Warcraft 3 Strategy Guide: 1v1 Ladder Games

“Neglected by Congress below, distressed with the small-pox; want of Generals and discipline in our Army, which may rather be called a great rabble, our credit and reputation lost, and great part of the country; and a powerful foreign enemy advancing upon us, are so many difficulties we cannot surmount them.” - Benedict Arnold

Wise words from one of the greatest military minds in history. Indeed, succeeding at Warcraft III takes patience, study, cunning, and most of all, dedication. To win at 1v1 ladder games, you will need to excel at many different skills including:

1. Game mechanics
2. Race selection
3. Hero Skills
4. Basic creeping strategies
5. Organizing your army
6. When to attack/retreat
7. Micromanagement
8. Good sportsmanship


....PSYCHE. To win at this shit, you don't need any of that. Throw it all away in the garbage and spit in Sun Tzu's face. All you really need is disdain for your fellow man to make a total mockery out of a serious opponent. Just remember: anyone else playing ladder is a sub-human douchebag not fit for existence.


Now that you are in the right frame of mind, this guide will teach you how to not only slap your dick in your opponent's face, but also to improve your own win/loss record. Actually, since my account was banned from ladder play because of maphacking, this is not so much as guide as it is a demonstration of how you can turn 1v1 ladder into a total joke.

Hiding The Tree


I'm not going to go into great detail of how to set this up, but here is a short breakdown:

1. Choose Night Elf
2. At the beginning of the game, detonate all wisps
3. Uproot your Tree of Life
4. Find a good patch of forest and move your Tree of Life towards it
5. Start eating away at single trees to create a path into the forest, deep enough to hide the tree from normal view


The reason this works is because to technically win a standard game of Warcraft, your opponent must destroy all of your buildings. The purpose of this strategy is to hide your only building at the start of the game so your opponent cannot locate you and therefore, cannot win. Since trees block vision, your Tree Of Life can almost remain hidden from your opponent for most of the game. The Night Elf race is perfect to set up this condition because:

1. You can detonate your workers, erasing any trace of them
2. The Tree Of Life can eat away at trees, making entry into a forest easy

As easy as the concept seems, there is a bit of skill required to know where to burrow into a forest, and how to minimize the number of trees eaten to cover up evidence that you have entered a forest. You also want to make sure that you are adequately hidden from view within the trees.

Victory


Using this strategy, victory is gained from your opponent quitting the game. This may occur for several reasons:

1. Your opponent believes there is a bug in the game, and that no opponent has spawned on the map. Your opponent then thinks that there is no way to win the game and quits (70% of victories)
2. Your opponent believes that you have somehow hacked the game, allowing you to become totally invisible, and quits out of fear (15% of victories)
3. Your opponent realizes that you have hidden the Tree Of Life, but rather than spend all the effort tracking you down, quits out of laziness (10% of victories)
4. Your opponent, for whatever reason, quits anyway (5% of victories)




Personally, I have managed a 50% victory rate by Hiding The Tree. So that means that half the time, your opponent will quit by any of the reasons mentioned above, and the other half of the time your opponent will track you down and kill you.

At first, 50% may not sound that good, but as a long-time ladder player, I would have a 50% win rate even if I had played normally. This brings me the next reason why this is a superior strategy:

Opportunity Cost

I was once a dedicated player of Warcraft ladder games. I would spend a lot of time practicing, reading strategy guides, watching replays, and working on my micromanagement. After a while, I realized that no matter how much effort I put into this game, someone was always gayer, expending that extra effort to gain that extra 2% advantage to win the game.


But this is where the elegance of the Hide The Tree strategy comes in. When a game starts, your opponent is usually working away like mad building units, directing workers, and managing creeps, all to gain that advantage at a great speed. On the other hand, you have spent at most 2 minutes total eating away into a forest and hiding your tree. After that, you are free to do what you want, like study, watch TV, whatever, while your opponent all the while is feverishly building his army in preparation of an epic battle.


So even if your opponent hunts you down and kills you, think about what he has gained. Has he gained any utility from playing this game with you? Nope. Unless your opponent enjoys clicking on black spots on the map until he finds a pixel with a different color, he has wasted all his years of Warcraft practice and study because it amounts to nothing when you consider that his opponent hasn't built anything. Your opponent has gained a win, but has he done so any easier than if you were playing for real? Hard to say. At the beginning of the game, your opponent is treating the game like any other, so he is expending the same amount of energy and effort. You are not handing him a victory, you are making him work almost as hard for it and without deriving any enjoyment.

