Game Breaker/Simulation

Game Breakers in simulation games.

---

• You can do this in SimCity 4: build one single tile of road, pass the Legalized Gambling ordinance, leave the game running overnight, and you'll end with a large amount of cash in your coffers (Aproximately 250.000$ an hour).
  • Alternately, make a map with only a couple of power plants near the edge, then an adjacent map with a house, a road, and a power line connecting it to the first map. Run the game for a few moments, and then sign a contract with the first town buying power from that city. Go back to the first city and let time fly. You will be making a lot of money off the deal, endlessly. The second city doesn't suffer as long as you don't play it, and the deal can always be cancelled when you've got enough money. This has not and probably will not be fixed by patches.
  • And a sure-fire way to kickstart a region while making ridiculous amounts of money is to zone lots of high-density residential on one side of the map, lots of high-density industrial on the other side, three coal power plants, one water pump, a landfill, connect the areas with rail, or if the Rush Hour expansion is installed, build connecting roads with toll booths. Not only you will make ridiculous amounts of money from transit fares, but since impoverished Residential demand always skyrockets unless taxes are higher than 12% (which is already a lot), you can fill a large town with almost half a million people in two hours or less and roll up §500,000,000 given enough time. Best part? Impoverished zones are almost maintenance-free -- which is even justified, considering poor people cannot afford to be picky about their dwelling -- so if you put your power, water and waste facilities in a neighboring town, you can actually leave the simulation running completely unattended and return 6 hours later for massive cash. Plus, this will leave you with a base of inhabitants on whom you can later invest in education and healthcare to make them rich.
  • Less breaking, but still valuable was the railroad trick in the original SimCity. Railroads only cost twice as much per tile as asphalt roads. But they gave the same bonuses, completely eliminated traffic and a massive chunk of your pollution problems.
    • Completely financially gamebreaking in the original SimCity on the SNES: (Easiest at the beginning of a game) Spend all of your money on fire stations, police stations, and roads/rails (anything upon which taxes must be paid), until you are broke, and make sure "Auto Tax" option is deactivated in settings. When the screen pops up, hold L or R, close the screen. While still holding L/R, manually open the tax screen, drop tax rate to 0%, ramp up tax support to 100% for all services, close the screen, and finally release L/R. Presto! Full cash meter. Bulldoze your police state and start fresh with unlimited funds. Operates, near as could be determined so far, due to a glitch: when L/R are held, the game can still be operated, but time does not pass. When the screen is brought up by default, you cannot raise support costs to higher than tax income (sensibly). "Pausing" the game in this screen, then bringing up the screen manually, allows you to create a debt - which the game can't handle, and converts to $999,999.
      • However, it sometimes resulted in an instant loss instead.
• A similar trick can be done in City Life 2008: bring in lots of impoverished Have-nots to your town, leave the simulation running, and return later with millions of dollars in your treasury.
• In Sim City Societies, the reward buildings you get cost nothing to build or maintain, and give you a small but significant amount of money each day. You can start a new city, only building these and leaving the game to run for an hour, after which you will have a LOT of money. (depending on how many you have unlocked off course).
• In Hardwar you fly weird little plane/speeder crossbreeds called moths in a city carved in Titan's craters. The game comes with five relatively balanced choices, but a subsequent patch included the Swallow. It was by far the fastest moth in the game, so much so that it kept being faster than any other moth even when loaded with the heaviest, largest cargo pod available. It also had a strong hull, strong shields and was extremely maneuvrable. No other moth in the game could stand to it in a one-on-one fight and hope to win.
  • Swallows? Expensive, hard to manufacture, and almost strictly an end-game option. The Police moth included as a starter option in the patched version comes pre-equipped with the largest cargo pod there is (And those are rare over the course of a normal game) and an infinite-energy fusion cell for power, meaning that you could remain effective in combat during the night while your foes have to stop at lightwells to recharge. Oh, and these cells only start turning up in the game after an optional plot point. The Police moth also had enough weaponry to chew apart pretty much everything in the game.
