The Long Road

03/16/2004 Archived Entry: "2:0"

So Warcraft 3 has taken a hold of my life. Again. The last time this happened, I was playing Tower Defense maps on battle.net until 5 in the morning every day; now I've moved on to actually playing against other humans, until 3 in the morning.

Seems like all online gamers have this impossible level of skill in co-ordinating their dozens of troops, and attending to their base contruction and tech-tree climb that I simply don't have. I thought I was a pretty decent player after having beaten the game, but the online community is a completely different animal.

My style of "build a large base then send out a huge army" just doesn't really seem to win when everyone else's finely tuned strategy is "attack and kill as quickly as possible". I don't like having the stress of managing so many aspects of the game at once so I just concentrate on one thing at a time. Obviously, this does not work. I think my "style" is simply too passive since I enjoy long relaxing games in an rts and not the focus-intensive short games that are played online.

This latest Warcraft binge started when a friend's female roomate suggested that they play the game. The curiosity factor was enough to get us all to install and check out her skillz. First game I played against her, I lost. In fifteen minutes. Second game? Lost, 20 minutes.

Anyways, I've had to read up on a lot of strategy on the game again, and practice all the hotkeying and the detailed micromanagement (which I've never really been good at), and lots of late night training, cuz godamnit I can't lose to her again!

Replies: 7 comments

One technique to try when starting out on Battle.net is to create a game for newbies and then specify before you start that you can't attack for the first ten minutes.

Posted by Romer @ 03/17/2004 09:42 AM EST

Hey Thai, remember when we played Starcraft? I felt the same way when I played you. I couldn't enjoy the game. The only thing that kept me going longer than 20 mins was my excellent skill at hiding my main base around the map (by flying around).

As for WC3, I no longer have it. It got boring. I like CivIII a lot more. Or I just play Madden 2004.

Posted by dAN @ 03/17/2004 09:49 AM EST

lol, if you think RoC is fast-paced, wait until you see TFT! =P

In TFT, they put A LOT more emphasis on tier 1 units, so much that in most cases upgrading to tier 2 comes as a risky decision the player must make.

All tier 1 units/buildings are cheaper, and to upgrade to tier 2 takes more money and more time now =P So all you see throughout the first part of the game are hero harassment + rushes hehehehe
(games rarely last longer than 20-25min)

And about your strategy, yeah I kinda realized that since everytime I came to attack your base it'd be fully loaded with towers + upgraded building armor! So even if I killed your army, your base was another story! :P [Remember that game that lasted almost an hour??] haha, good stuff..

can't wait to play tonight =P

-Dave

Posted by Dave @ 03/17/2004 10:46 AM EST

I used to play WC2 in high school, and fancied myself rather good at it. When one of the guys in my class learned I played, he asked for me to play against him. I beat the crap out of him in the first ten minutes by making footmen & annihilating his base.

I never really played against people before (usually cooperative against the computer), but that struck me as the best strategy -- you never really know what your opponent's got in store for you, and if you want to win, strike fast & hard... I think that's why Bnet games are mostly like that. I much prefer playing with family (I have two brothers.)

I never got any good at WC3, sadly, and my younger bro & I always got our butts kicked by an equal number of computers.

I've found "adventure maps" (lots exist out there for StarCraft, and for WC3 I'd imagine) more appealing, as I still have a cooperative bent -- I'm a sore loser, and losing against something that doesn't gloat isn't so bad. :P

Posted by Arshwana @ 03/17/2004 11:14 AM EST

The problem with War2 and Starcraft were the click-fests that resulted.

I'm sure most people know reading this know all this, but in both of these games your troops were more efficient at killing if you targeted enemy units one by one. The reason for this is that near-dead units do as much damage as fully charged ones, so it is in your advantage to destroy units as quickly as possible. The default behaviour is unfortunately to attack whoever is closest, which leads to a pairing off between soldiers.

In starcraft, a simmilar situation exists with resource gathering. If you just tell all your units to harvest one patch, they take a few seconds in the crucial opening minutes of game to sort themselves out. It's faster if you tell each one to harvest a different location.

This leads to more focus on tactics, rather than strategy. Blizzard recognized this and made War3 more explicitly focused on fewer units with more tactics and less strategy, but I'm unsure of how successful they were.

My point? Not that these games weren't fun, but since online people endlessly practiced the correct click-strategies, which really require skills I would argue shouldn't be necessary to enjoy the game, they would gain an eventual advantage.

Posted by ian @ 03/17/2004 01:19 PM EST

I'm sorta a sore loser too but it doesn't take away from my enjoyment too much. One of the guys I play with is one of those typical trash talkers but he gets pretty offensive so I just tune him out. Sometimes he makes me feel like I shouldn't even be playing with him but then I just think of the day when I'll be good enough to kick his ass in 10 mins. Then he'll shut up.

The "adventure maps" are pretty fun, so are the tower defense ones but they're not as satisfying as actually beating an actual person.

The "real" problem with WC3 and pretty much all other RTSs is that strategies get tuned to an almost exact science. So everybody follows pretty much the same patterns since its known to work best, the game then really comes down to, as Ian said, being able to micromanage your units during combat which has been boiled down to "correct click strategies". You can't really fault the good players for being good at the clicking aspects since that's what you really have to work at to become better at these games. I can't really see any other way of doing things since, again, everyone will follow the same build orders and the same strategies since they work best.

Posted by Rayne @ 03/17/2004 05:28 PM EST

OH BABY! 2:2! I've redeemed myself!

Posted by Rayne @ 03/18/2004 02:06 AM EST