Demonic Spiders / Real-Time Strategy

You definitely can't construct enough Pylons to take these Demonic Spiders on.

Kingdom Rush and Plants vs. Zombies have their own pages.

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• Age of Empires II
  • Elite War Elephants, the unique unit of the Persians. They're heavily armored, have the highest hitpoints of any land (or sea) unit, just a bit less resistant than an actual building, and they have a powerful splash attack. If you're fighting the Persians, get some monks ready because those are the only really effective countermeasure. Their only disadvantage is being slow, but the Persians have a Unique Research that raises their speed, making them a faster live Rams.
    • Apart from the Saracen unique units, Mamalukes, which take down elephants, as well as every other cavalry unit (as well as practically every other non ranged unit) with ridiculous ease. Even siege weapons weren't effective, because they were cavalry themselves, and could just charge them down. In online play, these were the real demonic spiders.
  • Also Huscarls, the Goths' unique unit. They have pretty solid attack, are almost immune to archer fire and they also can be built from barracks, meaning that you'll end up with a near never-ending swarm if you fight them. But they have no defense to melee units, so a swarm of Swordsmen or even Cavalry can kill them without problem.
  • Woad Raiders are the Celtic Unique Unit, they are as tough (and cheap) as champions, but can move about as fast as cavalry.
  • Demolition Ships, ships designed for kamikaze attacks. While they can be quite effective in a player's hands, the AI turns them into a force from hell.
• The first Battalion Wars has Pillboxes. They're supposed to be super strong versions of the MG Bunkers, but it isn't enough that they have explosive shells and side machine guns. No. They have to come with ridiculous health and defense as well. The only reason they go down quickly on a standard run is because in the only two levels where you encounter them, you get Anti-Air Vets, who themselves had too much power and can therefore devastate big targets like nobody's business. Unfortunately, you get the AA Vets in the first place on those two levels because of air units to make your life miserable too. Joy.
  • Battalion Wars 2 isn't free of Demonic Spiders either. Of course, Fighters, are mostly demonic for a No Casualties Run, but they have their definite responsibility for the difficulty of the 2 hardest single-player missions in the game. Nothing gets really annoying like seeing no enemies nearby and 2 seconds later, one of your air units is destroyed. This forces you to manually control a Fighter, which means if you don't have your ground forces Wait or keep themselves preoccupied (especially irksome to do with the lack of a command like in the first Battalion Wars where it sends troops to a specified location), they will move stupidly (either in circles or into a bad situation) just to try to follow you. Under Siege's second half gives you only air units anyway, but the problem is that you're expected to bomb targets and air units are pretty much Glass Canons now. And just to make this even worse, Fighters can do a barrel roll, which throws off the lock-on of weapons that you need to use to kill the Fighters. None of this would be so bad if your air units would actually try at all to pick up Jerry Cans, though that wouldn't help much with your Fighters occasionally crashing into the enemy Fighters and instantly dying as a result. At least Call Sign Eagle in the original isn't That One Level for anybody who can adjust to the aerial warfare, and that level had plenty of targets for the enemy Fighters and Strato Destroyers. But just for icing on the cake, in The Reckoning, the game's final mission, you don't even get any Fighters yourself to avoid needing to use anti-air units that can get one-shotted by the Battlestation. At least until Pierce provides you with 3 Fighters in his Big Damn Heroes moment—that comes after destroying the 3 Generators they're guarding. And Anti-Air Vets have horrible lock-on range, especially for their job. Argh, argh, argh.
  • Of course, Strato Destroyers in Battalion Wars 2, having their Elite Mook status discredited as an excuse by the Battlestations, aren't going to be off the hook. Even getting past the borderline Guide Dang It! of their weakness in their lack of rear armor plating combined with the fact that they're only in the last part of one freaking level in the entire game — the last one in single player, no less — it doesn't change the fact that they take ridiculous punishment for an air unit, when you already have Fighters, as well as a strict Speed time limit if you're going for rank, to contend with. What is worse is that the Strato can blow most of your forces, including your mission critical Battlestation, to Kingdom Come. It doesn't help that the air units regenerate infinitely and the Battlestation under AI not only targets the lasers defenses (which you can't even lock onto) instead of the Mining Spider itself to get the bloody thing done with sooner to give you more grief if you manually control one of Pierce's Fighters, but also still takes notable damage from heavy laser fire.
• In Battlezone there are the Soviet Light Tanks. They come equipped with the TAG Cannon, a weapon that fires a small tracking projectile. If said projectile hits, they'll unleash a huge, almost-impossible-to-dodge wave of missiles. Two good hits can take down basic NSDF tanks and turrets.
  • Also, the Furies. Their main attack is a bolt of lightning that's hard to dodge, and they have huge missiles with massive damage radii. Worst of all, the regular ones can drop out of the sky on top of you with no warning. The tank versions at least lack the mobility of the regular ones, but they're substantially tougher.
• Bloons Tower Defense has the Dark Dirigible Titan, or the D.D.T. They have the third fastest movement speed in the game, tied with ceramic bloons and only outdone by yellow and pink bloons. Unlike the other top three contenders, it's a blimp, meaning it has automatic immunity to a massive array of instakill attacks, can instakill the player if it manages to bypass defenses, has a boatload of health (over 700 in its first appearance), is immune to most Damage Over Time attacks, and can gain the Fortified status, doubling its already big health bar. Even worse, it has the triple whammy of lead, black and camo properties. On top of the aforementioned camo property making most towers unable to even target or damage it, the lead and black properties mean that it's immune to both explosions and sharp objects respectively. Considering how most of the powerful towers in this game either rely on sharp objects or explosions, this makes the DDT extremely hard to even hurt in the first place. Oh, and when it dies, it spawns four camo regrow ceramics, which are demonic spiders in their own right.