    • Yes, everything... except swallows. And yeah, they're expensive and hard to manufacture, but there's the small detail that there are five abandoned ones free for grabs in hangars around the game...
  • And if you need cash, then you could do what pretty much everyone in the know did: Save up enough to buy the Downtown 05 hangar and install a distillery, then spend the rest of your days buying cheap water and chemicals from nearby hangars, producing scads of Alcohol cheaply, and put it all up for sale. There's only one other source of alcohol in the game, they sell it reassuringly expensively, and are nowhere near as central as Downtown 05. You can undercut their prices by insane amounts, just so long as you keep your prices above the base cost of materials (And since 1 Chemicals + 1 Water = 8 Alcohol this isn't hard to do), you can recoup the cost of the hangar and the distillery within a day or so. Eventually every single moth in the game will instantly flock to you hangar and cause an immense Dronejam that created a tailback across half the crater.
• In Warship Gunner 2, a battleship with the Massive Wave Gun, a good Auto Reload System (alpha, or above), and the Ammo Assembler or sufficient Ammunition Depots is a Game Breaker for this reason -- everything in the air or on the surface in your Massive Wave Gun's line of fire DIES. On Normal difficulty, this includes bosses. And it has the second longest range (by only a slim margin compared to the longest-ranged) in the game too!
  • An Auto Reload System increases the rate of fire, so it can be used for targeting groups at closer range and not just "sniping." Finally, the Ammo Assembler system grants infinite ammo for all of the ship's weapons, but comes later (destroy 999 superweapons) than Ammunition Depots which provide 20% max ammo increase for all weapons on the ship; without them the Massive Wave Gun has 5 shots before it needs reloading. Its weaknesses are all in design elements such as weight and size (the latter making the battleship superior to the battlecarrier, the only other compatible ship) but are practically marginal or already compensated for in a good battleship design.
  • The troper writing this sees your battleship of doom and raises you a frigate from hell. It can hold 10 system slots (ammo assembler plus 9 more systems of your choice), has enough room to house ASROC, Anti-Air and High Explosive Missiles, as well as pulse lasers, AGS cannons, and a magnetic pulse gun. It has as much firepower as a battleship but comes with higher speed and maneuverability, making catching up to defense targets no problem. True, the Magnetic Pulse Gun isn't as strong as the massive wave gun, but hey, when you can spam those shots to full effect, it doesn't really matter in the long run.
• Although not quite as Egregious as examples in the sequels, the woodworking table in the original The Sims qualifies. Using this object, a Sim crafts a lawn gnome which can be sold for a tidy profit. A Sim with a perfect mechanical skill that starts the day in a good mood can make about twenty gnomes in a standard eight-hour day. Each gnome sells for $100 each, resulting in a $2,000 daily profit, which is significantly more than the highest-paying career (which leads to a bit of Fridge Logic when you realize that a gnome craftsman can make more money than a business tycoon or an A-list movie star). The best part? As opposed to the normal career paths, you can set your own hours, work as little or as much as you want, don't have to worry about raising other skills, and don't have to worry about making and maintaining friendships. The only downside is that working on the table is taxing on your sim's fun and energy levels. However, since you'll be able to afford all the best mood-raising items and equipment, this downside is easily mitigated.
  • I'm sure I've got an e-mail in my Spam folder with a similar scheme.
  • Another method is the "Perfect Sim" method, which makes a sim max out their personality stats which may or may not be useful depending on who you ask. To do it, you need to have Livin' Large to have a chemistry set, and make a sim who has no points to any of his personality and a lot with at least the chemistry set inside it. Make the sim keep using the chemistry set until he gets a yellow potion, then have him drink it so he'll reverse his personality, maxing them out. A similar method can be done for pre-existing sims who already have some points in personality, which require them to have a yellow potion handy, and have at least two sims in their lot. The sim who will have maxed out personality must be close to the other and must be killed while the other pleads for their life (which may take awhile) until the dead sim is revived as a zombie. Because zombies have no personality, it will empty the personality points the sim already had, and they can then drink the yellow potion to max their personality out.