And if your opponent quits, you have won a game, plus your opponent feels like shit. It's win-win.


Advanced tactics

As usual, if you want your opponent to quit as fast as possible, go into Ironman mode. This means no talking to your opponent at all under any circumstances.


By remaining cold and distant, your opponent feels the desolating loneliness of his existence in this game, and will hasten his quitting. This usually results in the highest percentage of quits.

On the other hand, you can increase the chance that your opponent quits because he thinks there is a bug in the game by crafting an error message:


That covers the Hide The Tree strategy. I find that most of my enjoyment comes from the long verbose insults my opponents throw at me, but sometimes, the shorter the sweeter:

HILLARY IS RAPING YOUR MIND AGAIN

HILLARY ASSAULTS YOUR MIND DIRECTLY




*ZAP*




^________________________^

^______________________________^

(You can now smell colors.)

Ridiculous and Insane Protestors

The world is changing hands. Great powers are rising. The things people care about are being decided, and with democratic freedom comes civil protests that bury entire cities in civil disorder. I have keenly been observing these recent upheavals and I can tell you that I can disgusted by how stupid they are. Here goes:

Muslim Protests Against The People of Denmark

Slogan: "KILL KILL DENMARK! WE WANT DANISH BLOOD"

Millions of "radical Islamists" want to kill the Danes because of the Theo Van Gogh blasphemy picture. Not only was Van Gogh brutally murdered by a radical Islamist hitman, but the call for the eradication of the Danish race came up. All of this for a religious blasphemy?
Reasonably enough, this reaction was seen by most Westerners as barbaric and medieval. I think this is totally outrageous. Islam should be happy! You took Constantinople back from the crusaders, okay? Jihad over.

Chinese Protesters against Carrefour
Slogan: "BOYCOTT TIBETAN INDEPENDENCE"

Apparently, there is something called the "Chinese Internet", and on this subset of the internet, word got out that FRENCH PEOPLE THINK TIBET ISN'T A PART OF CHINA AND THEY HATE CHINKS.
So what do Chinese citizens do? They vent their nationalist anger by protesting a French supermarket called Carrefour (even though this rumor turned out to be false). Simply absurd. Why do Chinese people think that they're beyond criticism? Hey, the Cultural Revolution is over, motherfuckers.

American Protests against Darfur

Slogan: "FEED A CHILD WITH JUST ONE CLICK"

This is an idyllic scene of white people valiantly coming to the aid of suffering Africans unable to care for themselves. They do not care why they are hungry, simply that they are, and that Americans need to send food to save that child right away. To do this, they know they must convince others to help, so they create artistic and pleading slogans to inspire others to send help too. They photoshop pictures of starving people and put captions on it like "she is waiting for just 1 bean" or "I hope you are grateful where you live".
Shocked by these unusual images, the people listen: They say "oh my goddd thats so saddd" or "thats so horrible!!!!!!!!!" and the money pours in.
This is manipulative social poison. Why do these people think they can succeed in feeding the people when all the governments of the world have failed? If you could feed with clicks, believe me, the world would be flush with virtual food. Take a lesson from Rambo: stfu!

The Gay Games of WC3 Part 2

In this next part of the series, I describe the really gay shit that I play when Im feeling malicious and need a cheap laugh.

Jurassic Park Survival
I used to play this game with fervor, desperately trying to survive in a jungle filled to the brim with dinosaurs and flies and sometimes stuff from the Pleistocene epoch. In my effort, I constructed great walls of electric fence, massive gun towers, research facilities, I mined the earth and ripped down the forests to consume the resources I needed to ensure my survival.
But I would always fail. In the end, the reptiles would also overrun me. Then I realized, hey I don't really need to survive on my own: I just need to make sure everyone else DOESN'T survive. So with a cordial smile, I reach out to other survivors and with a generous hand, I construct for them a much needed gun turret, right in the middle of their base. Whats that noise? THE GUN TURRET IS GOING HAYWIRE RUNNN BEFORE IT TK'S YOU NOOO. Aw...shit. Should have run.

Rating: 3/5

I am Legend Survival
uh WAIT I CAN SAVE YOU!!!
One of many zombie survival variants but better. You gotta keep the zombies off your ass before daybreak and to survive, you have to work together. I am ignoring the fact that Will Smith was the "last man on earth" because this allows you to TK and justify it by quoting Will Smith.

Rating: 3/5

Island Defense

This game represents a bunch of weird WC3 mods called Vampirism or Sheep Tag or whatever. I don't care. I all I know is that Justin is really good at griefing this. Fucking this game up is extremely complex, involving a variety of builds, hiding tactics, verbal duplicity, and sleeper cell TKs. Damn, I want to play Myst.

