Age of Empires III/Fridge


 * When the player gets to the Imperial Age, he gets the option of building a Capitol and researching three technologies that tremendously increase the gather rates for all sources of Food, Wood and Coin. Sounds awesome doesn't it? The names of these techs are, respectively, "Large Scale Agriculture", "Deforestation" and "Excessive Taxation". These three issues became real problems during the late 19th century and the 20th century, so, in a way, the player becomes the cause of agriculture spreading like wildfire, the loss of thousands of acres in woodlands and the fact that so many people became crushed under huge debts. "It's just a tech and it's just a game!" you might say. "I'm just improving my civ's gathering rates!" While this is absolutely true, the fact remains that not thinking about the consequences for these actions is exactly why many politicians of the 19th were responsible for the problems caused by Large Scale Agriculture, Deforestation and Excessive Taxation.
 * On a similar note: fishing boats can gather food from fish or coin from sperm and humpback whales. While gathering food from fishing site eventually exhausts the food from it, a whale as coin source is infinite! That's right: throughout a game, you can station a maximum of four fishing boats around a whale (and there is usually more than a single whale on the map) and have them gather coin uninterruptedly until you move them away from the coin source or they get destroyed. Needless to say, even though at first we thought we'd never run out of them, whales turned out to be a very finite source of coin as time went by.
 * Morgan Black is over 30 at the time of the Siege of Malta in 1565. John Black, his grandson, is in his 20s when the Seven Years War breaks out in 1756. This looks like a pretty evident case of Writers Cannot Do Math until the end of the campaign, when it is revealed that.