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Well now, this may seem somewhat out of place knowing this site's relationship with WCIII over the years, but a week or so ago I (prompted by my friend who had just played for the first time with some friends over LAN) decided
"You know what? Maybe this Warcraft III business really is for more than just awesome UMS games!"
And thus began trying to play 1v1 for the first time (I may have played 15-30 games of "1v1" back when I played a lot of WCIII customs, but that was when I was 13 and had no idea how to actually play 1v1) and proceeded to grab up all the information a hungry starcraft player would normally go for.
However I ran into a problem. After watching all of the Grubby's Warcraft III Commentaries which I highly recommend to anybody at all cause Grubby is awesome, I pretty much ran out of resources to help me other than just watching replays of me or pro players, which doesn't really help somebody who has no idea what they are doing.
So after finding my way to Garena for the first time and finding out that people are really really good there, but the ping made going back to regular old B.net impossible, I would join game after game and the same strange thing would occur.
I kept running into this situation.
Game 1, say I'm Orc vs UD. I have some 50 food army, and he has some 50 food army. We meet, a battle happens, and I don't kill a single unit while all of mine die.
Game 2, We switch the races but keep the same armies, so I now have the units that roflstomped the orc army right? Well after the battle I still don't kill any units (or even do any damage it feels like) and all my stuff dies.
Something is going on here, and I know that's is pretty much purely skill. But seriously how the fuck do you play this crazy game?
Anybody wanna help a noob out?
Also, I head out to a double header directly after I post this edit. 2 tests, 1 gets done 15 minutes before the 2nd starts.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fuckmylife.
 
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On February 29 2012 09:50 babylon wrote:
Micro better. :D
Yes yes, that's what I've been told by nearly every person that speaks english, but...
What does than even mean man......T.T
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In my experience with Warcraft III the general idea is that every single unit is very important and needs to be properly controlled, and the emphasis on macro is greatly diminished.
Some of the factors that cause this are the hero units, and the fact that amassing a large army works against you due to the whole income reduction you get when you get high in supply.
It's like Starcraft's micro, but a much larger emphasis is put on individual skirmishes over just "simply having more stuff" than the opponent.
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Yeah ... it's like "macro better" but it's more difficult to explain. 
Stay away from a-moving, and pay close attention to what each individual unit is doing during a battle. Don't just let them hit things willy-nilly if you can help it. Run away injured units, deny experience if you're just having a small skirmish, try to predict what the enemy will do or where he'll move and adjust your own positioning to block or to set up a better angle or attack/spell-cast accordingly, etc. And surrounds. It's kind of like a chess game. :O
I mean, overall, War3's basically a game of extreme timings and one, constant, game-long skirmish. If you're more comfortable with macro, btw, I'd suggest going HU over the other races.
I find that a lot of my difficulties with War3 come from not being able to clearly perceive what's happening during battles. I get in that mode where a battle happens and ... I don't actively try to micro, because I can't see anything but flashy colors. It's terrible, and I've played the game since it was released. (Still not very good.)
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in starcraft 2 you can get to gm while mostly 1Aing. this is not the case in wc3. u need to use your spells as fast as u can, focus fire different targets with melee units or target one with ranged units. , use items, back up red hp units, look for opportunities to surround, and many more micro concepts that starcraft players dont even understand.
if u want to be good at warcraft u actually need to play alot and be good. cant memorize a 4gate build and go to masters in 2 days.
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On February 29 2012 09:52 N3rV[Green] wrote:Yes yes, that's what I've been told by nearly every person that speaks english, but... What does than even mean man......T.T
not sure if you are serious but I guess it doesnt hurt to answer.
Micro basically is the word for extensive unit control in a small scale. So for example in SC2 much emphasis is put on managing your economy and production facilities that would be macro. Micro is when the emphasis is put on single unit management. Best example would be the heros you are using in WC3. To get them to their full potential you have to put a lot of your time into managing them.
So what the guys were telling you about your games is that you did not get the full potential out of the units because you are more used to SC2s battles that dont put as much emphasis on single unit management.
