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: