Another major topic needs to be covered before we delve into the meat of WarCraft editing: actual game play strategy. I am sure that the majority of you out there have a vast quantity of WarCraft II playing time under your belts, but please read through this section, at least to bolster your tactical knowledge. Only when you can win the original missions with your eyes closed will you truly be able to judge the realism and difficulty of your own missions.
I should start this particular section with a quick disclaimer. All of the information contained here is written from the standpoint of a new mission, starting with a few peons or peasants and nothing else. Regardless of this fact, the information is valid for any mission in any stage, so be sure to keep an open mind!
Remember that, in building tactics, it's not what you build, so much as how fast you can build it. Time is of the essence in WarCraft II, and as the difficulty level of your missions rises, the amount of time that a player will have to grow unchallenged will drop. Because of this inverse relationship, a WarCraft player learns to quickly evaluate his or her current standing, and take the most beneficial steps to ensure victory.
Upon entering a mission, you should ignore the military units that you may be starting with and locate any peons or peasants you are given. Keeping time in mind, quickly scout the area immediately around you, looking for gold mines, trees, rocks, or bodies of water. The key is to place your Town Hall or Great Hall in a position that is not accessible to the enemy, at least not from multiple directions. Of course, you also want to allow easy ingress and egress for your own units.
Once the construction of the hall has begun, assign all available peons or peasants to assist in the building. If you are not already familiar with this tactic, you can vastly reduce the build time of a structure if you order your peons or peasants to Repair a unit under construction. The time you save here is very important, because a computer-controlled player will not use this tactic! Once the hall is built, you should begin to pump out the peons and peasants as fast as you possibly can. Mine and harvest as much gold and lumber that you can at the start of the game.
There is one other major building option. Sometimes you may find yourself up against a mission that comes at you hard and heavy from the start. In this case, you'll want to build a barracks first to give yourself some military assistance. This complete, you can pump out defensive units while tending to the hall.
Once you have the ability to make your own work force and troopers, you can allow your building strategy to progress however you like. I strongly urge you not to allow this manual, or any manual for that matter, to dictate the way that you approach missions. The diversity of WarCraft's units and buildings allows for many different styles of play. It is your preference that makes the game most enjoyable.
On another note however, you must also be able to recognize certain situations that require specific building tactics. There are three building tactics that all players should strive to incorporate into their own styles.
WarCraft II is not a game of love and peace. We've got the Humans against the Orcs, the Orcs against the Humans, and many times we have the factions within those groups fighting themselves. For this reason, anytime that you can enhance your chances of cleaving your opponent, you should take it. Often, you will find that you MUST take it!
In finding a way to better secure your position on the map, we look to the strategy playbook of the fearless maniac player. Constructing multiple large cities every time you enter a clearing is not a feasible, or even good idea for any mission. The placement of barracks however, is. Any strong city has two barracks among the various buildings. The computer, for instance, prefers to use three barracks when in land attack mode. Placing additional barracks just outside the gates of an enemy encampment is another good idea. It allows you to mass forces and strike without wasting time trying to maneuver a platoon across the entire game screen.
Occasionally, you may find that you are swarmed by the enemy so fast that you do not even get to think about offense. This is the scenario where the editor shifts the standard pattern of play from build-attack-rebuild to attack-rebuild-build. Here you must construct a barracks and begin turning out footmen or grunts as soon as possible. If this fails the task, restart the mission and build two barracks. After that, try three, four, or even five - whatever it takes to repel the invasion. True, it puts a major cramp in your city progression, but better an army camp to start with than a burning town hall and a few dozen dead peasants.
Towers are a debatable item among WarCraft's military selection. Despite gold and lumber costs that may seem unbearable, they really do make an excellent addition to your war efforts. They also throw offensive strikes against your lands slightly askew, as the aggressor now has to deal with the custom-placed defense. Later on, you will see that a computer player will, given adequate resources and building time, grow to a strongly fortified Keep or Stronghold, and then begin building towers wholesale.
Tactics regarding tower placement are pretty much the same as the tips for barracks. Do not merely scatter them around on general principals, as they are expensive to build and upgrade. However, carefully placing them at the entry points to your city or along the computer's attack routes is a very good call. Also, building towers along the coastline to defend your water-based buildings can spot and fire at underwater ships, greatly injuring a sea-borne attacker trying to take cheap shots at you.
Both of types of fighting-capable towers (guard and cannon) bear further discussion. The guard tower is capable of firing at the flying units in the game, most importantly griffins or dragons. For this reason, you should seriously consider placing a small number of them in every city to defend against aerial assault. They work just as well against ground attacks, delivering their damage with greater precision.
The cannon tower provides additional punch and range, but also carries some risk. When a cannon tower fires, it not only strikes against its target but also deals collateral damage to the surrounding area. On a tightly packed battlefield, friendly cannon fire could very easily wipe out your forces along with the enemy's!