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I've been playing BW on ICCUP since 07 so I'm very familiar with all the starcraft terms, but when somebody just says micro better in WCIII I don't know what they mean. The not a moving and such is pretty helpful, mostly I just want some advice on what to do with my units during battle.
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you got enough micro concepts from everyone here, now its up to you to actually be good.
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1. Try not to fall behind in hero levels. If you do, you will most likely lose a battle when both of you have even supply. This means that unless you are engaging the enemy force, you should always be creeping. Obviously, you shouldn't lose any units to creeps.
2. As a rule of thumb, you should always focus fire if you have ranged units. With melee units you should try to surround enemy units that you attack so you can kill them. Also if there is a weak hero (normally intelligence heroes) that is exposed and easily surrounded, make him your first priority. Heroes are normally far more important than units!
3. Make sure you learn the attack-vs-armor mechanic! For example, siege attack does bonus damage to unarmoured, so you should focus your units with siege attacks on unarmoured units. This way you can make sure that you maximize your damage output.
4. Try not losing units by pulling back hurt/focused ones and/or heal them on time.
5. Do not lose your heroes!
6. Make use of items! Have a heal potion on your vulnerable/most targeted heroes. Use the NE and HU staff to save important units/heroes. Buying scrolls (armor/heal) is also a neccessity sometimes.
Those are all fairly obvious hints, but I hope at least some of them could help you.
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SC2 is a game that's like 90% macro and 10% micro. WC3 is the exact reverse. There's no real way to get an edge on macro unless you do some kind of crazy expand timing, so you're almost entirely reliant upon micro.
Now I was mostly an NE and sometimes Human player, so I really can't give specific strats on Orc and Undead. Orc units are really easy to keep alive though, through pulling back injured grunts and salving them, or by playing Raidercraft and just pissing all over an NE army with good ensnares (which with a Blademaster makes hero nuking also ridiculous) and a handful of Spirit Walkers to spirit link everything. Good orc players just seem to never lose a freaking unit, no matter what. x.x And also almost never make it to Fortress -- Orc stronghold play is just stupidly good.
UD play was similar as I recall, only it was Fiend micro (or gargs if you're a total asshole), with a DK first to do some awesome coiling action -- healing in the early game, and hero nuking in the late game -- followed by a Lich so you can really get your hero nuking going. Hall of the Dead was such a playground for UD, with the addition of the Lich + statues. Citadel play was a little weak, but critical to get destroyers if your opponent was massing casters.
NE was where the real skill was at though...such flimsy units you had to micro. I miss the RoC days when huntresses were nigh invincible, TFT NE units were just a microfest -- I highly suggest staying away from NE when you're first starting out unless you like being in pain, all the time. x.x
Human is just archmage + towercraft. Everything else they do sucks.  Mass breakers is pretty cool I guess. *shrug*
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as NE you have to play mass ballista of course
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These two basics helped me the most as noob - keep killing stuff at all times and always pull every unit to safety before it dies.
On February 29 2012 12:14 Corsica wrote:
From my personal experience: Dont play undead unless you want to get roflstomped, play imba race - orc! That's EXACTLY my personal experience too. However, I got motivated to figure out how to beat Orc (and everyone else) with Undead, and eventually succeeded. But it sure as hell took like 20x more effort. With Orc the same things were a breeze.