Rating: -/5

Anime Fight
This picture pretty much sums it up. It's basically like DOTA but rather than lanes, you fight on a big battlefield. I just went around as a Spike Speagle laying remote mines all over the place, but it got old because I couldn't ignore the fact that Spiku does not look like a troll spearthrower. Lame.

Rating: 1/5

DBZ Tribute Extreted
I know this sounds stupid for a WC3 mod but I gotta tell you, this is the best shit ever. All the skins got modded into dbz characters and you go around doing exactly what they do in the show: Power up for a long time and then fight for 2 seconds. The best part is that this is actually a serious game that "DBZ Tribute Pros" play and if you suck at it they will call you a n00b and "send you to another dimension". What the hell does "Extreted" even mean?

Rating: 5/5

The Gay Games of Warcraft 3: Part I

It's a laudable concept that game designers would make their creation totally and easily modifiable. The ability to create new games from current or older ones not only increases the game's value thereby making your dollar go further, it also turns a good game legendary, keeping it on peoples' hard drives long after its release date. For a good example, look at Half-Life, a game that came out a full decade ago, yet is so easily modded that you can still find a hundred online servers hosting Counter Strike or Team Fortress Classic or Day of Defeat to this day.

The crack peddlers at Blizzard know a thing or two about making a game that people willingly will play for the rest of their natural lives...see Starcraft or World of Warcraft and the ill effects they've had on the Asian economy for an example. Therefore, they made Warcraft 3 incredibly easy to fiddle around with. Literally anyone with some time on their hands and a somewhat feasible idea can cobble together a mod, which is easily downloaded through Battle-Net from the custom games menu and can be played by anyone within minutes. Unfortunately, there is a price to be paid by the intuitiveness and ease of modification in Warcraft 3. While in the hands of an inventive person, they have the potential to be both interesting and innovative, in the hands of your average Warcraft 3 player they can also be incredibly stupid wastes of time.

Hence: "Gay Games." Thank (satsux) Balls for that little gem.

But he's right, some of these games are incredibly gay, mostly the Anime themed ones, some of these games were made by people with just an immensely bad sense of what is fun.

Here's a list of the Gay Games I've played so far, and a relative ranking of how fun they are to play. Since my copy of WC3 is hacked and won't run online and I end up just playing them on Balls' computer anyway, I have no screenshots so I will just use random pictures as placeholders.



Defense of the Ancients (DOTA)

So popular, even has its own professional-grade art. This should scare you.

This one shouldn't even be considered a custom game anymore, but it technically is. The sheer overwhelming popularity of this mod probably surpasses even that of the game it's modifying. The setup is simple: You have two bases that automatically send AI soldiers after each other at regular intervals. This creates a total standstill, were it not for player-controlled heroes that use Warcraft unit models and have special abilities that can be used to give an advantage to your side. If you manage to consistently outwit the enemy-controlled heroes, the enemy will find you in their base, killin' their doodz. Whut r they gonna do? Nothing. The game is over and the bitch session begins about who was maphacking, who's a noob, who was secretly working with the enemy and who should uninstall the game entirely.

Balls contends that this is a game played by Brain Surgeons, CEO's and Harvard/MIT grad students, and that the game is a cranial masterpiece. I myself liken the game to CounterStrike in body, form and deed (switching realtime strategy for first-person shooter) and leave it at that. The game is good. The community is gay.

Rating: 4.5/5 starz: Awesome concept, but lends itself to the obsessive type of player.



Pokemon Challenge!

Welcome back to the '90's.

This game has a good concept, although there are those who would definitely argue with me on this. I never played Pokemon as a kid, nor have I ever watched the show. I know the difference between Pikachu and Koffing, and I know that chucking pokeballs in Smash Brothers is fun as hell. In this game, however, a simple pokeball costs you THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE U.S. DOLLARS and the only way you can get money is by killing Pokemans. You savagely order your own Pokemon to attack other Pokemans and beat them to death so you have enough scrap to buy yourself a pokeball so you can capture OTHER Pokemans and repeat the whole process over again.

Fleshing this out is a duel system that doesn't quite work, which means you can challenge random NPC's and your own fellow players to duels in a mini arena, which supposedly earns you more XP and money and whatnot. The game ends with an epic duel that determines the game's final winner. The game is pretty unfinished, and the duels sometimes freeze, causing the game to repeat music from the TV show forever while anyone else in the room loses their goddamn mind listening to you play. I figure one day they'll fix it, but there are a lot of people who would wonder, why bother?

