Scrappy Mechanic / Real-Time Strategy

• MOBA games like League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients are full of mechanics that may or may not have originated as a bug or engine limitation. For one, a number of spells go through spell immunity for no reason other than the limited Warcraft 3 engine on which the original Dota is built. This flaw was faithfully ported to the standalone sequel and is frustrating to be on the receiving end of. And in Dota 2, there are runes that spawn randomly in two spots every 2 minutes. This includes right at the start of the match. Guessing correctly and getting a free double damage or illusion rune before the game even starts is somewhat annoying for the enemy. On the other hand, proper teams tend to ward and prepare for the rune spawns, so acquiring the rune is less 'guessing' and more 'preparation'. Another mechanic held over from the first Dota is gold loss upon death. This is either a fair reward for someone for taking out the opponent, or an unfair punishment that's Adding Insult to Injury, and lengthens the gap in what may already be an uneven match.
• As a rule of thumb, if an RTS game includes a naval component (that is, separate from its usual land/air/space battles), it will probably be this. From Age of Empires to Command & Conquer to Rise of Nations and everything in between, much like in platform games, something about taking to the high seas just spells doom for the players' enjoyment and many players just wind up excluding it from their gameplay whenever possible.^note If you want exceptions, then both Total Annihilation and its Spiritual Successor Supreme Commander have well-received naval combat- in fact, the most popular 4v4 map in the latter, Seton's Clutch, is almost half water with only a narrow land bridge joining the two halves of the map in the centre. There's a number of reasons for why this might be, but two of the most common:
  • There's usually little interaction between the Naval component of a battle, and any other part of it, so if you should choose to do both, you're basically fighting two unrelated battles simultaneously, which might or might not be operating under different rules. After all, ground troops can't very well waltz into the sea, and your ships certainly won't get anywhere trying to cross the land. And if you should win the battle at sea and advance inland with your ground forces, your ships, unable to go aground themselves, will have no choice but to remain on the water twiddling their thumbs. Some games alleviate this by giving navies the ability to do things like bombard the shore from long range with cannons or aircraft carriers once you've cleared the water of things that can kill them. But this leads to...
  • It's usually somewhere between difficult and impossible to mount an offense against an opponent's navy unless you have a navy yourself. Best case scenario is you can deploy a land-based, long-range weapon that can force enemy ships to keep their distance from land, but that's as far as you'll get. After all, if you try to whip up some docks and push out your own ships, the enemy navy with its numerical superiority and positional advantage will pound your fledgling fleet into dust before it can even push out of the drydock. If the sea is the only way for you to advance on your opponent, this naturally leads to an unpleasant stalemate at best.
  • Red Alert 3 averts this by virtue of allowing construction on water and giving each faction multiple amphibious units including a literal Land Battleship. One skirmish map even consists entire of water with unbuildable islands.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin (2001): The crush glitch is this; whenever an enemy of considerable bulk is defeated, the corpse is randomly capable of killing Pikmin by falling on top of them.
  • Pikmin 2: Both the original and this game share the issue of nectar drops. These are helpful, well, drops of nectar that makes as many Pikmin who drink it instantly mature into flowers (giving them increased agility and strength). However, it's possible for a single Pikmin to drink up the entire drop.
  • Pikmin 3: Due to incorporation of full camera control, the swarming technique (using the C-Stick or Wii Remote D-Pad to command Pikmin as a group) has been replaced with a charge command, which makes the Pikmin attack enemies or mass-adopt tasks. The main issue is that swarming had more uses than just just those two things, like being able to quickly guide Pikmin out of the way of a close-range attack and allowing more precise control over where you want the Pikmin to attack. The Deluxe version subverts this, making several changes to the charge command to alleviate all of these concerns, in addition to allowing players to issue the command to just a particular Pikmin type (something that couldn't be done with swarming). Pikmin 4 brings swarming back... as a specific ability given after completing all of an NPC's side quests, as in, at the very end of the game.
  • Pikmin 4: The over-abundance of things that can scare your Pikmin. In the first three games, this was relegated to the rare Mitite enemies and certain attacks from certain bosses, and as such was easy to react to and often carried very little risk. In 4, most late-game bosses are able to roar, causing not only your Pikmin to panic and run around in all directions, but Oatchi as well, and are allowed to do it as often as they want. This is especially bad when fighting Smokey Proggs or the Ancient Sirehound, as those opponents can spread Gloom, which kills any Pikmin who touches it instantly.
