I played it a ton in me childhood. I think i even finished it because i recognized most of the missions in both campaigns. But there’s a big chance that i played with cheats, because kids.
While playing AoE4 i was thinking some thoughts on AoE2, so i checked that out. And i realised that i was a bit too harsh on the fourth game even compared to the HD edition. So i corrected my text.
While playing AoE2 i was thinking some thoughts on Warcraft 2, so i checked it out. And i realised that i was a bit too harsh on the AoE2.
Now this game doesn’t just lack some QoL features, it’s stuck in an intergenerational limbo between the keyboard driven generation one and the mouse-driven generation two. That still doesn’t end despite there being a ton of innovation to warrant a separation of the third generation of RTS.
I am not gonna search for my CD with the game or install a CD-Rom into my machine. And the game was never officially published here anyway. I saw some people complain about the GOG release, and i saw some people claim that the Battle.net Edition has some content missing. But i just couldn’t find a working vanilla game, so i played this. GOG has a launcher promising some enhancement and resolution options, but i see absolutely no difference between the original and enhanced versions. Even the render seems to be the same, and it uses its own scaling instead of changing the resolution through Windows. Having an easy way to alt+tab is the only thing i noticed.
tiddies of dunkness
The popularity of Westwood‘s Dune 2 created a separate very specific genre called RTS. Some wannabe historians like to call Herzog Zwei an RTS, but it’s nothing akin to the genre as people expect it to be. And it actually has none of the genre’s definitive elements. For a normal person even the first generation keyboard-driven games feel more like prototypes to this mouse driven genre.
So Silicon & Synapse decided to rip off that game and created Warcraft as a simplified clone of Dune 2 set in a fantasy world. With the same choke-point-control core-gameplay as Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis on Sega. They even adapted the Dune-specific concrete tile system by changing them into roads.
After selling some copies, in just one year they decided to release a new and improved clone of Dune 2 by ripping-off Warhammer‘s art-style. Oh, yeah, and also implementing the wild new hardware — mice with two buttons. By using RMB as a context sensitive action button they allowed the player to pick 9 units at a time — the typical Dune 2 assault pack.
With this amazing QoL improvement they were ready to become kings of the genre.
But where they were releasing an evolution over Dune 2 the creators of Dune 2 beat them by a couple of months with a leapfrog innovation. Command & Conquer has much bigger FoV due to using smaller sprites. It looks super cool with it’s superior animations. It has a slightly better unit AI and it allows selecting a ton of units at the same time. Their evolution of Dune 2‘s GUI offers players constant control over all productions instead of being a giant and sometimes useless panel blocking half of the screen. The units have hovering HP-bars and players can sell buildings.
And somehow they even kept the compatibility with one-button mice, all while creating the actual modern RTS. When Warcraft created peasants collecting wood, Warcraft 2 is stuck in a keyboard paradigm with mouse controls.
In several short years the genre will see explosive evolution growing in scale and filling all the available niches. And Silicon & Synapse‘s response will be another rip-off of Warhammer, this time 40,000.
The core design paradigm of Warcraft 2 is also kinda a big issue. The units operate in time-units instead of reacting to the player’s command. If a unit does its attack it goes into a long relaod and can’t do anything at all until it finishes. It’s not a separate time-bar that fills, to make it more realistic. All units have only one time-track. If your end-game unit with super slow reload performed an attack, it will just become unresponsive and will be getting damage standing in place. It does not just look dumb, it feels extremely sticky and unresponsive. Usually that paradigm is still used for heavy artillery to force players to protect it. But here even the archers and common soldiers are like that. And if a unit gets overwhelmed with commands it can outright fumble several “turns” in a a row and just do reloads without performing a move or an attack.
This is a paradigm for the keyboard controls, providing the players time to move each unit individually. Not a mouse operated control when you use the rubber frame to select a squad and attack move it somewhere.
The units are colliding with each other and get stuck. The formations break and stretch across a half of the map. The units with the abilities still have to be operated individually even if they are all of the same type.
The player has to babysit each individual unit as if it’s Warcraft 1. Manually move them a couple of squares at a time to keep the formation and to protect the squishy ones. And this is as tiresome as it always was. The micromanaging here is insane, in addition to the brain-dead AI that doesn’t react to enemies attacking buildings two squares away, the game has serious friendly-fire and your units relish killing each other in every way possible. And with unresponsive controls even with the insane micromanagement it’s hard to pull your units out of harm’s way.