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On February 29 2012 10:20 ArcticFox wrote:SC2 is a game that's like 90% macro and 10% micro. WC3 is the exact reverse. There's no real way to get an edge on macro unless you do some kind of crazy expand timing, so you're almost entirely reliant upon micro. Now I was mostly an NE and sometimes Human player, so I really can't give specific strats on Orc and Undead. Orc units are really easy to keep alive though, through pulling back injured grunts and salving them, or by playing Raidercraft and just pissing all over an NE army with good ensnares (which with a Blademaster makes hero nuking also ridiculous) and a handful of Spirit Walkers to spirit link everything. Good orc players just seem to never lose a freaking unit, no matter what. x.x And also almost never make it to Fortress -- Orc stronghold play is just stupidly good. UD play was similar as I recall, only it was Fiend micro (or gargs if you're a total asshole), with a DK first to do some awesome coiling action -- healing in the early game, and hero nuking in the late game -- followed by a Lich so you can really get your hero nuking going. Hall of the Dead was such a playground for UD, with the addition of the Lich + statues. Citadel play was a little weak, but critical to get destroyers if your opponent was massing casters. NE was where the real skill was at though...such flimsy units you had to micro. I miss the RoC days when huntresses were nigh invincible, TFT NE units were just a microfest -- I highly suggest staying away from NE when you're first starting out unless you like being in pain, all the time. x.x Human is just archmage + towercraft. Everything else they do sucks. Mass breakers is pretty cool I guess. *shrug*
Yeah, NE has "flimsy" units. That DH surely rolls over and dies all the time I guess you forgot the cute bears with shitload of health, which have the ability to heal 400 hp during combat and then get staffed to safety if needed... Oh yeah and mountain giants 
If you want a real micro challenge play human and try to keep those 300 hp T2 units alive ^^
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On February 29 2012 10:13 N3rV[Green] wrote:
I've been playing BW on ICCUP since 07 so I'm very familiar with all the starcraft terms, but when somebody just says micro better in WCIII I don't know what they mean. The not a moving and such is pretty helpful, mostly I just want some advice on what to do with my units during battle.
The first thing to do is know what attacks are good against what armor. Should tell you what units your own units should focus on. Yeah, and food differentials tell you almost nothing in War3, sorry. If you're better than your opponent, you can hold off an 80 food UD army with a handful of dryads and a few bears + your heroes, so stay as far away as possible from a-moving.
To add to ArcticFox's description (which is really good, btw):
- Orc: BM + SH, Hex + WW + right-click on enemy hero. Don't ever lose your BM, lol. It deals like 75% DPS for your army. In Orc vs. UD, you'll basically want your BM tailing the enemy DK (usually) and preventing him from creeping. DK at higher level has insane nuking power.
- UD: ... creep like a bitch, pour points into Coil, grab a Lich, pour points into Nova. Mass fiend + statues + destros are, as stated, kind of the go-to, and fiends on aura are pretty easy to micro (and burrow micro is pretty fun!). Good Orcs will pretty much deny you creeping with insta-mapcontrol BM, but if you can get lvl 3 nuking power, you can scare the fuck out of the BM by just nuking him down to red hp and forcing him to gtfo. Once the BM is gone, you're in a pretty good shape.
- HU: Lololol, my best race. Tower laming, towercraft (into gryphs <3), tanks, etc. Bitch to play against a good towering HU. HU tri-hero is ridiculously strong, btw. For further reference on towering, see: Infi. Best players in War3 right now are HU (i.e. TH000 and Infi). Also the fast-expand race.
- My NE sucks, but as stated, it's the race that probably benefits the most from good micro. Bears + dryads are ridiculously good, and well-controlled mass dotts destroy Orc. DH is a bitch; not as big a one as the BM, but almost.
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On February 29 2012 10:34 Skilledblob wrote:
as NE you have to play mass ballista of course
They're called GLAIVE THROWERS! Courtesy of unexplained changes in TFT. And available at T1.
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I play some. Add me, if you want lol. I play some RoC customs and some ladder on both Roc and Tft.
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WC3 is all about microing, heroes, and items. If you have more healing scrolls and Invulnerability potions on your blademaster, you probably won't lose. Also, you have to micro your almost dead units away so you don't feed experience. Focus fire is important too.
Overall just micro LOL
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United States33290 Posts
WC3 is all about playing human and building way too many towers, from what I can tell
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From my personal experience: Dont play undead unless you want to get roflstomped, play imba race - orc!
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On February 29 2012 10:05 Lemonerer wrote:
in starcraft 2 you can get to gm while mostly 1Aing. this is not the case in wc3. u need to use your spells as fast as u can, focus fire different targets with melee units or target one with ranged units. , use items, back up red hp units, look for opportunities to surround, and many more micro concepts that starcraft players dont even understand.
if u want to be good at warcraft u actually need to play alot and be good. cant memorize a 4gate build and go to masters in 2 days.
I would love to see some one 4 gate to gm in this day in age...
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On February 29 2012 09:52 N3rV[Green] wrote:Yes yes, that's what I've been told by nearly every person that speaks english, but... What does than even mean man......T.T
lolololol But what does that mean!!!!