In tackling an advanced mission, inventors and alchemists can be the extra something that tips the scales in your favor. They can manufacture airships (dwarven flying machine or goblin zeppelin) and bombers (dwarven demolition team or goblin sappers), both of which are highly useful.
What good can the airship be? The answer depends on how interested you are in what your enemies are doing. You should always try to build two or three airships to scout the map very quickly. If you know the positions and movements of the enemy, you can tailor your offense directly to your opponent.
NOTE: While I will refer to cheat codes that enable you to view the map throughout this manual, PLEASE do not make a habit of looking at the entire map using these codes! Viewing your missions to study the building style of computer players is acceptable. However, you ruin well-planned tricks and traps by spying on every mission layout. Also, remember to play your own missions blind to playtest, the way a new player would see the mission for the first time.
A final benefit of airships is the last-ditch action that they can take against naval forces. Move a flying machine toward the enemy fleet and park it directly over the most valuable target, preferably a battleship or underwater craft. When the enemy destroyers open fire, their cannon fire will strike your airship, but it will also damage the ship beneath it. A submersible (gnomish submarine or giant turtle) will probably go down before the airship. Conversely, using this tactic against a battleship may chew up two or three of your flyers. Just remember, this is a desperate tactic. It works, but don't expect miracles!
Bombing units add some interesting destructive capabilities to a mission, and best of all, they are just plain fun to use! Nothing softens up a thirty-man army like a half-dozen bombers. The key is to draw small groups of the enemy out toward the bomber, so that it can move into their ranks before detonating. Towers are another military item that will fall to a bomber in one hit. When attacking a tower, though, try to hit it at an angle where your unit explodes adjacent to another enemy building or unit. The collateral damage of a bomber is very impressive.
I recommend keeping a group of four to five bombers in reserve during a mission. They do take a long time to build, so you should start pumping them out early and often. In the later stages of a difficult mission, you may even need to build additional inventors or alchemists to create bombers quickly enough to be of assistance.
Another important function of bombers is to alter the actual play of the map. If an enemy is surrounded by rocks on all sides, with just a crack of a pathway leading in, why not use bombers to blast yourself an entrance on an undefended flank? Creative destruction can often bring victory where blunt slaughter can not.
Finally, if you are using the "right mouse button" method of play, DO NOT use the right button to control a bomber unit! If you should accidentally click on a friendly building, unit, rock, tree, or any object, the bomber will move in that direction and then explode, often blowing your own units to bits. For this reason, keep the bombers near the front lines, but safely away from your other units, and only control them one at a time.
Proceed through the offensive and defensive strategy sections with a strong sense of caution. As stated earlier, determine the ins and outs of different strategies first hand. Experiencing the game of WarCraft II in dozens of distinct ways will help you create missions that others will find to be an entertaining challenge, not an irritating one.
Anyone with internet access has most likely seen or heard about the many cheat codes that have been programmed into WarCraft II. Unfortunately, from what I have seen, no one in the on-line community has bothered to offer truly helpful information about these codes, or to even discuss some of the dangers involved.
Following is a list of some of these codes, along with some additional information about how to use them, as well as a brief warning.
O.K., so now that you've got a list of cheat codes. What good are they to an aspiring editor? There are two major points that I would like to convey regarding these and any other cheat codes you may discover.
Point number one: An editor's best friend (good play testers aside) is any code that allows you to view the game map without physically moving over every square inch of land. ON SCREEN is the best choice for this. This will allow you to monitor the growth and movement patterns of the computer-controlled color groups. Before actually playing any mission you create, you should sit back and watch the computer build. Did it grow and upgrade properly? Are the computer units free to move around the map and make an attack? Did it build a ring of farms around the gold mine and shut itself out? The computer will tend to play a particular mission in a similar way every time, so it is easy to discover flaws or strong points.
A similar code, SHOWPATH will also display the map. However, because it does not act as if you have explored the map yourself, your units will act as if moving into an unknown territory. If you are simulating an assault under SHOWPATH and you select an enemy unit to attack within the `shadowed' areas, your unit will merely move like a scout and end up being surprised and slaughtered. Although you know where the enemy is, your units don't.
Point number two: The other cheat codes provided here, although they may look tempting, are of no real use to the efforts of an editor. Some of them, such as UCLA or NETPROF, are obviously there as jokes. However, any code that involves an increase in gold, lumber, or oil will also give that same amount to each of your opponents! Therefore, boosting your stores to quickly run through a mission does not work. The only time you would want to purposely add resources to the mission via cheat codes, is to determine if that increase will improve the building and/or upgrading of a slow-growing computer player.
Now that you know the secrets behind the WarCraft II cheat codes, be sure to pass these added details along to anyone who will listen. The more information that the players have, the less frustration desperate newcomers to WarCraft will encounter.