• Sins of a Solar Empire:
  • The Open Rebellion event for Stellar Phenomena. If allegiance drops to less than 30% on planets, a sizable fleet of rebels, complete with their own Capital Ships, will attack the planet, destroy everything they can, and automatically destroy the colony regardless of health upgrades. Since planets more than 5 phase lanes away have a maximum of 35% loyalty, and Deliverance Engine signals guarantee at least a 10% drop, playing against an Advent player is an exercise in futility as the colonies are overthrown faster than you can restore them. Not even TEC Rebels, who are "assaulted" by fleets of non-combative forces, are immune to this.
  • Culture can be this. You may be doing well militarily only to have your planets slip from your control. Especially bad if you're doing a military research only run for the Achievements or don't have enough slots to spare for Broadcast Centres.
  • The Pirates. They steal credits from players they attack, become stronger over time, and as of the Outlaw Sector DLC, their base is absurdly well fortified, and will attack multiple players at once, so not even paying higher bounties against other players will save you. Players often choose to simply turn off the pirates option.
• Total War:
  • In Rome: Total War, if you are allied with Faction A and at war with Faction B, then Faction A allies with Faction B, your status with Faction B will automatically be set to "Neutral". This will cause your armies to break any sieges against Faction B holdings, which can be quite annoying if you've build up siege equipment and/or are only a turn away from the city having to surrender/sally out as this progress will be lost.
  • Medieval II: Total War:
    • The Pope. He gives you missions for little to no reward and excommunicates you if you don't do them. He also excommunicates you if you go to war with another christian faction even if they attack you. You also cannot permanently satisfy him at all.
    • Unlike Rome, there is no way to change your Faction Heir in this game. Presumably it was done for historical accuracy, with the computer typically selecting the oldest son of your Faction Leader if one is available. (If not, his next oldest brother is typically chosen.) This can lead to scenarios where a greedy/corrupt/disloyal governor of a backwater territory is named heir over his much more qualified brother/cousin who is a loyal conquering general. Your only option at that point is to send your undesired heir off to battle as part of a Uriah Gambit (and hope against it turning into a Springtime for Hitler situation where surviving makes him even harder to kill in the future.)
  • The "Realm Divide" mechanic in Total War: Shogun 2. Basically, once your clan controls about 15 provinces (out of 65,) every other clan will ally against you. You're given a severe diplomatic penalty, meaning your former allies will abandon you and you'll be unable to establish trade relations, killing your economy. Finally, every clan that is against you will be given large stacks of veteran units every turn, even if they can't realisticaly afford to recruit them or pay their upkeep.
  • The first Total War: Warhammer flat-out forbade races from occupying provinces that didn't suit them. For example, Dwarfs would never be caught dead away from their mountain fortresses, and humans don't much fancy living in them, so one could never occupy territory of the other's type. This tended to leave holes on your borders you could never permanently plug. The sequel addressed this with a more nuanced "habitability" concept, which imposed development and public order penalties for trying to maintain settlements in unfriendly climates.
  • From The sequel:
    • Autoresolve is a constant juggling act that never manages to please everybody. While it's routinely tweaked and re balanced to take new updates and patches into account it always seems to favor some units over others, discount the presence or abilities of others, or severely inflate or deflate the value of certain units, meaning it occasionally produces utterly illogical results. Since all AI vs. AI battles are resolved this way it also tends to determine which factions dominate the campaign map and thus which enemies the player winds up fighting the most. It's more generally disliked for not taking magic into account, prioritizing killing off damaged or low-health units, grossly overestimating the value of walls on a settlement, randomly wiping out artillery over everything else, and giving pushover garrisons or weak armies huge numbers of kills they would never get in a manual battle even if the player never touched the controls. It also has an annoying habit of just outright killing entire units, whereas a player might take some hits but won't lose any units entirely.
    • Summoning an Intervention Army to sabotage an enemy faction's ritual is notoriously unreliable because intervention armies behave erratically, sometimes choosing to ignore designated war targets, and can die quickly if they go through a few bad autoresolves or just happen to be unlucky enough to spawn right next to a very powerful army. And because you can only summon one Intervention during a ritual, your investment can vary widely between being long-lasting to completely wasteful.
    • Autoresolve has serious issues with range, speed, and accuracy, often to the point of straight-up ignoring them. This led to a bug where any ranged unit attacked would be considered able to return fire regardless of range difference, resulting in head-scratching victories where the winning army would lose artillery units and nothing else due to 'return fire' from units that shouldn't be able to reach them. This bug was so subtle it escaped notice for three years, only being detected and patched as of the Twisted and the Twilight.
