Goddamned Bats / Real-Time Strategy

Iron Marines and Kingdom Rush have their own pages.

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• The AI in early Command & Conquer games had a habit of sending a slow dribble of units to attack your base instead of massing for a single big attack. This made the attacks easy to thwart but annoying to constantly deal with.
• ZERG RUSH KEKEKEKE!!!
• Skullmages in GrimGrimoire. Essentially useless to the human player due to Crippling Overspecialisation but can throw an ethereal based stratergy right off if the computer starts with lots of them.
• Battalion Wars has Gunships. In both games, you generally get only Anti-Air Vets to kill them with. If you get Fighters or Anti-Air Vehicles in a mission with enemy Gunships, enjoy the time you get with this, but do not assume your ground forces are safe. If you want to manually destroy Gunships with the Anti-Air units, you have to focus your vision on the skies instead of worrying about anything on the ground, like freaking Heavy Tanks. Mercifully, units that have been commanded to move to a location with the Y button in the first game will be active in attacking (most noteworthy in Road to Xylvania, which despite four infinitely respawning Gunships can be done with a Perfect S-Rank without the Battlestation), but this is not possible in the second game, which is part of why it is worse about Gunships, because you'd want your units in Follow Mode where the Gunships will end up shooting your following foot soldiers. The other part of the reason? A higher percentage of maps with Gunships give you only AA Vets—which do lousy damage against them for the fact that they lack defensive power to begin with—to deal with the buggers, and if you have anything else that can really do so, apply one of the following:
  • Shipyards Ablaze, where you'd have to learn how to control the Fighters or else they could wander into the AA Vets' range
  • That One Level thanks to Demonic Spiders (there's two of them in single player).
  • A level where you're using Frigates, which could just as easily have to deal with submarines. (Mercifully, Frigates are fast enough to evade the battleship fire, but this results in Character Select Forcing because of the AI's stupidity.)
  • A level with Anti-Air Vehicles... and either you get only one of them for the enemy force to destroy, the enemy force gets a Battlestation that can easily destroy the vehicle, or both.
  • The first part of Under Siege, which for similar reasons to Road to Xylvania with Y button spamming is easy. (Under Siege is Co-Op's That One Level for a No Casualties Run but for different reasons relating to the second and third parts.)
  • Late enough into Apocalypse that further Gunships will only try to threaten the objectives.
  • One of the messed up Assault maps.
• The Dawn of War II campaign has the Tyranid units Rippers, Hormagaunts and Termagaunts. Pathetically weak, but their large squad size and tendency for half a dozen squads to attack at once makes them a constant annoyance, while their tendency to be meat shields for more powerful units makes them potentially deadly. Fortunately at higher levels they can be killed in about one shot, with Avitus slaughtering entire swarms in seconds.
  • The Imperial Guard, one of the most common tactics in Dawn of War is to Zerg Rush with dozens of IG Guardsmen.
    • Speaking of the first Dawn of War, the Harlequin. Up to three can be built at any time and their Dance of Death ability makes them turn into the She-Fu equivalent of a Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball, stunlocking entire infantry squads. Their other ability, Harlequin's Kiss, instakills the targeted soldier and deals splash damage to everyone nearby. The only thing that keeps them from becoming Demonic Spiders is the rather low health... with commander-class armor. In other words: they can still be taken down by an absolute Zerg Rush of ranged infantry - or simply just send in a tank. Or even better, as many tanks as the Arbitrary Headcount Limit allows and follow up by destroying the Eldar HQ before it respawns.
• The Chrysalids from UFO: Aftermath. They can't actually harm you, yet they are among the worst things to meet in the entire game. Why? Because their only attack is a stun, that has longer range than some sniper rifles and a high enough duration and rate of fire to be able to single-handedly lock down your entire squad if you let them. And that's when they're alone. Should you run into three or more you might as well just give up and load.
• Europa Universalis has any poor country with a lot of winter in it. Tibet and some of the russian steppe-nations in particular. Sure, they can only raise a few thousand men. Too bad you still need at least 5000 men to besiege their fortresses and they can only support 2000... You can easily lose hundreds of thousands of men besieging piddly tax-base 1 or 2 provinces. Especially in winter.
• In AirMech, a MOBA game, The AI controlled airmech will fly away from units they're supporting the push just as you're coming down on ground mode to get them.
• The Arm light tanks and bots in Total Annihilation. Their primary weapon does a decent amount of damage for its cost and techlevel, and while as the game advances their threat level gets closer and closer to zero, they remain an annoying nuisance for a while after game start and in the first minutes can even overwhelm a Core player that hasn't yet brought up fixed defenses.
  • On the Core side, you had the Can and it's more powerful counterpart, the Sumo. Both do reasonable damage, but they move slowly and can absorb surprisingly large amounts of damage. Short range is all that stopped them from being much worse.
  • The Zipper. Very light armor, but the laser stings more than early first-level units, and they're very fast and maneuvrable. An experienced player can deal a surprising amount of damage with them - they'll melt like soft snow against any type of fixed defence emplacement or primary attack unit, but if you manage to bypass those and find an enemy supply area, a bunch of Zippers can cripple your enemy's economy fast enough that by the time they notice the problem and rally up, the offending units are likely to have finished the job and disappeared.
  • Due to the game's lack of Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors anything that has a gun will take its chance against any type of enemy unit even though it really isn't meant to be shooting at them. Most of the time this results in heavy tanks harmlessly slinging heavy ordnance against passing planes and missing by several lengths, but there is one glaring exception: fighter planes. They aren't meant to fight anything other than other planes, but they will target ground units if given the chance; individual missiles do piddling damage against anything with armor, but with enough fighters you can kill with a thousand shallow cuts even a Commander.
• Crusader Kings II has Viking raiders, introduced with The Old Gods. Small bands of raiders can disembark into any province along the coast of the sea or a major river, steal gold from one of your counties, then hop back on their boats and sail home (or, more vexingly, to another lightly-defended province) once you've assembled an army that can actually deal with them.
• Desert Moon has Bursters. These are a guaranteed kill on your units if they get near (they either maul the unit, or you kill it and it blows up), and they travel extremely fast. They can easily kill Flamethrowers and Imploders who are pretty much required against Hunters and Infected. Thankfully a Fuel Launcher will make them slow and easy pickings, but when they come in numbers, you may not be able to kill them before they reach you.
• The Vampire Counts in Total War: Warhammer have units of literal "goddamned bats". Their flying bat units are extremely weak but very fast and maneuverable. The AI-controlled army will often use them to fly all over your lines and attack your vulnerable units, like artillery. Even worse, they force you to use your ranged units to fire at them to drive them off, when ranged units would be much better occupied shooting at more important targets.
• Horse archers in Age of Empires are flimsy, countered by a lot of units, and not particularly dangerous on their own. But when micromanaged by the AI they immediately run away when attacked and rapidly become a real nuisance to deal with.