"Cantaloup, whom I will peridocially refer to as fruit boy"
-WilliamWC3
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| WarCraft III First Conflict | | | Author: | | | IP: | wkstn113XXXX | | Date: | 02/21/02 06:02 | | Game Type: | Warcraft 3 | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 2, Max: 9, Min: 8
Lifetime Rating for Raider: 8.5370 |   | |
Greetings, I am Raider and I am back to battle reporting. I have two more reports, and should you like to see those, here they are:
Fox^1 vs Acura-x
and
Me using the infamous Heartcutter's deep6
However, today I bring you something that this site has barely seen... a WarCraft III battlereport!!! So lean back in your chair, grab yourself a drink, and prepare to be entertained. LOOK AT THEM PRETTY GRAPHICS!!!
This was my first game versus a human opponent. Before this, I played 2 games where I just ran around the map killing creeps and familiarizing myself with the orc tech tree. I created a 1v1 on the map Tranquil Paths.  Within moments I got an opponent--a guy names Xell entered my game. He picked the orcs and so did I. Well, looks like my first game was going to be a race matchup.
As you can see from the minimap, Tranquil Paths is a 4 player map with the starting locations in the corners and a natural nearby. I started in the top right with 750 gold and 200 wood in bank. I ordered 2 peons to mine gold, 1 to make a barracks and 1 to make a pig farm. With the remaining golf I qued up 4 more peons in my Great Hall. This brought me down to 40 gold.
Note (these notes assume you do not know pretty much anything about WC3): in WarCraf3 you only need 5 peons on gold. You can have as many as you want on lumber, but usually you don't need more than 5 there either. Thus my goal for peons early game was 10. An orc peon brings back 10 gold and 10 wood per trip. Also, as you could see from my reasources in WC3 you do not start with just enough money for 1 peon as in StarCraft, but rather with a good amount that allows you a good deal of flexibility of what to do early on. Most people either put all 4 initial peons on gold and then make buildings withe the new peons they make or put 2-3 on gold and start barracks and a farm right away in order to have figting units quicker. I prefer the latter. One important thing to note is that even though you hvae enough money for another Great Hall, you cannot turbo early expand because there are creeps defending all expansions, and your peons would simply die trying to make an expansion.
I placed my farm near the Great Hall and the barracks closer to the exit from the base so that my new troops would come out closer to the front line.
Once my barracks were done I started producing grunts, my basic fighting units. The first two arrived shortly. Also, as soon as I had my 10 peons, I began producing a hero.
Note: the first hero is free, the next two cost 450 gold and 100 wood each.
My hero of choice for this game was the Far Seer named Kag'ar Winterfang. When he arrived, I already had 2 grunts, 5 peons on gold and same amount on lumber. My town was working full swing.
I ordered my Great Hall to upgrade to the second tier and went back to my warriors.
"Move out! Let's hunt some creeps!"
It did not take my small party long to find the said creeps. 3 Gnolls were waiting on the road just outside my base.
"Get them lads!"
 The two grunts went right for the gnolls while the Kag'ar attacked them from the back using his ranged attack. When one of my grunts got down to half health, I applied the dance technique that is often used in zealot vs zealot or zergling vs zealot combat. I pulled that grunt back and let the creeps target the healthy grunt, then ordered the injured grunt back into the fight. The 3 gnolls fell with both of my grunts surviving with plenty of hit points left. As a reward for that fight, I got some gold a tome of intelligence.
Note: tome of intelligence is a one-time use item that increases your hero's intelligence by one. Intelligence increases the amount of mana that your hero has, and for heroes that have intelligence as their primary attribute (such as my far seer) it also increases their attack.
With the victory under my belt and one more grunt out of the barracks, I moved on to my natural.
"Enemy sighted, chieftain! Two trolls and an earth golem!"
Great, more experience, more gold, more stuff!
"Go get'em!"
The trolls went down easy as well, but one of my grunts was almost dead in the end. On the other hand my hero leveled. I got the chain lightining spell.
Note: Chain lightning in WC3 is a lot like it is in Diablo 2, except is looks better and it does not suck. You can put up to 3 points into this spell thus increasing the number of targets it hits as well as the damage. One important thing to know about the chain lightning is that it does the most damage to the first target and then a portion of that to the others, thus it is a good idea to target important units such as heroes or spell casters.
By this time the night has fallen and all the creeps on the map fell asleep.
Note: Since creeps are spread all throughout the map, scouting early with a peon is not possible since he will simply die. Instead what most people do is wait until the night time when the creeps go to sleep and then send a unit (usually the basic fighting unit) to scout the enemy. This is what I did this game.