  • This becomes extremely evident in boss fights, where the actual boss is usually a pushover compared to the DDT hordes that accompany it in the later stages.
  • Bloonarius can spawn a massive amount of them near the entrance, instantly obliterating any player who didn't have some sort of last-line defense.
  • Lych can resurrect fallen DDT's, turning an already fast and tanky unit into a Lightning Bruiser capable of outrunning your projectiles, soaking up massive amounts of damage, and ending the game once they reach the end of the screen. Considering that their speed has been buffed to the extent they can go from the start to the end of the screen in less than a second, its very likely that they wil slip past your defenses.
  • Vortex has a slipstream behind it that can speed up bloons to speeds even greater than resurrected Lych bloons. Considering Vortex can stun your towers and No-Sell projectiles, DDT's can instantly push through a previously well-functioning defense and lead to a game over.
• Brütal Legend's Campaign mode has one in the ranks of the Drowned Doom army: the Reapers. They move ridiculously fast, can one-shot most of your non-vehicle units with their melee attacks alone, and they have some strange blue fire burst attack that tears you apart in seconds. Oh, and did I mention that there's at least one of them around every time you have to face the Drowned Doom? At least they can be taken down somewhat quickly by Double Teaming with a level 2 Razor Girl...
  • In fact, ANY Drowned Doom unit is a Demonic Spider, Reapers, Frightwigs and Brides being some of the worst. Reapers (as stated above) can practically murder you and your entire army in about a second, are INCREDIBLY fast, and usually come in pairs of two or three (at least during the later Stage Battles). Oh, and you're screwed if someone decides to Double Team with one... Frightwigs attack using their tentacle-hair, and they can easily butcher you or any unit from immense distances by themselves. If double-teamed with, they can be thrown at enemy-units to possess them, making them fight for you. If it happens to one of your units, you have to take your own unit down. Sounds like fun, right? And oh, the Brides. The Brides are support-units (buffing their own units, and de-buffing enemies) and don't exactly attack, unless someone hits them. If they're hit, the hitter gets a bolt of lightning thrown down upon them, which kills your units absurdly quick if you're not careful.
• In Command & Conquer there are Spiders aplenty.
  • In Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, enemy tanks controlled by the AI would often plow through entire squads of your infantry, the tanks often didn't bother firing but would just crush any troops to death, it was far harder by comparison for the player to pull of a maneuver like this as the AI could move any of it's soldiers at once out of a tanks way, as well as being able to home its tanks in on any stationary infantry.
  • In the Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 expansion Yuri's Revenge, the Allied Robot Tanks are the bane of the Yuri faction's existance. They are faster than the land-bound Grizzly Tank and can cross water with their hover-jets. The worst part, however, is that it is completely immune to the Mind Control units and structures that Yuri loves to use.
  • The same game has the Libyan special unit, the Demolition Truck. Its special ability is to blow up in a massive nuclear explosion. A fleet of these pointed straight at the enemy base, backed by the invulnerability-granting Iron Curtain, can level a base in seconds.
  • As the Game-Breaker faction, Yuri gets his own spiders too: the Floating Disk is a high level unit that can deactivate your entire base, eat money and are generally a pain in the ass to kill.
  • The Soviet Terror Drone is this in the early stages of the game. They can't harm buildings, and base defenses tend to kill them quickly. However, they have a one-hit-kill melee attack against infantry. What they do to vehicles is even worse — they jump inside the vehicle, and destroy it from the inside out. Once the vehicle dies, the Terror Drone is free to continue its rampage. The only way to save a vehicle that has become "infested" is to get it to a Service Depot, which the player will often have neglected to build yet. Yuri has it worse — he doesn't get a Service Depot, so all he can do is destroy his own vehicle, which kills the Terror Drone as well. A single Terror Drone can wipe out an entire unit of tanks, or put a serious crimp in your economy by going after your ore miners. The Terror Drone also gets bonus points for looking like a spider.
  • Since a lot of strategies don't involve air strikes (most aircraft units in the C&C universe are glass cannons at best), a fully promoted Kirov soon becomes one of these. A regular Kirov takes a while to kill thanks to its absurdly high defense. But a fully promoted one takes even longer. If one neglects to build sizable air defenses, by the time a Kirov starts dropping bombs, it's already too late.
    • Kirovs get even worse in Red Alert 3, where they get health regenaration, and the ability to go faster with their new ability (though this does eat away at their health) allowing them to get to go from building to building faster, thereby destroying your base faster.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Uprising's two most threatening units are the Allied Harbinger gunship, which can pulverize anything on land, and have the ability to repair themselves on the fly; and the Empire's Giga-Fortress, that transforms from a slow naval unit to an incredibly durable air unit with a deadly Breath Weapon. Four or more of these are enough to level a base in minutes.
    • Also in Red Alert 3, Yuriko, who's basic attack prevents units from attacking. Backed up by other units, this results in your vehicles being juggled around, unable to kill her.
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun introduced the Cyborgs, who are classified as infantry but are uncrushable and have more than average health. They also have a rapid firing weapon that can mow down tanks in addition to infantry. They're obtained rather early on and you can mass them to harass enemies before they can get down a war factory. On top of all that they can heal in tiberium, making them exceedingly hard to get rid of. The Cyborg Commando takes this to another level, being able to destroy anything in the game in 3 hits, including buildings.
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars: GDI Juggernauts can fire artillery shells from across the entire fucking map assuming their's snipers spotting for them (and it only takes one Sniper Squad for every fucking Juggernaut on the map to be able to fire). God help you if your opponent gets out more than 2.
  • Command & Conquer: Generals:
    • GLA Rocket Buggies. These are designed as raiders, and they are fiendishly effective. Rocket Buggies outrange most base defenses, and just a few will destroy those defenses rather quickly. They're also fast enough to be able to run away if the defender sends tanks against them. Ironically, they're perhaps most effective against other GLA players, who can't scramble aircraft to deal with them.