• The Sims 2 is rife with these, especially in its expansions.
  • Open for Business adds the ability to make robots using a crafting bench, culminating with the ability to make a humaniod, fully controlable robot called Servo. The kicker is that the Servo inherits all the skills, abilities, and personality of its maker, meaning that it can immediately be put to work on creating more Servos. Within days you can have an exponentially increasing population of robots in your backyard, and given that creating a Servo costs $3,000 and selling one gives you $6,000, this essentially equals unlimited money.
  • Open for Business also allows you to make flower arrangements. The highest tier flower arrangement you can make is the Snapdragon, which occasionally releases a cloud of perfume that fills all of a Sim's requirement bars except energy. Spread clusters of them them around your house, and you'll never need to do anything but sleep and fulfill aspirations.
  • Bon Voyage added massage tables. Two of the massages fill Fun and Comfort which is nice but not game breaking. The third massage, Acupressure, fills Energy and does so faster than sleeping - so a pair of Sims who know how to perform an Acupressure massage can keep each other going indefinitely without ever sleeping, needing only a massage table and some snapdragons.
  • Appartment Life adds magic into the game by allowing sims to become witches/warlocks. Not only are some of their abilities/spells ridiculously overpowered (instant teleportation (though this was already available in Bon Voyage), timestop), but once they reach maximum skill and alignment they gain the ability to craft a throne for themselves. This special chair replenishes all their needs very much like the Energizer aspiration reward item, but unlike that can be used an unlimited number of times with no chance of failure (as long as the witch/warlock doesn't switch to the opposite alignment), completely negating the need for any other items or activities.
  • Generally speaking, the Sims, and the Sims 2, suffers from Power Creep: with each successive expansion pack, Sims gain more and more advantages with fewer drawbacks. By the final expansion pack of the original Sims (Makin' Magic), the player could do literally anything within the game engine, including auto-promotions and free friends, without any effort. The Sims 2 tried to counter-balance the bonuses with penalties, particularly penalties that require either large amounts of recovery time (due to lowered stats) or large investments of time themselves (Free Time expansion pack, for example). In short, The Sims games eventually deliver themselves into Game Breaker status, and that's not even including the undocumented Game Breakers that people are able to find. By the time the Power Creep gets out of control, Maxis/EA simply reboots with the next game (Sims 3, in this case).
  • The dev team REALLY didn't think of just how exploitable some of the game features are. A vampire can run a business and bite all his employees so they can work happily all night, or a witch can craft some thrones, convert her employees to witches and they can work FOREVER. A vampire can make a killing with the wrecked car from Free Time, by spending all night fixing one, selling it for 5,200 simoleons and then only needing a shower and maybe a coffee after he's finished. Vampires also have the easiest pregnancies ever thanks to their lack of motive decay at night.
  • There's also the pink flamingo lawn ornaments which cost under 20 simoleans and can be kicked repeatedly to rapidly fill up a Sim's Fun motive.
• The Sims 3 is Gamebreakingness incarnate.
  • Some Lifetime Wants have gamebreakers. The monetary ones can be fulfilled by adding more Sims, who come with $16,500 Simoleons, to the household. When a Sim leaves the household, he comes with $16,500, so you can also move him in and out of the same household to generate cash. The Surrounded By Family Lifetime Want is fulfilled when the Sim has five teenage children raised from babies. This Want can be fulfilled in less than one day by adopting five babies and aging them up prematurely with the Birthday Cake. As an option in the game (it was a cheat in Sims 2), you can turn Aging off, effectively giving you infinite time to fulfill a Lifetime Want.