Rating: 3/5 stars: Not enough Pokemans.



Naruto Challenge (or something)

Wait what?

Like DOTA, but each Warcraft hero is supposed to represent a character from an Anime series. I have no clue who these people are, and it seems incredibly pointless. This is what 9/10ths of these Gay Games are about.

1.5/5 stars: Needs moar ramen.



Slide, Ninja, Slide!

Come get some.

This one is stupid, but different. You're a ninja in an ice world and you have to slide around with hardly any control over your character at all, avoiding snow monsters and rezzing your friends when they fuck up. The best part? Linkin Park plays at 3X speed on repeat in the background. SWEET.

2/5 stars: Good if you're on meth.



Warhammer 40,000 Defense

Where do you think you're going.

Gee mom, why can't I just play Dawn of War? No, Billy, that game is violent and is full of conflicting religious messages, I'd rather have you playing a nice game about elves and magic faeries.

Well, you'll show her! After downloading this mod, you can now be an awesome Ork chieftan slaughtering countless defenders of...what? It's just a really bad tower defense game? Shit.

0.5/5 stars: Makes it suck to be alive.




Porn Maps

Paper raper.

Umm, I don't know for sure if there's any actual porn in these maps, but I figure somehow they managed to get a porn slideshow into the WC3 engine and it's not just sorceresses making "pain" noises on repeat while demons bump against them. The only porn map I did see was actually a screamer where a huge demon pops out at you after about a minute, which was hilarious enough to earn extra stars.

2/5 stars: This is generous.




Revenge of the Niggers (yes, Niggers)

You bitch.

Ok, here we go. This mod actually deserves its own post, but in short, half of the players play the part of the "Niggers" and the other half play the cops. You run around town, past Mickey D's and KFC's and Ghettos and Banks either performing criminal acts as a Nigger or preventing them as a Cop. Sadly, this game is actually pretty well done which indicates a lot of time and loving effort was poured into it. People who like this mod are very sick in the head (or they're just having a Nigger moment, know what I'm sayin?)

3.5/5 stars: Gratuitous racism? In MY warcraft? It's more likely than you think.




Wilderness Survival

Um, will this be on the test?

Personal bias puts this one over DOTA in terms of quality, but I have my reasons. This game is a lot shorter, slightly easier to understand and definitely more creative than DOTA, and when played right, is a lot more enjoyable. You and your fellow players are survivors trapped in a snowy wilderness, desperately trying to stave off the cold and wild animals in an attempt to outlast the others. As you wander through the snow, your body heat level drops and kills you if it reaches zero. To prevent this, you must find items such as wood, vines, moss, ice, animals bones and other items, hit "E" for "make," and see if the combination of items you have creates a useful item...such as a campfire, a tent or a fur jacket.

You basically have to figure out recipes by trial and error, the help of other humans or useful survival guides that you can find lying around. For example, stick plus stick = big stick. Big stick plus animal horn plus vine equals spear! Mushroom when cooked in your campfire can produce poison paste, which when added to your spear equals poison spear. It's basically impossible to find any of these recipes online, and in a way you kind of don't want to tell anyone the recipes you know. It gives you a bit of an advantage that they don't know how to create a loaded shotgun which they can use to blow you away while you chop wood for your fire.

This game is fun as hell and has an element which you don't find in many other games: the element of creation. Taking the time to find all the materials to make your own brewery (which takes about a day of game time) and being able to create a nice, frosty beer for your efforts (and get drunk, which keeps you warmer) is satisfying and rewarding.

5/5 stars: Will make you confident enough to crash your plane in the frozen tundra.



Parasite

OH SHI-

This game is wayyyy too complicated. You can tell that its creator really cared a lot about the gameplay, but as a result it becomes so overly complex that only the most dedicated player will even bother to try to figure it out. You're a space marine (or the station computer) on a space station, and one of your fellow space marines is infected with a parasite. Only he knows that he's secretly an alien saboteur bent on killing everyone, and everyone else has to figure it out before it's too late. Suspicious behavior has to be observed, and there is serious punishment for killing the wrong guy because you thought he was a BRAIN SUCKING INSECTIOD CEREBRATE FROM DEEPEST SPACE, so you have to be careful.