• Company of Heroes: Most of the German super units, the Wehrmacht King Tiger, the most powerful tank on the field, and the Panzer Elite Jagdpanther, a power tank destroyer which can penetrate any armoured unit. Both units are Made of Iron and can single handily take on anything in the battlefield, but once destroyed they are lost forever, unless they are repaired by a Bergetiger.
  • Don't even have to go that far up the tech tree for the Germans. Pumas are damn fast, virtually immune to small arms, and will kite your anti-tank infantry. Oh, planning to send an M8 Greyhound against them? Good idea, I mean that is the accepted counter, except the German player can simply pop a 57mm anti-tank gun on them for cheap.
  • Americans following the Infantry Company doctrine can deploy US Rangers, armed with two bazookas per squad and can be upgraded with Thompsons. They're supposed to be elite infantry, but German players have often found themselves facing entire armies of them, and promptly getting decimated by them.
  • The British in Tales of Valor can swap out their Cromwell tanks out for the Kangaroo carrier. That is, lose a fairly rubbish tank and gain what is bar-none the best Awesome Personnel Carrier in the game. It's basically a Sherman tank with the turret chopped off and the compartment hollowed out and filled with seats, so it's very well armoured. It can hold 15 men — two Infantry Sections, one Sapper squad and a Lieutenant, and they can all fire out of the top. And what's worse, flamethrowers and snipers do jack against then because they're hard-coded as vehicles. 'Roo Rushes are the source of a great deal of a German player's crushed hopes and dreams.
  • The British also have access to a number of static defences which are both ridiculously powerful and cheap as chips, including the 17-Pounder and 25-Pounder (respectively, a very good anti-tank gun which can threaten even the German super-heavies from long range, and probably the best artillery piece in the whole game, capable of lobbing extremely lethal explosive shells half-way across the map). This is intended to offset the Brit's abysmal vehicle roster, but it's not only very frustrating for an opposing Axis player but also rather boring, as the battles lack the dynamic flow of, say, a tank duel. British defence spam is derisively referred to as "SimCity play" by the community.
• Cursed Treasure has Ninjas. They're very fast, and as soon as they get hit, they use a Smoke Bomb to make themselves invisible for five seconds, meaning they can run past most of your towers unharmed. You'll need to place a mass of towers near your gems so that they get shot in all directions when they de-cloak.
  • If that wasn't enough, we have Champion Ninjas, who are even faster and have more health ^* The otherwise-weak Demon Skill tree is your friend here. Max out Meteors and spam them to beat them.
  • The sequel tones down the ninjas by giving you the Fear spell, which affects cloaked ninjas and pushes them back for a short while. Enter the Iron Guard Champion mooks. Like Ninjas, these robots stealth as soon as they get hit. Unlike Ninjas, Iron Guards are slower, have much more health, AND are immune to Fear, so no pushing them back. Oh, and they can fly over water to take a shortcut to your gems.
  • The sequel has amazons. When they get down to half health, not only do they lose their armor and move faster, they also disable all towers in a sizable radius for several seconds. A group of these ladies in an early wave is very bad news.
• The spider virii in Darwinia can leap over long distances and tear through Darwinians like a laser cannon through butter. Annoyingly, they target Darwinians over player-controlled units, so it's easy to accidentally lead them back to your incubator and watch in horror as the army you've been building up for the last ten minutes is torn apart.
• Dawn of War has a few of these: Tau Fire Warriors, which have ridiculous range and stopping power for an infantry unit and is the Tau's basic infantry. Ork Flash Gitz, which have the same resilience as other Orks but with incredible firepower and accuracy, something Orks tend to lack. Chaos Obliterators, Mighty Glaciers effective against all unit types which can teleport. And of course the Necron Lord, which is powerful even for a Commander and becomes a relentless Boss in Mook Clothing with enough upgrades. The necrons also have Pariahs, which have a very powerful melee attack, a decent ranged one, a lot of health, and are immune to morale damage, as well as causing a slight maximum health reduction on enemies they attack but do not destroy. The main thing that stops them from being a Game-Breaker is their slow movement and inability to teleport like other necron infantry, the limit of one squad and their cost.
  • Dawn of War II, meanwhile, has the Zoanthrope, a Glass Cannon that can obliterate vehicles in a few shots, even the Dreadnought in the campaign (otherwise a Game-Breaker), and Tyranid Warrior with venom cannon — an annoyingly precise weapon that deals damage on par with the best heavy guns in the game, except that it's fast, doesn't have a minimum range and doesn't need to be deployed.
    • Eldar Seer Council and Warlocks are even worse, since they can do that AND move incredibly fast and hold their own in melee.
  • The Tau also love to spam Stealth Teams which sit there and pick away at every unit you have unless you have a special detector to sniff them out. And thanks to Dark Crusade changing how Infiltration works you could conceivably have a whole army unable to see and therefore unable to attack the stealth teams whittling down your army.
• Evil Genius features soldier squads who will arrive on your island if your heat rises too high with any of the world alliances. They travel in large groups of four to ten men, and can easily gun down most of your henchmen and minions in seconds, and there's so many of them that even a single skirmish with a single squad of soldiers is often enough to seriously deplete your supply of Mooks—and if you try to use social techniques on them, there's usually so many of them that most of them will withstand exposure to your social minions and continue on their mission to wipe your base out.
  • On top of that, there's Jet Chan—an A.N.V.I.L. super-agent who can cut through your supply of minions like a hot knife through butter, and can knock out most of your henchmen in seconds. You can't even keep him contained in a holding cell—he regularly breaks out, and when he does he'll usually drop four or five minions at least before they subdue him again. You can't get rid of him permanently until your reach the game's seventh objective, either. And if he arrives on the second island early on, before the base has been partially constructed, you're better off just reloading from your last save.