    • Confederation in this game is notoriously opaque and unreliable compared to the first, making it very difficult for the new factions to bring their racial allies into the fold. This is especially annoying for the Skaven and the Lizardmen, who can find themselves stuck in alliances with minor factions taking up valuable territory, but who refuse to confederate in spite of your relative strength (it's not uncommon to see a weak faction refuse to confederate below Strength Rank 50 in spite of the player being 1), leaving the only option being to break the alliance and take a reputation hit.
    • This helps contribute to the Dwarfen Tide problem in Mortal Empires, since the Dwarfs not only use the old system, but have a laundry list of positive relation modifiers and technologies that make confederating far easier (and far more common, in the AI's case) for them. This can even sink entire campaigns if you happen to be at war with a minor Dwarfen faction and they suddenly get confederated, leaving you at war with a mighty juggernaut you can't possibly overcome.
    • Vampiric Corruption became this with the Aye-Eye! Patch due to how quickly it spreads, particularly in Mortal Empires. Not only do the Vampire Counts spread it, but Heinrich Kemmler was moved to the mountains south of Bretonnia with his own faction (the Barrow Legion), which also spreads corruption, and of course, the then-newly added Vampire Coast also spreads said corruption from their pirate coves thanks to being a hybrid of normal and horde faction. Many players noted that late-game Mortal Empires tends to devolve into the Old World and the coast of Lustria being overrun with Vampiric Corruption, making traversing the areas a hassle as it causes attrition to most other factions. This was eventually addressed in the Doomsayers Update, which remedied the issue by making Vampire Coast factions more prone to razing and sacking as opposed to making huge empires. Vampire Count factions are still just as bad, though, as sharing a border with them means constant corruption-related rebellions due to how much they can push into adjacent provinces. If you ever share a border with a vampire faction you're almost forced to exterminate them just to get the corruption under control.
    • Sieges are also not well liked by at least some fans. While aesthetically each siege map looks different, they all essentially have the same layout. This extends to how all the races approach the siege as well, which is mostly in the same way. This can lead to some ridiculous images like ghost infantry using ladders to scale a wall. Overall this makes every siege battle feel the same.
    • Making it worse, the map geometry, pathfinding, and lines of sight often get extremely weird in siege battles, resulting in a lot of frustration as artillery won't shoot at a tower they have a seemingly-clear line of sight to because the angle isn't perfect, units refuse to attack enemies on top of the gatehouse because they don't have line of sight even though the enemies do, or ranged units are unable to shoot through a knocked-down wall or, more egregiously, an open gate. The reverse is equally frustrating; understand the AI well enough and sieges become trivially easy, but because of the high value Autoresolve places on walls and towers you'll almost always have to fight them manually anyway.
    • How The Eye of the Vortex campaign is structured can be a bit annoying since with most of the factions will eventually have the same end goal of completing the ritual, by capturing ritual sites which sometimes can feel like it forces attention away from a faction's personal quests.
    • Nobody likes Skirmish Mode. While it's in place for a good reason, to help a player keep their ranged troops out of melee combat, in practice it's worse than useless for most ranged units. Units in Skirmish Mode will automatically run away from anything that gets close to them, which often causes them to abandon your carefully-planned formation because a single hero got a little too close. Worse, a unit that's retreating because of Skirmish Mode can't be controlled; they'll ignore any movement command given until they're far enough from the threat. They will also only ever run in straight lines directly away from their pursuers, which makes them very likely to corner themselves, break your formation, or get tangled up in an unaffected unit (or worse, your artillery) and stop them from firing. It's doubly bad for ranged units that can handle themselves in melee, like heroes and lords, since they won't fight back if attacked even if they'd handily win. This ironically means that something designed to ostensibly protect ranged units from being attacked makes them much easier to attack. It's also enabled on all ranged units by default. Most veteran players will immediately disable that, only re-enabling it on very specific units.
    • The Old Ones' puzzles that are found when exploring ruins. The Rubric (guess what symbol is not being repeated) and Cuboid (guess the face of the dice by looking at the others) ones are easy enough to do, the Cypher (guess how many dots of what colors go on the square) ones occasionally have (apparently) multiple correct solutions but only one is accepted as being correct by the game, but they still remain interesting and doable most of the time, but the Dial of the Old Ones is especially disliked, as it involves manipulating two wheels in a way that can't be done ingame and is extremely difficult to do mentally, assuming you even understand you have to turn both of them. Even veteran players and puzzle-masters tend to just look up the answers for these ones.
    • The option to invite another faction to join your war is nigh useless for the player, as it's extremely difficult to convince an AI to agree to them, even if they have a massive negative rating towards the target. Meanwhile, AI factions will gleefully invite one another to Gang Up on the Human, leading to absurd situations such as Norscans inviting Bretonnians, or Greenskins inviting the Empire. This ranges from annoying to extremely dangerous, depending of the faction you are now suddenly at war with. Expect to see that "United Against Us!" window sooner or later in any campaign you play. What's worse, a 'United Against Us!' war does not allow your allies a chance to join in against the new attacker.