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On February 29 2012 12:30 Yamulo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 29 2012 10:05 Lemonerer wrote:
in starcraft 2 you can get to gm while mostly 1Aing. this is not the case in wc3. u need to use your spells as fast as u can, focus fire different targets with melee units or target one with ranged units. , use items, back up red hp units, look for opportunities to surround, and many more micro concepts that starcraft players dont even understand.
if u want to be good at warcraft u actually need to play alot and be good. cant memorize a 4gate build and go to masters in 2 days. I would love to see some one 4 gate to gm in this day in age...
"cant memorize a 4gate build and go to masters in 2 days"
:/
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Also keep in mind that anyone still playing WC3 is obviously a hardcore fan of the game, and are most likely seasoned veterans by now. Players at or near your skill level will be few and far between. You'll have to put in a ton of work be able to hang with most that are still laddering.
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It sounds like you are still a newbie to the game. In that case I highly discourage you from playing Orc, as it is a little bit more complicated.
Stick with UD with DK Lich fiends to destroyers.
On February 29 2012 12:14 Corsica wrote:
From my personal experience: Dont play undead unless you want to get roflstomped, play imba race - orc!
You are joking. At low/intermediate levels, Orc is the hardest race to play. A new player should stick with Undead or Human and focus on ranged units and casters.
On February 29 2012 10:03 babylon wrote:Yeah ... it's like "macro better" but it's more difficult to explain. Stay away from a-moving, and pay close attention to what each individual unit is doing during a battle. Don't just let them hit things willy-nilly if you can help it. Run away injured units, deny experience if you're just having a small skirmish, try to predict what the enemy will do or where he'll move and adjust your own positioning to block or to set up a better angle or attack/spell-cast accordingly, etc. And surrounds. It's kind of like a chess game. :O
A-moving is actually kind of important if you play Orc....
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On February 29 2012 12:06 Waxangel wrote:
WC3 is all about playing human and building way too many towers, from what I can tell
Yep, the normal mass tower+tank turtle fest. So, so much fun.
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On February 29 2012 10:20 ArcticFox wrote:
UD play was similar as I recall, only it was Fiend micro (or gargs if you're a total asshole), with a DK first to do some awesome coiling action --.
Lol love this. I loved playing ud back in the day, so many options and such strong hero synergy. Also lich with deso orb and a ranged group eats shit alive. Also I remember many hilarious ud mirror matches with mass ghouls/gargs. Sigh wc3 was amazing T_T.
And yes, Human tank/tower/pally drop shit is 5 bazzillion times more retarded than anything UD can do.
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The answer to your failure is scroll of healing and invuln pot
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WC3 is very situational and contains a lot of things you can't really analyse at the same level as in SC1-SC2. There is like an infinite number of combinations among units, heroes (including especially the tavern heroes that are a part of many gimmicky strats) and items. Some times you can only find on monsters (creeps), I'm not 100% sure but I think some shops/items are actually not present on every single map, either, meaning that there are things you physically can't do on certain maps.
When it comes to micro, you need good situational judgement. Battles do often take the form of actually "dancing", a combination of kiting enemy units, dodging damage on yours etc., to the point of manually dodging attacks from melee units by withdrawing appropriately based on seeing enemy unit animations/having a sense of timing of e.g. how often a sword falls. This makes some people capable of suffering practically no damage or very little damage in situations that could defeat or whittle a comparably sized and composed army handled without micro. That playstyle is very taxing on the player who tries to play like that, and it is also severely unnerving for the other player, who may feel like he's being cheated or at least cheesed. Some players have developed this hit and run style wherein they will always run if you chase, chase if you run. Like they don't ever really want to battle, they won't leave you alone either. They won't creep (level the hero up on monsters) or build/expand on their own, they'll concentrate on being an annoyance to you. This is something I really hated especially in my early days or the days I first met players who really cared about micro.