  • All the super-agents are like this. John Steele (a James Bond Expy), for example, randomly resets the security settings on all your doors and can temporarily sabotage your power generators, disabling most of your base (including leaving all the doors open and traps deactivated). Unlike Chan, you can't ever get rid of Steele until the very end of the game.
  • Ironically, the easy way to avoid the soldiers starting shooting everyone and everything is to set all the doors to security level 1 (i.e. open to everyone). Soldiers really don't like closed doors and will shoot them. Then, when the doors blow up, the soldiers will go into a shooting frenzy. As long as you don't have any closed doors, trap triggers, turrets, or cameras, the soldiers will not start shooting. In fact, they won't even try to kill your evil genius if they see him, as they're not Assassins. Eventually, they'll just go. The only thing you have to fear is other types of agents screwing up your base in the process.
• For Halo Wars there's Arbiter, the Brute Chieftain, Wolverines and Gauss Hogs. Both Arby and the chief can destroy half an army with ease (the former assumes you have infantry or aircraft). Engineers can make them as powerful as a Scarab with the same number of Healers. Wolverines are inordinately powerful against almost everything but main tanks and counter units. Gauss hogs are DS's for the exact same reason.
• Homeworld 2's Vaygr Laser Corvettes. A cheap, yet highly efficient alternative to the faster but frailer Bomber squadrons, a single squadron of Laser Covvettes can tear through frigates and capital ships in fewer hits than two Bomber squadrons can do. The difficulty lies in the fact that frigates and capital ships are a cornerstone of Hiigaran war doctrine, so when that asset's lost, the Hiigarans would've lost a lot of ground. Given that the two best Hiigaran counters to this corvette class (Pulsar Gunship squadrons and Torpedo Frigates) are also easily overwhelmed by their own weaknesses in the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors chain, Laser Corvette attack runs become very difficult to deter. Due to Dynamic Difficulty, the Vaygr will have generous amounts of Laser Corvettes in comparison to the Hiigaran fleet.
  • The singleplayer-only Progenitor Keeper, a Lightning Bruiser at its finest, is an Attack Drone carrier whose on-board firepower and armor, surpassing anything short of a Mighty Glacier Battlecruiser, is kept in a package that's smaller and nimbler than a common Destroyer. To make things difficult for the Hiigaran Fleet during the encounter, Battlecruiser technology is still unavailable and the Keeper is scripted to fully recover upon a quick Tactical Withdrawal.
• Iron Brigade:
  • The Volt Dropper, boss for the second map and from then on a recurring enemy in regular waves. Circling the battlefield out of range of your mecha, toting a massive amount of HP, only being able to be targeted by a select few turrets and bombing the hell out of your base, this flying nightmare will — unless you spam AA turrets — probably survive into the next wave and still be flapping about whilst you're trying to deal with new enemies, all the time knocking down the health of your installation. When your commander tells you to look up, worry.
  • Jacobs. They make all Tubes near them Nigh-Invulnerable except other Jacobs. They have low health, but the trouble is that they're found in groups of other Tubes, and since they can't attack, they're the lowest priority for your towers. One needs to prioritize and manually get rid of them fast or the other mooks will waltz past your towers/overrun them, and this is not easy because they stick within or behind their invincible group as a form of protection.
• Junkworld has a number of enemies that can quickly overrun your defenses:
  • Gator Riders, the Giant Mook enemies of the Swamps. They have tons of HP, and while they're slow, they sport a very painful ranged attack from the rider's shotgun. Attempt to block them in melee combat is not effective as the gators hit hard and often use a One-Hit Kill bite attack to wipe out any offending troops. All this unit-killing ability allows weaker but gregarious enemies like Radcoons to leak through. The kicker is that Gator Riders appear in relatively large numbers for giant enemy standards which means that the slow-firing Snipers will have trouble taking them down quickly enough, and often appear with Radcoons to rush through your weakened defenses. Even worse? The Order levels have cyborg versions of Gator Riders with even more health and more powerful attacks.
  • Vermincharges in the Underground campaign are Rat Men pushing a mortar that regularly fires capsules containing three fast-but-weak Krittlings at a spot further down the path. They come in decent enough numbers where if you don't kill them fast enough, you will be overrun by the Swarm of Rats spawned by their mortars. Finally, unlike Junkworld's sister series Kingdom Rush where blocking mooks with troops prevents them from using their ranged special abilities, Vermincharges can still fire their rat swarms even while being blocked.
  • Gutterballs in the Underground campaign are Krittlings rolling on a huge spiked metal ball. They have a ton of armored health but low HP, move very quickly, and cannot be blocked or slowed by your troops, instead just running through them for damage. The fun doesn't end when they die, for the ball releases three Krittlings which can run past to the exit if you lack firepower or defenses.
• Clan OmniMechs in any of the MechCommander games. Any individual Omni isn't particularly special — unlike something like Mobile Suit Gundam, they're not some kind of Super Prototype and are in fact generic, mass produced designs. The problem is that a single Clan heavy Omni can boast the same firepower as some Inner Sphere assaults, while moving at the speed of most Inner Sphere mediums, and still carrying the armor of other heavy 'Mechs. This makes a single heavy Clan 'Mech hideously lethal to lesser Inner Sphere 'Mechs and a viable threat to even the largest of IS assaults... and none of the three games is shy about throwing hordes of these Lightning Bruiser designs at you. Expect to take severe damage if more than one Vulture or Thor shows up, and prepare for losses if you're attacked by multiple Mad Cats. Fortunately, all three games will also let you salvage these monsters for your own use if you're good enough to take them down without also blowing their fusion reactors to bits.
