Picture Wars is a turn-based strategy game where everything is customizable down to the pixel: units, buildings, vehicles, maps, everything. One person posts a picture of the area that the combat will be in, another posts the same picture but with his units added in. On his next turn he just posts the picture again but with his units in different places, and so on. Because of this, basically anything is possible as long as it is fair. This results in several tons of awesome.
There are also several variants on this, known as "Modded Matches".
The name is also that of a generic forum game, with varying rules, but mainly one-upping the last image.
This website provides examples of:
- Arbitrary Gun Power (Averted. Most infantry die from a single hit to the chest or head, and anywhere else will basically make them useless in combat.)
- Artistic License – Physics (If you are comparing Picture Wars physics to real Physics you are an idiot.)
- Blood Sport (Most Colors matches are implied if not outright stated to be one of these, with all of the colored soldiers being clones that think they are fighting in a real war.)
- Bottomless Magazines (Maybe the soldiers reload between turns or something. Bigger guns normally have an actual reload time for balance.)
- Bottomless Pit (It's not common, but the bottom of the map is usually treated like this.)
- Bug War/Robot War (Sometimes the bugs fight the robots.)
- Cosmetically Different Sides (Ahahahahahaha But seriously, most armies are vastly different, which leads to some major balancing problems.)
- There's also the Colors gamemode, where two sides of exactly the same soldiers fight eachother, normally over a flag.
- Construct Additional Pylons (Occasionally averted, but a lot of armies build their bases right then and there.)
- Explosions in Space / Stuff Blowing Up (Like I said...)
- One of the larger explosions was at the end of Part I of Worlds War One, where a hotel receives four huge missiles.
- Gamebreaker (Known as imba. The only way to beat imba is to be imba. Though some armies do have uberunits that are hard to get but incredibly destructive.)
- Also true of the now-dead Immortal Empires gamemode. Every side seemed to have their own individual color scheme, with he majority of evil cults gravitating towards saturated colors while the good cults would often be much brighter.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere (A common way of ending a game that has made one player bored.)
- Human Aliens / Rubber-Forehead Aliens / Starfish Aliens / Humanoid Aliens (All of them exist in this game.)
- No Recycling (Averted by most. Undead armies even recycle the enemy.)
- Not Playing Fair With Resources (In one mode, a single army has to fight against an unlimited force of attackers while trying to sustain it's base. Also, some armies don't have resources, but they usually have some weakness to compensate.)
- Nuke 'em: Not uncommon as a sub-trope of Crowning Moment of Awesome.
- Poor Communication Kills (Almost every match handwaves why the two armies are building bases in a small area by saying that neither knew the other was there in the first place.)
- Rule of Cool (Quite a few of the sub-tropes of Rule of Cool are in Picture Wars.)
- Rock Beats Laser: Who would have known that unarmored infantry with laser rifles can be killed by arrows?
- Taking You with Me (It is incredibly unlikely that a game will end with anyone left standing.)
- Tank Goodness: Virtually every army with access to engines will have some armoured delight lying around.
- The Smurfette Principle (Women are pretty much nonexistent in any army that doesn't breed. And in a few of those, there's a "Queen" unit that does all the babymaking herself.)
- The Namkobian Expeditionary Force would seem like a subversion, having no less then four different units that are female, but it never fields more then one female unit at one time in a battle.
- You Require More Vespene Gas (Yeah, pretty much every army with a resource is like this.)
- Curb-Stomp Battle (Seen to many times when cannons and lasers goes up against sticks and stones.)
- A lot of Ugmen battles are like this.
Examples from specific armies:
- Corrupt Corporate Executive (Trios Enterprises. They eat planets for resources, kill any competitors with their extensive military, and reverse-engineer alien technology for profit.)
- They are also attacking a mine held by an enemy empire, to steal their wealth.
- The European Union: And no, the UK is not part of it.
- Ghostapo: Kapuzburg is actually an inversion of this, being a bunch of ex-imperial German soldiers trained to fight supernatural beings.
- Power Floats (Everything for the Ceph'qua floats. Everything.)
- Justified in that their vehicles use a lesser-known element known as floatanium.
- Kill It with Water (Aquamorphs. Telepathic Hydrokinetic one-eyed aliens. They also have ice powers.
- HAPPY Fun Ball (HAPPYbots. They're happy and smiling and they love all creatures all of the time! Just don't let them hug you...)
- Madness Mantra (DATA. A lot.)
- PERFECTIONPERFECTIONPERFECTIONPERFECTIONPERFECTIONPERFECTION
- REMOVEREMOVEREMOVEREMOVEREMOVEREMOVEREMOVEREMOVEREMOVEREMOVE
- Non-Standard Character Design: The Namkobian Expedition Force is a Minecraft-based army, right down to their vehicles being made out of blocks.
- It even has non-standard character design within the army itself, with both the traditional character designs by Notch and the designs by Dock co-existing as part of their fluff.
- Stylistic Suck (sweet_army12 is the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff of picture wars.)
- Talk Like a Pirate: Namkobia's default dialect.
- Tentacled Terror: Several armies are variations on cephalopods. Most notably the Ceph'qua which are cybernetic floating cuttlefish.
- Those Wacky Nazis: Roughly three quarters of all armies having anything to do with Germany are this (which says a lot about how popular Germans with guns are), sometimes with added Stupid Jetpack Hitler.
- Time Police (The as-of-yet seen in action Time Police, who violently deal with time travel and changing the future/past in general. Unless it was destined for the time traveler to change the timeline, in which case they'll let it slide. The Travelers were not destined to do so, and are currently warring with them.)
- Time Travel (The Travelers, a race of time traveling aliens from the future who are out there in the past to avert the apocalypse. Given their xenophobia though, it's unlikely they're in it for anyone besides themselves, which in some cases leads to lots of carnage.)
- The War of Earthly Aggression (Most notably the match Worlds War One.)
- One Nation Under Copyright (Displayed in the OTS, who are the main fighting force of Argent Enterprises, a corporation that runs everything from hospitals to galactic colonization.
- Also displayed with Trios Enterprises, which sells everything from fruit to fissile material. Their military is just as extensive as their markets, though somewhat subverted in that Trios Enterprises has nothing that can be called 'civilians'; everything is automated save for the brain-in-a-jar Brainbots.
- Honour Before Reason (House Anhur's military, who display suicidal and irrational (fighting with swords against fully armed mercenaries) methods as they fight for their families and empire.)