As for complaints about getting utterly destroyed by a same food (supply) army, that was a biggie and people complained about imba a lot. In terms of destroying similarly sized armies of the enemy races, Orc was the race most complained about. A mixed Orc army with magic support could kill pretty much any composition from the enemy other than some insane gimmicks. Undead had certain "imba" compositions, especially featuring destroyers, the magic-immune fliers, but not only. Necromancers with meat wagons (swarming the enemy with spawned skeletons) tended to be a game-ending composition in UvH. Night Elf could abuse "bears", i.e. druids of the claw (there were also druids of the talon, who transformed into ravens and were hard to deal with if used appropriately), and dryads. The worse gimmick to deal with was the insane healing from bears that had huge stats to boot even before their considerable self-applied buffs (e.g. they were already stronger than equal food (supply) human knights in terms of numbers but they had a healing spell and a powerful combat statistic buff to help them further), combined with a teleport artifact (staff or rod of something) that you could use to teleport a wounded unit away from battle. So with all that healing and the teleport staff, anybody who tried to focus-fire against that army and didn't know what he was doing was as good as dead. Humans, in turn, had some gimmicky magic but also the WC3 siege tank, which was a very missile-resistant anti-building unit with huge damage. So guys would build one million towers (humans had building armour upgrades better than any other race) and then send out tanks to level enemy bases rather than participating in normal combat. But truth be told Blizzard basically asked for it by making human a weak race much like Terran is now. There are some parallels between humans and terrans.
So, when you come into battle in WC3, you need to size up the enemy army very quickly and assess potential dangers. You need to know how to preempt this, how to deal with that. You need to decide what you want to target first, what to target later or even actually ignore for most of the battle, you need to avoid getting hit by AoE, you can't afford getting overrun by powerful T3 melee units if you don't have stopping power (human tended to be lacking in raw strength regard in such situations because the knights were so thoroughly unspectacular, like the by far worst T3 melee unit of all races). You don't want to be chewed and spat out by magic, which happens if you aren't prepared (a human caster-heavy army could wtfpwn any magicless orc). You don't want to overrely on magic if the opponent has magic immune units or simply a composition that doesn't suffer much from magic. Also, if the opponent has buff spells and you have none, you're pretty much done for. Then there's the hero nuking, generally the most prominent by Undead or by Human against undead (Undead had spells against living creatures of any race, Human had spells against undead creatures). For example, if you have a developed Mountain King (core human hero coming from the allied dwarven race) with its storm bolt and a developed paladin (core human hero) with its holy light ability, you can put a lot of hurting on any undead hero, perhaps outright killing a low-level low HP hero, e.g. a "caster" hero (e.g. a lich). In turn, Undead had a coil ability on the death knight (sort of like the opposite of holy light) and the nova ability on the lich (a frost-based damage and slow spell), which hurt non-undead heroes badly. Obviously, units could also be nuked and actually more efficiently than heroes because damage reduction was less. Sometimes you'd nuke a unit or two to tip the numbers in your favour or earn some experience before withdrawing. Sometimes you had to nuke units. In some battles heroes would dramatically gulp potions or even run to shops for potions to regenerate the used-up mana and single-handedly confront enemy armies. Some heroes are specifically designed for that type of thing.
Finally, don't expect much balance or non-randomness. Skill matters a lot but luck does too, there are combinations that don't really have counters, there is a lot of situational imbalance (as in not proper imba but still something you can't really beat) and a heckton of gimmicky strategies like offensive use of towers, packs of invisible units (including siege units), dedicated main hall assaults with repair prevention, spawn maximisation (some heroes can spawn a lot of spawns if they're aided by another hero with mana regeneration aura; some types of spawns multiply if they score a kill... a kill means the actual killing blow, you know, which opens up micro opportunities). You can't really blame people for using whatever they can to overpower you but some of the combinations are extremely frustrating to deal with, or mind-boggling, others are also anti-climatic, artificial from the point of view of the RPG-like atmosphere of the game (if you don't look at it as just a couple of graphics and sounds to cover up some number crunching).
This said, WC3 is a lovely game but you need to be aware of all of the above. Coincidentally, I've just open a thread asking about the state of the WC3 ladder today. It's been a while since I last played. IIRC I was a level 26 solo player in Europe in 2007/2008 (level 28 AT, some other 20-something levels). GL HF if you keep playing it.
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