• Mini Robot Wars has the Titan. Like the Giant, it's huge, slow, has a lot of health, and kills your minirobots in one hit. Unlike the Giant, it has about twice as much health and it can kill three minirobots in one blow!
  • The Mole is this if you don't have anti-stealth units. These are stealthed, and their claw attacks hit an entire column of minirobots, hurts a lot, and hits rapidly. Thankfully, a Radar minirobot or some Surveyor minirobots will lessen the trouble.
• Part rhythm game, part RTS, Patapon has a few Demonic Spiders that will wreck your whole trek through the level.
  • You encounter Cyclops early on in Patapon 3, and they're easy enough to deal with — retreat when they tap the ground, advance or guard when they grab at the ground. But the Purple Cyclops has a habit of smacking you around multiple times per command, and can even outlast a Defense Command, dealing heavy damage to your Shield and/or Spear unit(s). They also have more health and higher offense than normal Cyclops.
  • Reapers are irritating in that they keep flying in and out of range, but that just makes them Goddamned Bats, right? Wrong. They have a breath attack that lasts an entire Action and Command phase. Not only does it deal constant damage, but it will cause your 'Pons to fall asleep or get the Poison status, which really should be dispelled. Because without fail, the Reaper will follow up with its slash attack. If it's not defended against, it WILL cause critical damage and you may well lose a crucial unit. When you only have four units max, this can end a level in a hurry.
  • Golems are a massive pain to deal with, namely because of their deadly arm attack. Your Shield and Spear units can hopefully survive the attack, but the problem is the range. The arm attack can, and will, hit your Arrow units — the ones with the least amount of HP, usually knocking them down to either yellow or red health, if not killing them outright. This is merely annoying to deal with if, say, you only encounter one golem per level. But this is not the case. You will encounter several golems in several levels. Not only that, but they can be truly massive in size, will retreat into the ground between attacks for total invulnerability, and staggering them makes them reset their attack pattern so they can hit you AGAIN.
• Paradox Interactive games have not necessarily specific kinds of enemies, but certain nations can take on this trait. Europa Universalis III has France (though not as much anymore) and Crusader Kings has the Mongols.
  • The most recent expansion of Europa Universalis III, Divine Wind, has put all of the Horde-type nations as this. Austria also counts if you intend to expand at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire.
• The Pikmin series contains an inordinately large number of such mooks. For starters, nearly every enemy in the game is going to steamroll over any Pikmin not under your direct control, as a general rule. Secondly, any enemy you can't kill before it notices it's being attacked is going to kill everything attacking it when it realizes it's under fire, as a general rule. Thirdly, such Demonic Spiders are going to be positioned in such a way that either makes it impossible to reach their weak spot or impossible to avoid a direct confrontation, as a general rule.
  • Literal Demonic Spiders show up in the form of Dweevils, who will steal treasures and run into the midst of the various uber-destructive enemies littering the cave, thus forcing you to either micromanage with a teeny tiny strike force of the appropriate Pikmin or risk your whole party trying to clear some space. The electrical ones are among the most dangerous since electricity is instantly fatal for non-Yellow Pikmin, but the worst one is the Volatile Dweevil. Instead of stealing treasure, it carries a bomb-rock which it will use to suicide-bomb your army.
  • Orange Bulborbs in Pikmin 2 are somewhat similar to their red counterparts, yet their slumber is much more easily broken. Bulborbs are best destroyed by circling to their back while they're asleep and piling purples or reds on as fast as possible to avoid the dreaded shake (which scatters your Pikmin and let's the thing rampage). Oranges, however, don't let you get close enough to actually DO this, forcing you to either waste a valuable Bitter Spray or sacrificing half your Pikmin to take it down with enough speed to save the other half. Did I mention they also tend to have their backs to the wall and be surrounded by tiny orange sentry Bulborbs?
  • The balloon-riding Careening Dirigibugs carry around giant bomb-rocks, which they drop in extremely inconvenient places. To kill them, you need to wait for them to drop one in a place where you can avoid it while tossing Pikmin up to the bug itself. The catch? These tend to appear in levels with Bottomless Pits, as well as around enemies who use wind or other methods to scatter your Pikmin all over, making a single unlucky move into a disaster that claims your entire squad and force a reset.
  • Spotty Bulbears. You know how the aforementioned Orange Bulborbs wake up before you get a proper chance to hurl Pikmin on them? Well not only are Bulbears always awake, but they are always moving on Patrol routes. So if your Mins are carrying an item back to your ship without a guard, prepare to witness a Bulbear dinner. Oh, and if you can sneak up behind it, then you are in for a nasty surprise as they keep their young behind them, who will gladly go to town on your Pikmin while you deal with the adult. It is fortunately only found once in the third game's Story Mode, but it can take quite a few explosions to take it down, not like other Bulborb types.
  • Gattling Groinks. For one, they have a front guard, so attacking them head-on is an exercise in futility, and you need to constantly flank them. And what's worse is that they attack by launching mortar shots in three cluster bursts, which can take out 10 Mins at the most at a point blank hit, and scattering the rest if they get caught in the splash range. And to top both this and the Spotty Bulbear off, if killed without being shattered, both can regenerate after their death and revive in the second game. So if you didn't take them back into your ship, well... Have fun.
  • The Fiery Bulblax, simply because it's the only enemy in the game that absolutely has to be fought by a specific type of Pikmin. Being constantly on fire, only the fireproof Red Pikmin can fight them, since even a petrifying Purple Spray won't extinguish its flames and will still burn all non-reds. They're mostly notable because they're the only enemy in the game where you can't conveniently use the Game-Breaker Purple Pikmin, since even Orange Bulborbs and Dweevils of any kind can be stunned to death before they can do anything. In one particularly evil decision of level mapping, one of the harder treasures in the game requires you to kill one of these with only Blue Pikmin by luring it into a pool of water, extinguishing its flames, then killing it before it eats your squad, or worse, getting out of the water and re-igniting itself.
