're animals (which won't enter your cultural borders) or Warriors (which are only dangerous to Settlers or Scouts). Then they discover bronzeworking. Barbarian Axemen will wreck your infrastructure like nobody's business, are a pain to take down in melee, and tend to come in packs - and they usually bring at least one Archer with them just to keep you guessing. The really irritating part is that, after about 800 BC on any difficulty harder than Settler on the expansion packs, these guys never stop coming. Build the Great Wall as soon as you have access to it, or, barring that, keep Archers near your important tiles.
- Civ VI spices up the barbarian mix with other camp types, depending on what features they spawn near. Horseman Barbarian camps will spawn at an unholy rate (sometimes multiple units a turn on Turn 15), while camps by the sea can spawn Quadriremes. These cripple seafront cities, since they pillage the Fishing Boats you'll be relying on and require you to divert important early turns to building walls just to get rid of them. Clearing one of these barb camps is even worse, because their ships will come back and protect them. Quadriremes have lots of movement and can fire on land melee units without taking damage back. If you wanted to take out the camp with your starting Warrior (to avoid diverting further important early turns), get ready to flip some coins.
- Civ IV Axemen are easy to deal with in the Warlords & Beyond the Sword expansion packs, since chariots get a giant attack bonus against them. In vanilla Civ though there's really nothing you can do in the early game except take coin-flip battles and hope they're stupid enough to attack units on defensive terrain. Not fun.
- The "Final Frontier" scenario in Civ IV: Beyond the Sword has this with Space Pirates, which constantly ruin your day by using your own hyperspace tunnels (i.e. space roads) to reach your systems and destroy your construction ships (i.e. workers). However, since there are no other "terrain" improvements in the scenario, that's all they can do.
- Civ III Infantry. Located at the start of the Industrial tech tree, they're a 6/10 unit in an era where the absolute best offensive unit is the 8/3 Sipahi, and more commonly 6/6 Guerillas, 6/3 Cavalry, and other Infantry. Once fortified with defensive bonuses they're close to impossible to dislodge until you get the primary Industrial offensive unit, the Tank, which doesn't appear until the end of the Industrial tech tree and thus isn't of any help for a long time. Pretty much forget about making any land-grabs until you get Tanks, unless you've got crushing military superiority, and even then expect a slow, frustrating grind.
- Barbarians. They aren't much trouble early on, when they're animals (which won't enter your cultural borders) or Warriors (which are only dangerous to Settlers or Scouts). Then they discover bronzeworking. Barbarian Axemen will wreck your infrastructure like nobody's business, are a pain to take down in melee, and tend to come in packs - and they usually bring at least one Archer with them just to keep you guessing. The really irritating part is that, after about 800 BC on any difficulty harder than Settler on the expansion packs, these guys never stop coming. Build the Great Wall as soon as you have access to it, or, barring that, keep Archers near your important tiles.
- Civilization: Beyond Earth continues the tradition. Native creature now use normal combat and stay passive unless threatened... but then there are Siege Worms. These things have an endgame combat rating. A few are wandering the map on turn one. New players are often advised to treat them as mobile disaster areas rather than an enemy unit and just focus on cleaning up after one blows through their settlement.
- The Dread Lords in Galactic Civilizations. Any conflict involving them is going to be bloody, to the point where their constructors can go through mid-level ships like knives through butter. Also, ten Dread Lords infantry can conquer a planet. We recommend either swarm tactics of a sting-before-you-die suicide attack nature, or blowing up their sun.
- All these tactics are just delaying actions, as you, hopefully, race to research and build better, stronger ships. Eventually, you can even take them in a one-to-one fight, although it will be difficult getting there.
- In Master of Orion 2, Psilons eventually become these. The Psilons are an entire species of Squishy Wizards who are physically frail but possess limitless creativity and a knack for science. Due to their Creative attribute, instead of picking one technology to research and forsaking as many as two others, Psilons get everything. That means their puny, frail bodies will be piloting ships with adamantium armor and antimatter bombs, settling worlds twice as far and in half the time as anyone else, and fielding feeble infantry ensconced in flying Powered Armor with neutrino beams when other species have a couple rifle upgrades. By the midgame, if the Psilons haven't been strangled by a species like the Bulrathi that can easily win early fights, expect every encounter with them to be harrowing.
- The native lifeforms in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, especially since their attacks completely ignore your units' armor, and the only way to beat them is to have high morale or a special psi-shield (which doesn't do much against enemy units). The xenofungus itself is extremely annoying, as it constantly spreads, destroying your terrain improvements. Even removing it completely from an area doesn't guarantee that, in a few turns, a random scripted event won't create a highly-concentrated xenofungus area complete with boils of mind worms and a spore tower or two.
- Even the designers knew these things were irritating; notice how many of the construction quotes refer to the colonies's struggles with them.
- X-Universe:
- Xenon "M" interceptors in X3: Terran Conflict. While they're poorly shielded, they come in huge swarms, and 90% of them will mount Pulsed Beam Emitters — rapid-fire, lethally accurate lasers that do incredible damage to shields. A single M can strip down the shields of an M3 fighter very quickly on its own — add in several dozen friends and you basically need a capital ship to kill them all without dying instantly in a hailstorm of (nearly) instant weapons.
- The Xenon "Q" frigate is a Demonic Giant Spider. On paper its stats are actually fairly mediocre for a frigate (though it typically mounts some pretty heavy weapons, including PPCs on the flank batteries), and the firing arcs for its turrets are totally bugged in in-sector combat. However, it is reviled for its ability to one-shot pretty much anything with less than ten gigajoules of shielding in out-of-sector combat. Technically every frigate can do that given a lucky break with the RNG, but as the Q is by far the most common enemy frigate it gets all the hate.
- If you're in anything smaller than a corvette, Khaak Clusters. They're made by one M3 ship and a lot of M5s that travel as a single target, then separate and attack when an inviting target approaches. None of them are a threat by themselves, but if the cluster isn't distracted by other targets and chooses you, you and only you to give its attention to, then you'll be facing Death of a Thousand Cuts as 10+ ships concentrate hitscan weapons on your ass. If you're good enough of a pilot you can probably take the smaller Clusters in an M3, but one variety has 26 ships in it.
- Many of the randomly encountered Pirate M3 and M4 ships tend to equip the Plasma Burst Generator. Think Video Game Flamethrowers Suck? Not here. A PBG-equipped Blastclaw can shred most anything smaller than a corvette once it gets into range, and is nearly impossible to escape from. Thankfully, once you get a good corvette like the Vidar or the Springblossom (or a frigate like the Panther or Shrike), they lose a lot of their menace.