  • The Moodlet Manager, a Lifetime Reward, removes any bad moodlets on you, and for all intents in purposes, it makes it an all-you-can-eat, bed, toilet, telephone, bath and games device all in one. When any one of your bars hits the point it gives you a bad moodlet, the Moodlet Manager will heal it, and give you the polar opposite to it (Smelly becomes Squeaky Clean, Strained becomes Having a Blast and so on) instantly. The only downside is that it can sometimes backfire and shunt your energy level down to 0. However, just re-using it instantly cures this. Taken to the extremes, a sim can stay awake for months and doesn't need to eat more than once a week, and even then that's only if you want the Ambrosia buff.
  • And with keeping in with the whole Power Creep thing, the expansion pack for The Sims 3 has caused what is quite probably the most gratuitous Game Breaker in all of Simkind. You can Transmute metals in the game by using a Display Case, and tinkering with this can, if done right, bring untold riches. The only downside is that you need to create a Supernovium first (which seems to involve extensive fusion of Platinum), but once you do have that, you're in for something special. If you arrange 1x Supernovium + 8x Gold on the XL display case, with the Supernovium in the top left corner of the case with a gold bar stacked on top of it, and the rest of the gold put in the other 7 slots, it creates two bars: Compendium and Platinum. Once you have the Compendium bar, arrange it exactly as before, with it in the top left with a Gold Bar on top, the other Gold Bars in the other areas, You get...Another bar of compendium. However, it's value will have increased exponentially. By repeating this process, you can generate a super-dense, super heavy bar that can be worth up to 2.1 Billion before it loops around and bottoms out at 0.
  • The Generations expansion pack gives us the Motive Mobile lifetime reward. By traveling in this car, your sims will have all their motives filled up. Every single one. And it doesn't only work for your current household. Any sim who travels in the car will have his or her motives refilled. Got a date? Go out with the Motive Mobile. Your date will be fulfilled.
• The Urbz, a console exclusive Sims game set on a big city, have a recliner chair at one area that refills all your energy in two seconds.
• The Bala Gi patch for X3: Reunion introduced the M3+ and M7 class ships, respectively a fighter and capital ship that vastly outmaneuver and outgun all other ships of their type--and the M7 frigate even outflies many fighters. Arguably a necessary evil, as the normal ships are all holdouts from the original 1999 game and generally suck.
  • That's not as bad as the M7M frigates from the next game, X3: Terran Conflict. These are capital ships that use missiles as their primary weapon and have the special ability to launch missile barrages. The highest range of regular weapons is about 6.6km, the max range of the M7M missiles is over 40km. And there is nearly no missile defense in unmodified game...
• Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 has scenarios where the player is severely limited in what he can build, and the challenge is to meet the goals of the scenario with only a few attractions available. Upon installing one or both expansion packs, the player would find that none of the attractions added are affected by these limitations, unless he plays one of the new scenarios. In essence this makes the original scenario limitations worthless.
  • Plus, if you own the first two RCT games, you can import fully finished rides into it, meaning that you can get coasters you can't have anyway.
• The Solarii in the first Majesty game, as well as the wizard class. At high levels, they can utterly demolish enemy buildings and monsters/heroes. One Solarus on her own can take down one half of an enemy lair...with one swing of her might club/hammer/mace!
  • There are few challenges in the game that cannot be solved by simply throwing more Paladins at it. With great hit points and some of the best armor, they're natural tanks, but after a few levels they pick up a remarkably good personal shield ability. When combined with a ring of protection, a high level paladin could easily achieve a 95% chance of blocking or dodging any melee or ranged attack in the game, with the 5% that did get through barely nicking the paladin's HP, easily solved by delving into one of the stocks of potions. To make the deal even more appetizing, these ladies had some of the most player-friendly A Is in the game, prone to seeking out trouble free of charge, and intelligently spending their money, boosting both your economy and their surviability.
    • While not quite as physically tough, Monks and Adepts could become similarly immune to physical attacks, rather impressive considering how lightly armored they were. Adepts had sheer physical movement speed (and high level teleportation) on their side to let them go anywhere you needed them, while Monks (at least in the expansion) had an unadvertised defense-piercing critical hit (usually accompanied by a "Hi-Yah!" and the enemy crumpling to the ground), most noticeable against otherwise Mighty Glacier-like golems.