  • While the Yellow ones are not so bad, the regular white Wollywogs are an absolute pain to deal with, especially when they unexpectedly fall from the ceiling. They are very aggressive and will attack your Pikmin with almost no provocation, leaping ridiculous distances in attempts to flatten them.
• Rise of Nations has the Stealth Bombers. Incapable of being targeted by SAM systems, capable of flying at fighter speeds, and inflicting obscenely high damage with laser-guided accuracy, these are the bane of any player, whether online or playing against the computer. The fact that they can't be targeted by SAMs requires you to spam fighters in order to protect your important sites from them, thus wasting considerable amounts of population. Even worse, they're not really that expensive, meaning that after your enemy has a good infrastructure, he can Zerg Rush you with them, requiring constant raids against hostile airbases to prevent the damn things from destroying your cities and wonders. There's a reason why they've motivated many players to end the game by bringing the Armageddon counter to zero (in Ro N, each time nuclear weapons are used, the counter decreases by one, if it reaches zero, everybody loses).
• Sacrifice:
  • The Death spell, not a unit itself but when summoned it will instantly kill any unit it can reach by touching it, this includes the monsters of the wizard that summoned it. Still wizards are not targeted by it.
  • Two of the most dangerous units are Pyro's Warmonger and Charnel's Styx. Both are Glass Cannon that deal great damage; the former has a short range machine gun that rips apart any target in seconds, and the latter has a long range dark laser beam that can obliterate souls.
• Scrap Metal Heroes:
  • M-1000 Death Dealers are nasty pieces of work. To start, they have a high damage output and an extremely high attack range to dish it out. That wouldn't be so bad if they had low HP to compensate, but, well... it's got almost as much as a tank robot at this point. Oh, and it heals back a bit of it's damage every second. Anti-ranged parts like the Shield Generator are practically mandatory to deal with them.
  • Meganaughts. High HP, extremely high damage output, armor-piercing attacks, and resistance to ranged attacks as the cherry on top. If it weren't for their melee-only range, slow move speed, and above-average cost they'd be nearly unstoppable.
• The StarCraft franchise has a good few, especially the PvE exclusive units:
  • Infested Terrans in the first game's campaigns, especially in the Protoss mission "Into the Darkness": Self-destructing units that unburrow out of nowhere and rush you down and can instantly vaporize anything it connects with, including the unit you need to keep alive.
  • StarCraft II: Co-op Mode:
    • Basically, every special Infested variants encountered in Dead of Night can qualify. Hunterlings are cliffjumpers who can leap on their prey to stun them, and if they're the kind randomly chosen to appear the first night, they tend to make a beeline for your worker line before you even know they're coming over the cliffs around your base. Chokers can lash targets to stun and damage them, and against single units (like say, a hero unit) they can chainstun them to death. Kaboomers are giant Banelings that saturate areas with acid clouds for continuous damage and explode to do the same when killed, making them lethal against commanders that rely on groups of weak units. Finally, there's the Spotters, who are giant Overseers that can use Void Statis on structures to basically lock them down for several seconds, making them the bane of commanders that rely on static defenses (and Protoss need to be wary of losing their Pylons, potentially de-activating much of their base). Finally there's the Stank, Ultralisks with thousands of HP and an area-of-effect stun, and unlike the other infested they don't burn up when the sun rises, players have to gun them down the hard way.
    • On higher difficulties, Terran enemies will often send Ghosts to nuke your base. While it's easy to kill the Ghosts if you have detectors in place and a way to respond to them, their real threat potential shows itself when you don't, since they tend to sneak in during moments when you're likely to be distracted. Cue a massive Oh, Crap! moment when your army is busy doing its thing on the far end of the map and you hear a nuke warning, doubly so if your commander lacks a way to quickly move their units to respond to it. They're even able to sometimes see your base from low ground, like in Oblivion Express and Cradle of Death, where they can just sit underneath a ledge and nuke from there, and those missions and others put players in the middle of the map so there's more area to search for the Ghost. To make matters more annoying, their nuke drops outrange most of your static defense or detection options, so even Karax players aren't safe behind their walls of cannons and monoliths. When faced with these guys, it really pays to be Properly Paranoid.
    • Certain enemy attack waves make life hell for players. Any of the three "Protoss Armada" compositions (colloqually referred to as "Skytoss") will send massive fleets variably consisting of Oracles, Phoenix, Void Rays, Carriers, and Tempests. For the Terrans, Dominion Battlegroup ("Skyterran") will send fleets of Ravens, Banshees, Vikings, Liberators, and Battlecruisers. Such a mixed force, especially in the number present on higher difficulties, would crush even pro-level melee players, but consider that Co-op commanders have more limited tech trees; for some of them, they may simply have no feasible way to regularly fend off large numbers of top-tier air units. Terrans also have "Shadow Tech", which basically means their most annoying burst damage units — early waves will be Reapers, who can very quickly destroy structures; Cyclones to kite armored units; Liberators to siege your units with artillery from above; Battlecruisers to fire Yamato Guns at everything; and Ravens to unleash Seeker Missiles on your death ball.
    • Not to be outdone, the Zerg have their own lethal unit composition, Explosive Threats — their attack waves will consist of large numbers of Banelings and Scourges, which will melt pretty much any army no matter what commander you are or what units you're using. When they're gone, you get to deal with Zerglings, Aberrations (who deal bonus damage to armored units), and Vipers (who retain their Disabling Cloud and Parasitic Bomb abilities from melee play, as well as Abduct to easily get your valuable units killed), a unit composition that can quickly shred battered and weakened armies left over from the wave of suicidal units. It's quite telling that Explosive Threats had to be nerfed by replacing some of the Scourges in attack waves with Mutalisks to reduce their Anti-Air damage output because it was just that good at utterly murdering air units.
