Warcraft III

I still don’t understand why they decided to mix the worst aspect of MMOs (the grind) with an RTS. Utterly ruined the game for me. If anything even smells like “go kill these things which have nothing to do with the task at hand (killing the enemy) in order to get better at killing the enemy”, I suffer an instantaneous mini-barf. Resources I have no problem with, nor with “leveling up” through actual relevant combat. But “creeps”? Ugh. No.

Chain lightning isn’t a good candidate for autocast because it’s too expensive; a few casts would deplete your hero’s mana supply, so it’s best to reserve it for moments of opportunity.

Only some abilities are autocastable:

All races: Repair (on workers)

Human: Slow, Heal, Inner Fire, Spell Steal
Undead: Raise Dead, Curse, Web, Load Corpse, Orb of Annihilation
Night Elf: Fairy Fire, Abolish Magic, Searing Arrows
Orc: Bloodlust
Neutral: Frost Arrow, Incinerate, Black Arrow

I might have missed a few, but the point is that most abilities still aren’t autocasted.

Edit: I am slow at entering messages.

Most hero abilities were not autocast, only unit spells, and even then some of them were not either (Shaman heal totem). It’d be stupid to have autocast chain lightning when you could just run one unit up and soak the whole lighting cast up, or at least goes the logic.

I enjoyed War 3 and the campaign, and it’s pretty fun as a 1on1 game. The game really breaks down around 3on3 online though, and i’ll be honest, it becomes so visually messy i have a hard time controlling anything in 3on3 with each army being buffed by 4+ spells a piece. I haven’t played in a long, long time though.

If you want to learn how to play, learn playing the humans with a Paladin. If you can survive long enough the human casters like priests help make their army very durable with good longevity.

But, yea, remember War3 is HeroCraft. Big, powerful heroes help you win the game. And dead, unleveled heroes will lose you the game.

Also consider C&C 3 to play with your son. That’s a pretty fun casual game for putzing around with all the special units and such (although, ironically, some special units are easier to use against humans than the computer).

That explains my confusion; I thought that the ability showed the yellow box when you turned on autocast.

The icon looks like that screen when the auto-cast is off; when it’s on, it’s got a little glowing border like a marquee.

This is a rare situation (priest only I think) but you should know that each unit can only have one spell set to auto cast. You might want half your priests doing heal and the other half doing inner fire.

Also learn to use groups and group the same type of units together. You can give orders to groups including casting spells and setting auto casts. Depending on the order the game may only make one unit execute the order (like casting dispel magic) or might make all the selected units do the order (set auto cast, move, attack). Using groups makes managing your units much easier. For example, you can group all your sorceresses, then press the group hot key and rapidly cast polymorph on your opponent without having to select individual sorceresses’ for each spell cast.

The grind, my ass. It’s just a tech tree that you kill stuff to progress along, like command powers in CoH.

There’s even all sorts of tricks you can pull to power-level a hero to level 5 on creeps really quick. Once you reach that level, though, you get XP only from enemy units, not from neutral mobs.

If you’ve played Starcraft, this is awesome. I remember having a group of High Templar selected and, without thinking, clicked to cast Psionic Storm. Stupid High Templar! WC3 units are much smarter.

Check out the official strategy guide, especially the basics section. Some of the stuff there is outdated but it should definitely help you improve. Also, be sure to watch some replays and pay attention to the hero choices, build orders and unit combinations. The best site for that is Replays.net. It’s in Chinese but you probably won’t have trouble downloading the replays. For a more US-flavored replay site go to WCReplays.

It’s aggressive and all about the hero. Level him hard and level him early. Never sit there and do nothing, kill a creep camp for XP, rush the enemy base early and out-micro him. Harass with a lone hero and kill peons without dying yourself.

I played this with my GF and brother and easy used to beat the crap out of us. Then, one day, we suddenly won… and then we kept on winning. Now we play AMAI and beat that.

It takes practice, and I’d recommend some replays to give you a leg up, the way the AI Blizzard AI plays is not the way to play, it’s far too creep orientated, but if you’re playing skirmish in the expansion then creeps are for spare time not the main event.

I wouldn’t call it a grind, by the focus on heroes and leveling them totally killed my interest in Warcraft 3 multiplayer. Great campaign, though.

The shitty matching system is what killed mine.

“What’s that? You won two games in a row? Hmmm, well the correct win/loss ratio is 50% so I’m gonna throw your level 7 ass in against this level 25 guy…”

Ugh, I don’t like the whole thing being determined by who levels their Hero higher. But that explains why the enemy would wipe me out with his relatively small army.
Bleh, guess I’d better pick another game.

Edit: But thanks for the feedback. That really helped me not waste my time any further.

Warcraft 3 really shines in 2v2s. 1v1 is too much about creeping, and 3v3 is too much about spamming AoE.

And the “random team” matching system is worse than the 1v1 system.

From what I’ve seen Warcraft III 1v1 tends to be more hero harass (post-FT) than creeping.

I really don’t know where you folks get these ideas of what this game ‘tends’ to be about. While it is true that you can predict what your opponent intends to do, it’s usually based on the race/build order that they’ve got.

For example, an Undead player, in 1v1 could be rushing with ghouls, powercreeping (again with ghouls), teching with a mix of harras and heroless creeping, massing fiends/statues, teching to gargoyles/destroyers/abominations, etc etc etc.

The strategic variety is ungodly in WC3:TFT and abstracting the whole thing to ‘hero harass’ is really selling the complexities and subtleties of the game short.

This is true in 1v1s.

In higher level AT play, the early game (at least the last time I was competitive on the ladder) was all about hero harass. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you, but that’s what it was about.

Well… not really, no. Every strat is planning to win, and winning usually requires a superior eco and beyond expanding hero harrass is usually the other way of achieving this.

I don’t think anyone said hero harass is the be all and end all of Warcraft III, but it’s certainly an integral part of it.