However, there are so many abilities, machines that can be fucked with, ways to die and other factors (the guy who plays the station computer, for example, is in charge of so much crap it's hard to understand what the fuck is going on before it happens) that the game is extremely confusing. I won a game totally by accident because the parasite accidentally blew himself up because he didn't know what the hell he was doing. This was after I had turned off the oxygen machine a few times and got my allies wondering whether I myself was the parasite (which was technically impossible since I was playing the station computer.) Given more time to play, I'm sure it could become really fun.

4/5 stars: Get your "The Thing" kicks here.



300 Spartans

Gay Games personified.

You're a scantily-clad beefed up warrior dude fighting waves upon waves of AI-controlled Persian invaders. Basically you spear your way through tons of guys, and eventually you all get killed...just like in the movie! Not very rewarding, and there are only about 10 of you anyway instead of the advertised 300, so you will have to take what you can get.

3/5 stars: This is blasphemy.



More Gay Games await, if I have the strength and fortitude to try them all. Balls really should be helping me with this since he has the copy of WC3 that actually works, but until then, enjoy finding the games that are less gay on your own.

Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

The recent Chinese oppression in Tibet got me thinking about this movie. Of course, 10 years ago I'd watched it as a kid, but I found that I could recall very little. I was most surprised to find that it was taken from the autobiography of an Austrian mountain climber and so naturally, the first half of the movie is about scaling peaks.

The Free Tibet sentiment is a lost movement. Against the incredible clout of the PRC, Tibetans stand no chance of independence. While the Dalai Lama waits in exile, his country is being buried in Chinese government resocialization programs.This is one of the only examples I can think of when nonviolent resistance has failed.
Religion is poison.
The Tibetan people once ruled their own mountain empire. They had their own imperial palace, their own military, and their own Sino-Tibetan language much as Korea, Vietnam, or Mongolia has now. They have coexisted with the Han Chinese for thousands of years.

The communist hatred for religion changed that. Under the banner of One China, they put Tibet under military control and wiped out Tibetan spiritual culture to "eliminate the old evils". This historical event is what is shown in the second half of the movie. Overall, this movie is about a traveler who became great friends with the Dalai Lama, and it's tragic when bad things happen to your friends. It should be, anyway.

Rating: 75%
When I watch this, I get this feeling that it is comparing Nazi Germany to Communist China. Well, why not, the similarities lie in their appetite for annexing land and killing millions.
Pro-Tibetan

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

Many people think this is an inspiring movie about hard work. I think it's a movie about an idiot that happened to claw his way out of poverty through sheer willpower. I find it curious that out of all the choices this guy had in life, he chose the hardest path possible. Out of greed, he chose to be a lowly commodity salesman, out of ambition, he chose to take on this "competitive internship at Dean Witter", and out of pride, he chose to take care of a 6 year old kid all at the same time. In the face of failure, he stubbornly persisted by making cold calls at work, fighting for space in the homeless shelter, and washing his power suit in the sink.

The moral of the story is supposed to be that persistence pays off. That those who work hard will make it in the end. Or is it? I think this is a story of pure luck. He was delusional. He spent too much money, took on too much risk, ignored the costs of living. He didn't even know about paying taxes! He sought salvation in the most unlikely of places and by pure luck, found it. People who watch this movie should be given a disclaimer that black people do not necessarily have to go through all this shit to make the American Dream and that CEOs are not all easygoing white people. Or are they? Actually, I wouldn't know.

Rating: 65%
In this movie, Will Smith runs all over the city of San Francisco. He does a lot of running.

Stealth (2005)

I'm going to blog this movie while I watch it.

A bunch of futuristic planes are engaged in close combat with anti-aircraft turrets. Looks like some shit from Command and Conquer. This movie was called "Stealth" right?

The main characters are taking a clothing optional vacation in the tropics. Jamie Foxx is hitting on an Asian chick in a rice paddy. Character development is occurring.

The computer fighter pilot(ED1) just gained self-awareness and went rogue. It's going around destroying shit to justify its existence. Bares great resemblance to HAL9000.

Holy shit! Jamie Foxx just got killed. ED1 completely owned his ass.

ED1 just blew up this massive in-flight refueling airship.

ED1 just kicked the Russian Federation's ass.
Uh theres some kind of conspiracy/loyalty/love arc going on here. What the fuck?

The pilots just got into this huge fight with the North Korean military. ED1 -who is now a good guy- sacrifices itself to save them. Strangely, nobody cares.

Jamie Foxx's funeral. HAHAHAHA

Closing line: "Just tell me you love me, you pussy." The remaining main characters all have have horrific combat scars on their faces.

Rating: 40%
That was not what I expected. Not even close. This is not an April Fools Day joke, at least, it wasn't meant to be.