    • Propagators, spawned by the Mutator of the same name, quickly gained infamy among players for effectively being an instant Game Over if not dealt with appropriately. When a Propagator comes in contact with one of your units or structures, it will turn into another Propagator; if you can't kill them off at range, this will result in your entire army being destroyed in seconds, followed by your base. Even hero units aren't immune to the effect. These guys can effectively hard-counter certain commanders, like Stukov and Zagara, who simply don't have any options to deal with them, resulting in some serious Character Select Forcing for Mutations that involve this Mutator. And if the "Chaos Studios" Mutation rolls Propagators while you're playing a commander that's not good against them, you might as well restart.
    • Void Reanimators can revive dead enemies — they don't care if a unit has been dead thirty seconds or thirty minutes, and don't care if it's a Marine or a Battlecruiser, it gets revived. Unless you have the ability to take control of the entire map for the long haul, they will wander the map reviving your enemies and sending them to attack you, and of course the longer and longer the mission wears on, the more fallen foes there will be for them to revive. Finally, there are no alerts or minimap indicators to let you know where they are, how many there are, or even if there are revived enemies coming, meaning that attack waves will hit you without warning, and even as you fight them off the Void Reanimators are reinforcing their numbers by the second. On Brutal, up to four Reanimators can be active at a time.
    • Void Rifts are another pesky Mutation enemy. They're structures that spawn randomly on the map, often behind enemy lines, and will periodically spit out occasional attack waves while harassing you with a constant stream of basic units. Not only do the attack waves spawned by Void Rifts get harder over time, but there's also no hard cap on the number of Void Rifts that can be in play at once^note the only limit being that Void Rifts can't spawn in close proximity to your base, large clumps of enemies, or other Void Rifts, so if you can't deal with a wave of Rifts quickly enough or if your army gets wiped out trying, the enemy spawns can quickly build up and overwhelm you. Quick and thorough map control and/or Defog of War followed by excessive force are all but required to deal with these before they become a real problem.
    • The Void Slivers on "Scythe of Amon" have a chance to randomly spawn Death Grip Crystals. These buggers can stun multiple units at the same time, and if you don't destroy the crystal before the stun ends, all of those units die. Thankfully, they can't target hero units, but they can really put the hurt on commanders with relatively small armies by disabling and potentially destroying a large portion of their forces at the same time.
    • Boom Bots are invulnerable units that slowly march toward your base and army, detonate a nuke as their basic attack, and can only be dealt with by having one player read the code above them and relay it to the other player, who must then type it in to defuse the Boom Bot. That's right, these things force you to play Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes while playing Starcraft. This will take up an immense amount of your attention and force you to keep your communication on point, because entering a wrong code prevents you from attempting to defuse that Boom Bot again for a short time and makes it speed up. If you or your partner can't keep up, these things will turn you into radioactive dust.
  • Kill bots are gigantic war robots that are completely indestructible by any means: the only way is to let them kill enough of your units that they are satisfied and self destruct. They come more and more often, with each demanding more and more blood, that by the endgame it will be almost impossible for even your entire income to sustain their bloodlust unless you are one of the few commanders that can generate large volumes of cheap or free units quickly.
• Starship Troopers: Terran Command has the Scorpion bugs, which you'll learn to despise. They're tough, they deal a lot of damage and they have enough range that many of your units can't kill them before suffering their beam attack at least once - which is enough to seriously harm most infantry units.
• Total Annihilation has a good few:
  • Arm Fidos. They have decent armor and move fast, and on top of that they're quadrupedal so they don't have to maneuver around like tanks do. Their best asset, however, is the very high speed of their projectiles: other medium-to-heavy units in the game need to worry about ballistics and often miss as a result; Fidos on the other hand can deal precision hits effortlessly, which makes a squad of them absolutely lethal to light units and quite dangerous to most other things short of massed heavy tanks.
  • Arm Zippers. They're pretty weak in direct engagements, as they have weak armor and are effectively just tier-1 bots with a speed boost. The same speed boost makes them very dangerous when in the hands of a capable stealthy player; where a clunky band of first-tier bots will most likely be spotted and cleared in the time it takes them to do anything at all, a squad of Zippers can be very effectively sneaked past enemy defenses - ready to murder metal extractors at the worst possible time.
  • Arm Brawlers. Their high-speed guns target a general area and pelt it with bullets; compared to the more precise-aiming Core counterpart, they're far more lethal against groups of units.
• Total Annihilation: Kingdoms: oddly enough, the unit you'll learn to hate is a defence tower - a quick to build, hard-hitting, good-ranged defence tower that doesn't actually need a base to be deployed thanks to the quirks of how the Zhon faction builds stuff.
• Any elite unit in the Total War series is enough to give anyone a hard time, but there are a few examples.
  • The Roman legions in Rome Total War are literally impossible to defeat head on and fighting even against the computer will be very difficult to win without heavy losses. In some instances they are a boss in Mook's Clothing
    • Some of the unique units in Medieval II: Total War will take forever to destroy if positioned correctly.
    • Any infantry unit in Britian in Napoleon Total War will take forever to rout unless outflanked.
• Anything capable of inflicting poison or disease in the Warlords Battlecry series. Having your otherwise superpowered hero reduced to 1/8th of his normal health or having the speed and combat ability of a three-legged kitten is especially bad when you're playing as one of the Always Chaotic Evil races who have limited access to healing spells. Then you have the titans, one of a kind units that have terror, an even stronger form of fear and overshadow everything on this list in regards to sheer damage and HP. Also, they explode on death, killing everything and everyone nearby once they finally go down. As to race-specific demonic spiders, there's plenty:
  • Minotaurs have the Minotaur king, a huge minotaur that deals huge damage ignoring armor, has a high health pool, and can inflict fear on lesser units, making those afflicted weaker, slower and sometimes gets them running away from these beasts.
