Workers are also used as early-game scouts due to starting the game with several of them, and having a very low cost per unit. These guys have little or no combat capability, present easy targets for your enemies, and what they make usually just sit in place passively generating resources, but without them you have no economy, and without an economy, you have no army. In strategy games, Worker Units and by extension the stuff they build.One quote from US General Omar Bradley sums up how critically important these mundane things are:Īmateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. Hitler's Ardennes offensive of 1944 failed because he was obsessed with using tanks to spearhead it - and paid scant heed to the logistics trains necessary to sustain them. It took several thousand lorries to keep the six hundred tanks of an armored division in the battle. Every German panzer division in the Blitzkrieg required a logistics train whose less glamorous vehicles - many horse-drawn - would have stretched for a hundred miles behind the Panzers if placed nose-to-tail. This is a lesson drummed into trainee army officers: 'The teeth of an army are as nothing without its tail'. You might be itching to generate as many Panzer divisions or equivalent as they possibly can in order to roll over things with the high-end glamorous Bling of War, but if you don't pay attention to the boring stuff - your supply and support network, the boring logistics that needs lots and lots of boring trucks - then you're doomed once the panzers start running out of fuel and ammo. All the behind-the-scenes stuff in strategy games.Sure, that big hellfire that fills half the screen and uses a high amount of resources looks cool and you see big numbers on the screen, but the +5% fire damage passive ability combined with your usual fire attacks improves your damage much more over time as you use it. The kind of ability that's always on, and carries you through trouble. Passive abilities in games with customization involved.'Why use these when you can attack right away,' you ask? Raising your stats (particularly defense and evasion) and lowering the enemy's (particularly attack and accuracy) can make the difference between That One Attack hitting only half of your party for damage that can be healed back up promptly and that same attack causing a Total Party Kill. (A lot of video games try to circumvent this by giving healing spells effects just as spectacular as their offensive counterparts, such as big shining lights, summoning gods, killing zombies, or massive plant growth).

Fiery doom, big swords, or raining bullets are a lot cooler but try getting anywhere without a dedicated healer in your group. The Medic in co-operative games, whether that be Tabletop RPGs, MMORPGs or FPSes.The bigger guns tend to be unable to stock much ammo and take up more space, besides. Weapon loadouts that don't require much ammunition or allow you to put a ton of ammunition on your vehicle in things like Humongous Mecha combat sims.Preventing damage, producing resources and delivering them (economy and logistics), preventing the opponent from acting whenever possible, gaining intel, forcing confrontation on your own terms, and doing all of this as efficiently as possible, are all time-honored principles with a lot less flash and glamour than overwhelming offense, yet the better part of Boring But Practical applications in real or competitive environments rely on these and similar concepts. Defensive abilities, strategies, builds, classes, or playstyles, especially in competitive games and in Real Life - the most straightforward way to get ahead of someone is to take fewer losses than they do or replace your losses faster.Things that will frequently fall into this trope: As the list below shows, this trope doesn't require that a non-boring counterpart exists. The Reliable Ones, if you will - and proof that Hollywood does not always hate boring. Therefore, we have things that are much more 'boring' and normal, but these things often contribute more to your success in the long term than the visually more impressive things. You could even have Cool, but Inefficient, where it just looks awesome, but that is about it. However, the more interesting something is, the more likely it falls victim to the rule of Awesome, but Impractical: You can't use it often enough, it costs too much, or it just takes too much effort to get it. Everyone loves flashy magic, BFGs, and big, thundering tanks.

Phantom fury hallway battle