And every life is sacred. This is a game of low numbers. Very low numbers. The damage is high, the HP is very low, and even peasants and farms cost a lot. Losing either means receiving a significant blow to the economy.
A very crowded battle is having anything more than just nine units. And there’s no out-of-combat regeneration or dedicated medic units. So if you have a war invalid on your hands you can either use his damage by tanking with someone else. Or just mercy kill them to free up a population slot, because there is no suicide button.
This cramped and weak GUI is an improvement only over the first game. And flaunting the Warhammer‘s art-style they made the FoV miniscule. The tiny playable window is crowded even compared to Dune 2.
This is more like a weird crowded active-pause CRPG with buildings than actual tactical combat or strategic planning. So having speed controls and making use of them is the main skill in the game. Playing against a living opponent is a competition in youth. But an AI opponent doesn’t have to deal with the GUI, it can issue all commands all the time to every unit on the field. It’s not genius or super hard, but even to mimic a fraction of its power — slowing down the game-speed to a crawl is a must.
Speeding things up is also an important option. Gathering resources is slow, end-game upgrades are expensive and slow, end-game units take a ton of time to train.
And buildings have much more HP than guard towers or walls. Even with fully upgraded siege weapons it takes a ton of time to destroy just one pesky farm. After all enemy units are dead there’s still their base to deal with, so you need to speed up the time to the maximum and just wait for a very long period while your army is slowly levelling the enemy base.
The game has two-stage fog of war. But also it requires the player to hunt down and kill every last peasant, every last soldier and destroy every last farm. To make it more fun oil tankers enter into a panic mode when they feel that the game is lost and start to zoom around the map.
I started playing the game with the fog of war, but when i had to spend a lot of time hunting the oil tankers i just turned it off in the options. I think they realized too why it should be optional. Not only it helps to finally end the mission, but also it levels the playing field allowing the player to see the danger when it’s coming, and not when the enemy is already in ur base, killing ur d00ds. Even in the late game there’s no line of sight upgrades or ways to efficiently control the area. The towers are blind and have a small range. The only solution is to fill the map with flying scouts, but that is a waste of precious resources, especially against the “cheating” AI. So yeah, disabling the fog of war in the options is a great improvement for the campaign.
Orcs & Humans
& Elves & Trolls & Ogres & Dwarves & Goblins & Gnomes & Knees & Toes
I only ever finished about 80% of the orc campaign in the first game, so i don’t know (and don’t remember) the full story that much. And i lasted only about 2 weeks in WoW before i became bored to death with it. So i’m not up to all the current retcons of the story. I did like Warcraft 3 very much, tho.
This is a sequel to a mutually exclusive game and it is one itself. When they decided to make a unified story in Warcraft 3 (AFAIK akin to Starcraft) they retconned everything around and then WoW just nuked all the lore.
The humans’ briefings have a book with english words poorly transliterated into cyrillic.
The first game is literally just orcs and humans, but this one is so woke it replaced all the old positions with token races. So the orcs invaded this planet, and in this game they allied with the local oppressed trolls, oppressed ogres, oppressed goblins and started necromancy and caught local dragons. Humans replaced archers with elves and allied with dwarves and gnomes.
And now that i actually wrote this, orcs aren’t as much of bad guys as they are supposed to be, even beyond being bloodthirsty refugees. You literally save the local sentient race that is kept in concentration camps in the game, and several other intelligent locals gladly join your fight against the humans.
There is no need to place the roads anymore, so it entirely removes any planning from the base building. The most important decision is where to place a lumber mill. Unlike in the AoE it’s not a throwaway resource gathering point but a big investment. So you are not going to just plop them near every forest. The towers are of limited use too, all they do is tie the limited resources to one place. And with humans having access to healers it’s an even worse proposition.
The most involved part is to ensure there are no gaps between the buildings, or to ensure that there are passages. If there is a dead-end gap the units will definitely get stuck there when exiting a building. The roads in the first game at least helped with that.
Peasants hiding inside a building during the construction or when dropping-off resources is fairly annoying too. Of course there is no queueing, but even just catching a peasant is an ordeal.