• Dwarf Fortress is absolutely full of these, thanks to massive Combinatorial Explosion and the fact that the game is still in alpha. Some examples:
  • The Dwarven Atom Smasher: when a drawbridge lowers, it will crush everything under it and erase it from existence. Only the largest of beasts are immune. A single bridge can wipe out entire goblin raiding parties, or it can be used to hurl trash into another dimension.
  • Until the most recent version, projectile weapons were massively effective. A single crossbow bolt could pierce multiple internal organs. In Adventure Mode, this applied to throwing - a thrown handful of sand or vomit could decapitate an enemy.
  • Basic combat stats like strength and speed are increased by both military and civilian skills. Take into account that some civilian skills (like Mining and Record Keeping) can increase very quickly, and it's not hard to create a ludicrously powerful soldier who can take on a dragon on their own or knock a goblin back three screens in a single blow.
  • Not to mention your damage with a mining pick is greatly increased by the mining stat itself. Powerful pickaxe + 10 skill points in mining = a dwarf that can reduce almost anything that bothers him when mining to red mist with it. Just pray to god he never goes insane.
    • Prior to the combat overhaul release, wrestling directly influenced the damage a dwarf would do with unconventional weapons (like shields or thongs), the odds of them breaking wrestling locks, how well they dodged, and would make sparring almost completely safe. Giving 4 or so migrants from your second wave of immigrants nothing but wooden shields and assigning them to train constantly would allow you to have 4 virtually immortal dwarfs by the end of your second year, well before even ambushes would normally start. These dwarfs would use their shields as maces (which they would use to great effect thanks to their legendary wrestling skills), would be immune to wrestling locks by larger creatures, would be able to block or dodge virtually every attack, and (thanks to being naked besides a shield) would be several times faster than anything they fought. By the 6th year mark, a single dwarf trained in this manner would be more than capable of fighting off anything, of any quantity, besides one very specific type of enemy.
  • After the combat overhaul, lashers suddenly became walking death. See, whips are tagged as a bludgeoning weapon, which makes the damage it does increases with greater size, smaller contact area, higher velocity, and greater material density. However, while whips are only a fourth the size of a warhammer, they strike five times faster and have a tenth the contact area, which basically gives them the stopping power of a .50 caliber bullet.
• The Game Cube release of Animal Crossing had the island minigame. With a GBA and a link cable, the player could go to an island and meet an animal not usually seen on the mainland, and on their way back, the island is uploaded to the GBA where the player can make the islander do various things depending on what the player leaves behind. By dropping fruits on the island, the islander will reward the player with bags of money. The problem is that the bags in question are randomized between the game's four types of money bags: it could be either 100, 1000, 10000, or 30000 Bells in any given bag, when native fruit normally sells for 100 and non-native fruit for 500. There is no weighting on that, by the way -- 30000 is exactly as likely as 100. And you could carry up to 25 fruits to the island in one trip. What is this "debt" you speak of, again?
• X3: Terran Conflict's most blatant game breaker is the ATF Skirnir, a missile frigate that, due to a typo in the data for the Shadow missile, could dish out eight launchers' worth of 650 MJ per warhead on an eight-warhead missile. The toughest ship in the vanilla game has 12 GJ of shielding. Do the math.
  • The typo was thankfully fixed in X3: Albion Prelude, but lesser game breakers abound. YMMV.X has the full list.
• In many Harvest Moon games (especially the Mineral Town based ones), growing Pineapples in a greenhouse or other indoor growing space. Pineapples take a long time to grow, so grown normally, there's only time for one harvest before the season changes. But in a greenhouse, you have time to let the plants resprout, and they do so VERY quickly (every 3-4 days, depending on the game). Since they ship for upwards of 1000g per pineapple, a field full of them can earn you millions in just a couple of months. You can pull a similar trick with fast-growing reharvestables like yams.