    • This mechanic is disliked by some other players for the opposite reason, being a cheese tactic when abused by the player. The fact a war invitation doesn't trigger defensive or military alliances means it can be used to single out targets even if they have a web of powerful allies by simply finding someone they're at war with and asking to join the war. Even a faction that absolutely despises you will rarely turn down a request to attack one of their enemies. This lets a savvy player mostly ignore alliances when they declare war, and is one of the biggest tools a player has when dealing with the post-Archaon Ordertide.
    • The Great Power diplomacy penalty. The larger your empire gets the less everyone (except the Tomb Kings) likes you. This is often just enough to push neutral relations into the negative, which means those factions are much more likely to declare war on you unless you've pre-emptively researched diplomatic technologies that boost relations with that faction (and even then, the highest tiers of the Great Power penalty can overwhelm these bonuses). This penalty also makes it harder to confederate friendly factions, since having them like you enough is a major prerequisite to their being willing to confederate. As with most things in the Diplomacy system, the AI isn't affected by this.
    • Raiding is not considered an attack, which means if you attack an army raiding your territory you are considered the aggressor and incur the penalties of breaking any treaties, as well as pulling in the raiding faction's allies. The AI will sometimes abuse this by asking for a peace treaty then raiding your territory right after you agree to it. Attack them? You're now Unreliable for breaking the peace treaty, making every other faction trust you less. Neutral armies may also raid their way through your territory to avoid attrition.
    • Hag Graef's faction mechanic centered around Malus Darkblade is quite disliked, as going on either side of the possession meter gives heavy penalties as well as some nice bonuses, but the penalties are so crippling (no replenishment whatsoever for every single one of your armies if you go full possession, all your units suffer a heavy debuff to their melee attack if you go full control) that it's widely acknowledged that the best way to play Malus is to actually play as another Dark Elf faction and confederate him. After a patch, the full control does not give penalties anymore, but just remaining at full control is an exceedingly difficult thing in itself.
• Warcraft has several:
  • In Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, you could not create new Town Halls at other locations. This made it difficult to mine gold that was far away from your Town Hall. Subsequent games would allow you to build new Town Halls at other locations (and in the third game, one faction can turn their Town Hall into a mobile unit and back).
  • Also from Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was the road mechanic, which restricted where you could build structures. As nobody liked it, it never appeared again.
  • Units only had maximum sight when they were not moving, which made scouting very tedious.
  • Warcraft II had absurdly pathetic sight range for most units, which made scouting horrendous if you didn't have a Flying Machine/Zeppelin in your army.
  • Warcraft III had upkeep. If your forces got big enough, 30% of any gold you gain from that point is lost. If it gets bigger, you lose a whopping 60% of gold that is brought in. Considering that gold is limited...
  • Also from Warcraft III is that the AI will focus on attacking weaker units before stronger ones, which can be particularly annoying for the factions that have weaker ranged units compared to the melee units on the front line.
• The difficulty of infecting Madagascar in Pandemic makes actually winning the game largely a Luck-Based Mission. If someone so much as coughs in Brazil, Madagascar closes its only port and never opens it again. When this happens it is literally impossible to win the game. Being extremely lucky aside, your only two choices are hoping the disease starts on Madagascar (and gets off before someone coughs) or just declare yourself the winner when the entire planet aside from Madagascar was infected. The Spiritual Successor Plague Inc. contained an extremely satisfying Take That! known as the Trojan Planes perk, that would cause infectees of the Neurax Worm to land planes in closed-off countries: who's laughing NOW, Madagascar?
• Stellaris:
  • Sectors. They were implemented into the game to give players a way out of micromanaging dozens of planets at once, but the AI's Artificial Stupidity means most people think they're more trouble than they're worth (things like, the AI building farms on tiles with minerals). They have been improving gradually with each patch but a lot of players really just want them removed entirely.
  • The War in Heaven, which comprises of two Fallen Empires Awakening and going to war in a titanic galactic clash, sounds like a cool mechanic but more often than not it just results in the two superpowers kicking the lower races into the dirt while largely avoiding each other. Even late-game player empires can become little more than target practice, and the rewards for winning one aren't really worth it.
• Red Alert 3: For some godforsaken reason, if a unit dies in a group while you've switched the cursor to attack-move, the cursor will return to the move command, leading to entirely preventable losses as your army charges forward, some of them deciding that attacking is optional.

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