I've tried hard to think on how polymorphism might be used effectively in a game. I just can't figure it out.

It's easy to find out how components help on quickly adding new functionality to entities, thus improving flexibilty and code reuse. But polymorphism seems useless to me.

I'm asking before starting a new project, cause I might be missing some important issues regarding polymorphism and regret it later...

If you don't need it, don't use it. It depends on the type of game you are making as well as the way you design your engine. Just because the language you are using supports it, doesn't mean it is necessary.

My first battleship game in Java used polymorphism quite heavily.

All the naval boats had a common super class named "Boat_Hull" which contained the general properties and behaviors such as length, hp, resistance and position.

When the game loaded I simply generated x number of boats for each window and placed them in a "Boat_Hull" array even if the objects had specific types such as "Renegade" or "SubMarine".


This allowed me to easily keep track of the boats inside an array and if I ever needed to call a specific function I just casted into it's primitive type(Such as a radarscan method for a Scout boat).