"I want reconaissance!"
I sent the damaged grunt to scout in the counter-clockwise manner. At same time I noticed that my Great Hall upgrade has completed and I was at tier 2. I had already made a second barracks, and had some gold accumulated, so I ordered a forge, (armor and melee upgrades) a lumber camp, (makes my lumber peons not have to travel as far, allows production of troll headhunters, and their upgrades) and a spirit lodge (produces and upgrades shamans and troll witch doctors). At one of my barracks I set to reserching berserker rage, a special ability of the grunt that allows him to attack faster for a period of time (very powerful, especially when combined with bloodlust). I also started a second hero--the tauren chieftain. Since I knew my enemy was orc, I was pretty sure he would not go air, thus I decided not to get the troll hedhunters or wolf riders with their net ability and instead concentrate on grunts, shamans, and heroes, with a later upgrade to taurens.
Since I had secured my natural and was about to go into low upkeep where I would only get 70% of the mined gold, I decided to expand to make up for that. I ordered a peon to make new Great Hall at my gimmie when my grunt had reached the enemy base at the top left.
"Entering enemy base, Chieftain! Not many units around and no expansion, but they are already upgrading to the 3rd tier tech!"
The grunt went straight for the workers when he was suddenly cut down by the shockwave spell from the enemy tauren chieftain hero. So I knew he was teching and I knew his hero. His tech most likely meant taurens. I figured that since if I were to try and catch up, I'd have fewer taurens than him anyway, so I would just stick with my choice of grunts and shamans. Since I would get the expansion first, I should have no trouble. The key was to keep him from expanding.
 To this end I moved out to his natural as soon as my tauren hero completed. At his natural I found that not only had he not expanded, but he had not even killed the creeps there, as the 2 trolls and an earth golem were hanging out around his natural gold mine.
My 2 heroes and the grunts had no problem taking those out. That was free experience he would not get.
With yet another small victory under my belt I moved on to hunt more creeps. If you look at the minimap, you will notice that there is a neutral building half way between top right and top left. That was my next target. I was hoping to find bigger and higher level creeps there that would give me more experience. All the meanwhile I was building up at home and researching shaman upgrades, so by the time I arrived at the entrance to the small clearing that contained the neutral building, I had 4 more grunts and a shaman with bloodlust.
Note: bloodlust can be set on the autocast, and the shaman will automatically cast it when needed (in the case of bloodlust this means whenever there are units fighting). The AI for autocast is actually really good.
My shaman had over 200 mana, so I used it to cast a lightning shield on the tauren. After that i still had over 150 left, which is enough for 3 blood lusts since they are 50 mana each. I sent my force in.
Note: lightning shield is a durations spell that is cast on a friendly unit and it deals damage to adjacent enemy units. It costs 100 mana while bloodlust costs 50.
Defending the fountain of life were 2 ogre maulers and an ogre mage, fairly high level creeps.
In the picture you can see 3 lightning-like patches spinning around the tauren chieftain--that's the lightning shield. The red shields over one of the grunts, the far seer, and the tauren is bloodlust.
The battle was going along nicely. My far seer had advanced to level 3 and my tauren to level 2. For their spells I picked another point into chain lightning for the far seer and a point into shockwave for the tauren. Life was good.
But just as the last of the ogres was about to fall, my enemy showed up on the scene. His tauren chieftain accompanied by four more taurens hit my troops from the rear. I was so taken by surprise that I even forgot to take screenshots. I had a shaman, my far seer, my chieftain, and 3 of the grunts remaining. This was a hopeless battle, but my troops were going to die with honor...except for my heroes, who dashed back to my base as soon as I saw the force he threw at me. My two heroes made it out, but were both criticaly damaged. All other units had perished within seconds, as grunts stand no chance versus the taurens in one to one ratio, especially when backed by a decent level chieftain with endurance aura (faster movement). At home at my natural I had a grunt waiting, 5 peons mining gold, 1 mining lumber, and 2 troll headhunters training in my 2 barracks. This wasn't going to be pretty.
He must have stuck around at the fountain to heal his wounds and then moved on to my base. When he hit me, he only had 3 taurens left and his chieftain. my tauren hit them with his shockwave before going down since his life was near zero. The far seer got a good chainlightning off and retreated to wait for the spell cool down, while the grunt, 2 headhunters, and the 6 peons (go StarCraft peon defense!) engaged the enemy.
