Discuss.
My thoughts on a few superweapons:
Starcraft: Terran nuclear missilesNicely done. Effective, but with a catch. You had to manouever a covert ops units near your target, and it was possible for your opponent to kill him before the nuke landed. Of course, the solution to this was just to bring half a dozen of them. But even then you had to find your way to a critical target. Firign on the front lines was rarely more than a nuisance. Useful superweapon, but not game unbalancing.
Total Annihilation: Nuclear MissilesEffective. Completely obliterated anything anywhere on the map. Unlimited range. A single silo could build and stockpile many missiles. Absolutely game-ending if your opponent doesn't prepare for it. But all your opponent has to do it build the corresponding missile defense system, and keep it stocked with defender missiles just like you keep stocked on nukes. All in all, a decent implementation, but in actual practice I tended to find nukes only useful against unskilled or careless players. Skilled player always knew it was coming, so built missile defenses at all vital installations, rendering nukes pretty much useless. I didn't usually bother to build them.
Total Annihilation: Big berthaMassively long (but not unlimited) range immobile artilllery system. Not very accurate, but awfully devastating. And pretty much unstoppable. Once you had one of these things built, you pretty much just instructed it to auto-fire in an area you suspected your opponent probably had a base. If you were right, after a few minutes it would be destroyed. Interesting unit. Interestign implementation. Absolutely game ending against a player who didn't know how to deal with them, and players who insisted on building centralized bases around explosive facilities like fusion reactors. High skill requirement to avoid, but acceptably so. Overall, I approve. But it took a while to learn to deal with them.
Street Figher 2: Ken & Ryu's uppercutMixed feelings. Granted, there was a relatively high skill requirement to be able to use the attack, but people who had mastered it were nearly invincible. This attack could not only be used to overcome absolutely any aerial attack, thus keeping your opponent grounded, it could also be used to attack incoming attacks, like punches and kicks. And, it rendered one immune to ranged attacks. Consequently, a master of the uppercut with good timing could simply stand there for an entire match doing nothing other than uppercuts over and over...wait, uppercut, repeat. And win. It was possible to overcome, but only by an opponent with greater skill, and even then only if they used one of a couple suitable counter characters. A player might have completely mastered three or four characters, but if they hadn't mastered one of thr
right characters, anyone who had mastered this single attack with Ken or Ryu would be completely unstoppable. Overall, I dispprove of the implementation. It didn't affect me much personally, as my choice character was the one who had the easiest time overcoming the uppercut, but lots of other people were understandably annoyed because there was simply nothing they could do other than learn to play a new character.
Star Wars: The Death StarMassive ship with a huge laser that can blow up planets and a drive system capable of transporting it to anywhere in the entire galaxy in a matter of hours or days. Interesting idea, but badly implemented. The Death Star is the source of at least a couple entries on the "If I ever become an evil overlord" list. Why? Because this huge, massive space station the size of a moon was destroyed by a tiny one-manned spaceship that fired a single missile in the right place.
Dwarf Fortress: Flood the world with magmaProbably one of the most reasonably balanced super-weapons ever seen in any game. Ultimately destructive, but time-consuming and difficult to build, and a single mistake could cause it to backfire and completely destroy your fortress. Even if you do build it correctly, it's likely to have side effects: the destruction of trees and vegetation that might otherwise be useful. And it annoys your neighbors, the elves. Good implemenation of a super-weapon.
Star Trek Armada: The Borg Fusion CubeBuild almost every building and perform almost every type of research, and you can make a supercube. How? By building nine regular cubes, telling them to merge, and waiting 30-40 seconds. All in all, this was a reasonable attempt to solve a dilemna, but with bad results. In Star Trek, a single Borg cube was able to destroy entire Federaion fleets. Not exactly a balanced ship. But how could they include the Borg in the game without allowing them to build their token ship? So, basically they tweaked the idea slightly and made it tedious and annoying to build. Unfortuantely the fusion cube was pretty much like the cubes from Star Trek: if you got one, you could effortlessly destroy entire fleets, starbases...anything. Over the coarse of the learning curve of the game, I only ever saw one of these things destroyed twice. And both times, my opponents (same group of friends) learned how to avoid those same mistakes. Eventually it became such that if anyone managed to build a fusion cube, they won. Period. Nothing could be done to stop them. So, anytime one of us chose to play the Borg, we knew that we had eight minutes to remove them from the game. Why eight minutes? That was how long it took to build one. All in all it was an acceptable mechanic, but it wasn't very fun. Thumbs down for this superweapon.
Revenge of Shinobi: Jutsu of MijinYou are a ninja. Plunge your sword into your chest and blow up. Your body parts will fly through the air, impaling and killing all nearby enemies. The catch is that you die. Entertaining superweapon, and well balanced. Thoroughly and indiscriminately destructive, but it comes with a price. Of course, as a console game, you're allotted several "lives" to work with, so using this art doesn't mean the game ends. But you start the game with only three lives, so it's not something you want to use very often. And of course, if you
are on your last life, then yes, use it and the game is over. Good superweapon. Not one that I'd want to use in real life, but good game design.