  • Dark Dwarves have a whole set: Bronze Golems will refuse to die no matter what you throw at them, and their right hook is strong enough to kill just about anything that moves. They also have the best siege weapons in the game, with Flame Cannons that will devastate bases in seconds and Hellbores that eat Dragons for breakfast.
  • Dwarves: Dwarven Lords are even tougher than the above Bronze Golems, as on top of their upgraded armor (shared with the aforementioned Golem), they can resist half of any elemental damage. They're slow, sure, but once they get to your base, the damage bonus they have against buildings will wreck everything you have better than any siege engine could. On a lesser note, Berserkers are about as indestructible while much easier to mass, and will not go down unless you have lightning. And finally, while Crossbowdwarves don't qualify, towers garrisoned with them definitely do, by way of shooting arrows that deal over a hundred points of damage (which usually needs Titans to accomplish).
  • Dark Elves: Dark Elf Assassins are frail, but they can be massed, and have a small chance every hit to kill anyone, including your hero. They also have the most horrific poison in the game.
  • The Empire has elephants, which should only ever be confronted with larger units, as they will stomp the everloving hell out of smaller creatures, including your starter units, and your hero.
  • Ssrathi can breed T. rexes, who may be somewhat frail for their size, but have a bite that outdamages almost everything else in the game. Four of them can devour entire armies.
  • Barbarians have Reavers, which are basically an army of Conans with a huge bonus against any large unit on top of huge damage and beefy resistances, making it so that just four of them can take down a titan for one fourth of its cost. Despite qualifying as small, they can take down the above Elephants with zero trouble.
  • Knights: Knight Lords are as tough as a golem, their swords are similarly strong, can get upgrades to level up faster, and have a nasty bonus against evil-aligned enemies, so it's quite possible your army of undead and demons will be slaughtered. Oh, and they also get EXP upgrades that make them earn up to six times the experience from every kill, so a failed attempt at killing one will only result in an insanely powerful knight that can hack a base apart alone. They also have Archons, which are essentially good versions of the Daemons (see below), that can cure poison and also completely neutralize ranged attacks just from being there as well as killing running speed.
  • Undead: Take the Knight Lord, flip the alignment, give them an aura that kills stat bonuses and armor, and trade mobility and a little toughness for even more damage, and you get Doom Knights. Expensive as they may be, if your enemy has enough resources every single set of skeletons you see can become a deadly squad of Death Knights in the blink of an eye, adding some Paranoia Fuel to the mix.
  • Demons: Daemons can fly, their whip is a hard-hitter, and have a bonus against good creatures as well, so watch your units if you qualify as such, as well as the same bonus-killing aura as Doom Knights. They also have the distinction of having a Demonic Spider building in the Lightning Spire, which blasts everything in range with huge bursts of Magic damage, which is almost entirely impossible to resist.
  • Orcs: Orcish giants are skull-bashing, splash damaging cheaper Minotaur King knockoffs, while Goblin Shamans can freeze whole armies in their tracks with their cold damage, and call lightning on them right afterwards.
  • Wood Elves: Elder Treants are some of the deadliest trees you'll ever see, and also split into regular Treants on death, which almost qualify on their own through toughness and high-powered strikes.
  • Fey: Unicorns are tankier than average for Fey units, they have Mass Healing to make sure just one unicorn can undo a ton of damage on the entire herd (and the game has options to let them cast it automatically on low health, one by one, to make the most efficient use of it), and their horns are sharp, with deceptively high damage and devastating critical hits that come fairly often. They also have a diminished version of the aura Archons have, to make sure outrunning and outranging them isn't an option.
  • Plaguelords: Hydras eat up armies like nothing else while not upgraded, and they have even stronger elemental variants which can chill armies into uselessness, or burn through soldiers and buildings alike. Eyes of Flame are also Splash Damage abusers, the equivalent of bringing a flamethrower to a swordfight.
  • And, to top off this list, the absolute worst of them all are campaign-only, thrown against you, and impossible to build for yourself: Gorgon's Floating Skulls. They outrange towers, fire fast, move quickly, hit like trucks, and worst of all, they bypass any and all resistances by way of magic-typed damage. They're somewhat frail once you do actually get to them, but you probably won't.
• In the campaigns of Warcraft III you will eventually start to encounter Infernals that function as normal units rather than summon units. They are fast, strong, durable, immune to spells, and have a passive ability that damages any unit touching them.
  • Around the same point the player encounters Doomguards. While weaker than Infernals and lacking their speed, they are still as strong as late game melee units and on top of that can use spells that would normally be for a Squishy Wizard type of unit.
  • In The Frozen Throne Naga Royal Guards show up regularly late into the Night Elf and Undead campaigns as opponents. They are similar to Doom Guards as a spellcasting late game melee unit that is stronger than any normal unit you can field and are effectively as strong as mid or high level heroes. In the final level of the Undead campaign A Symphony of Frost and Flame the enemies will produce Royal Guards en masse and is a major reason why the level is so difficult.
  • The same level which you encounter Infernals regularly (the last level of the Orc campaign) you have to face the Chaos Orcs, which you got to use a few missions before. The Chaos Orcs have higher damage and health than your own units and have the unique chaos damage type which deals full damage to everything. This gives them the advantage against your troops and allows them to tear apart your buildings in seconds. They return as Fel Orcs in The Frozen Throne in Outland but this is offset by the fact that you are fighting them mostly with the Purposely Overpowered Naga faction.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom has Labyrinth Tanks. If they're the leader of a team, they move incredibly fast, and once engaged in combat they hit very hard and are pretty tough to take down. It usually takes a few rounds of combat in order to take down a team with a Labyrinth Tank.

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