My troops were falling fast. Then Chain Lightning!!! The health bars on the enemy dropped, but they pressed on, mowing through my troops and peons. Only one peon remained on the battle field when the tide shifted. Two more troll headhunters arrived from my barracks, and the farseer cast yet another chain lightning. All of attacking taurens fell, just the chieftain remained with critical health bar. The spears of the headhunters and the bolts released by my far seer brought him down in short order.
I could not believe it. I beat back a pack of advanced melee units with a handful of ranged attackers, some peons serving as deuche bags, and my far seer. Man, Blizzard meant it when they said the heroes would be powerful...
Yet the damage I had taken was severe. I lost all but 1 peon at my expansion, had only 2 headhunters for units, and 1 heavily damaged hero. I set to work to rebuild.
The first order of business was resurrecting my hero. Luckily I had already constructed the altar of storms, and raising my dead chieftain again required minimal effort (though not so minimal amount of gold). I set my barracks and my spirit lodge cranking making more grunts and shamans. My far seer hero leveled during the combat, making him level 4, so I added one more point to the chain lightning skill for the total of 3 (maximum). Soon my force was rebuilt and I sent a grunt out scouting. His natural was still empty, so I sent the grunt to the bottom left to see if he had expanded somewhere secretly. Meanwhile I took my entire force or 6 grunts, 2 troll hedahunters, 2 shamans, and 2 heroes creep hunting.
We stumbled upon a mercenary camp defended by 2 more ogre maulers and an ogre mage. The victory came easy. My chieftain gained another level, and I got him endurance aura. I also bought myself an orge mauler at the mercenary camp since I still did not have taurens and needed a high hitpoint unit in my force.
At that moment my grunt scouting the map ran into my opponent's force at the bottom left doing same thing I was--creep hunting.
I saw it--the perfect opportunity to attack his main base. He could teleport using the town portal scroll, but his forces would arrive in disarray, giving me a huge positioning advantage.
6 grunts, 2 troll headhunters, 2 shamans, an ogre mauler, a level 4 far seer, and a level 3 tauren chieftain set out to his base. I was at 59 control, which is the pretty much as high as you can go while staying in low upkeep. I believe this size group to be a perfect attacking force in most situations since high upkeep makes you lose a ton of money.
I swept the few troops he had in front of his main and moved in. His buildings started burning.
Then he arrived via the teleport. This was the largest battle of the game. He had his tauren hero, tauren unit, shamans, troll witch doctors, and headhunters. My grunts used rage, hedhunters tossed their spears, the shamans cast blood lust, the tauren shieftain cast his shockwave, and the ogre mauler just kind of stomped about hitting random units on the head with its club. Still the battle was close. Then my far seer finally cast (it took me a while due to inexperience to click on a unit) the all too familiar chain lightning. The tide turned immeditely. Half his troops fell withing a second of the lightning hit, and the rest died slowly to superior numbers.
When his last unit fell, Xell offered a "gg". I must agree it was. I seriously thought I was going to lose when his force killed mine near the fountain of life. Yet I held out somehow and came back to win the game.
Lessons learned:
-Never give up, no matter how bad the odds may seem, there always might be a way. The least you can do is make your opponent work for the win.
-WarCraft III does an excellent job at making no unit become obsolete. Taurens are stronger than grunts in one on one combat, but grunts with blood lust and rage can stand up to them cost for cost.
-Despite the effectiveness of early units, I should have teched all the way. Taurens added to the mix and wolf riders casting their nets (and with their quite powerful attack) could make the battles a lot easier for me.
-Must use the bestiary. Even if I am too lazy to micro the ensnare of the wolf riders, the kodo beast with its combat aura owns since it gives +5 damage to all units. It's devour also means your opponent has -1 unit in every fight.
-Need to work on leveling my heroes more. I was only level 4 by the end of the game. That's not a good thing, I need to go after creeps more early game and get those ultimate spells. Earquake for the far seer for example would own a town.
Comments:
The game is great. With WC3 Blizzard shows once again that they are the kings of the RTS genre. The graphics are beautiful, and it runs well on my machine. I got Piii 600w with 256 SDRAM and TNT2 with 32 MEG video. I am running 600x480x16 with all other things set on medium. I was actually running it fine in most cases on 800x600 as well, but I feared it might get choppy in-game. And remember this is beta, which means all the overlook programs are making it run a lot slower. The final version will run a lot faster.
Well guys, this is it for now. Hope you enjoyed reading it. Please post your comments since they are the best reward for a writer. Questions, suggestions, anything you can think of, bring it--feedback is very thx :) |
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