So with this game stealing Warhammer‘s look to replace the cartoony medieval look of the first game, the sprites still do look beautiful. All the new races are cool, and the mechanisms are great. This is one of the rare fantasy games with early cannons.
And the exaggerated art-style fills the squares dedicated to sprites nicely. The only thing that actually looks bad is the Gryphon Aviary during the construction. And the finished one is nowhere on par with the enslaved dragon.
The icons representing the actions are beautiful and the best part is that they are changing according to implemented upgrades. Like, the command “stop” is represented by a shield, and after the defence upgrade it actually switches to a prettier shield.
The ballistas became a separate mechanic in itself. The mages can keep the distance too, but they have to replenish mana. Hit and runs, kiting and corner shooting with ballistas is the main method of attack until the last two missions. And with how slow they take their turns it’s a lot of extremelly annoying micromanagement and a big exercise in patience and quick-saving.
The clerics were removed. Instead the minor spell-caster role was moved to the cavalry and the ogres who replaced the wolf-riders. These are the most tanky units on offer. Ogres are great with mines and AI micromanages them to have an army with bloodlust. The paladins are the most important unit for the humans with their healing ability. Even after you get the aviation a pack of them still serve as a field medic. And they are great at crushing defences when healing each other and are very annoying when AI does that.
The new mages are the coolest units in the game. The blizzard is iconic and Death Knights can raise skeletons. But their practical use is very limited. Skeletons and expensive Death Knights are just one hit ganked by paladins. And it’s much easier to assault with an army of self-healing paladins than to babysit a wizard and to wait for his mana to restore.
And when you get Dragons / Gryphons everything else becomes obsolete. Though, their AI is absolutely terrible. They deal damage in a line with turn times slower than anything in the game, and they start to hit each other with friendly fire every second you are not babysitting them. Despite them being identical the bias towards humans is still present, since you can heal your insanely expensive units any time.
Another cool thing about Warcraft 2 is naval battles. The ships look great and the dreadnoughts are super cool. Though with their sizes and the lack of variation the combat is even more simplistic — who has more units is a winner.
The submarines also look neat, but sadly they are almost useless. The AI always has everything covered with scouts, and players just attack ground, since the submarines are tied to the system of taking turns too and can’t run away after a shot.
While the actual playability suffers because of it, Warcraft 2 is still gorgeous as long as the side panel has a unit selected.
The sound is a mixed bag. There are many iconic performances, but a lot of them are very amateurish and recorded inside a toilet. Some effects sound like a guy tries to imitate them with his mouth, like the transport ships.
тче баттле бегонг…
With how Command & Conquer is superior to the Warcraft 2 in its core, what’s good about Warcraft 2?
The campaigns.
Assuming this is the first time RTS players see a two-button mouse half of the missions are glorified tutorials. They do not hold player’s hand and do not pester them with obnoxious pop-ups and limited actions. But in the first several missions the enemy has just some units to imitate a presence of life and the goals are very simple. More so for the humans. And that results in a nice escalation — every next mission offers a new unit or spell.
Meanwhile in Command & Conquer my base was wiped out during the second mission by 3 dudes with rifles because i was distracted and was testing it in an online emulator.
The tutorialized part is very similar between the two campaigns. The tasks are the same but most of the maps are drastically different. And humans have it much easier and often start with a pre-built economy instead of severe deficit of food.
In one game i run out of all gold despite not wasting much of it. There are no markets and no option to sell a building. So i had to deal with enemy’s base with two trolls and a bunch of angry peasants. Then i took gold from his vacant mine and hauled it on transports back to my base to build some ships and finish off the strugglers on the sea.
The second part of the campaigns is much more varied and has a lot of cool gimmicks. The orks have it hard in the middle, the human’s campaign is very easy until the final map, which is very challenging but could (should) be just rushed with gryphons. Also during the human campaign there are black enemies over black ocean, or grey enemies blending in with sheep and swine.
The save slots for some reason are limited to 102, which is a bit annoying. If it’s more than a ten, why not infinite then?
Warcraft 2 is really dated at its core, and it was dated even when it came out. Unlike UFO: Enemy Unknown there are hundreds of games that can replace it with no deficiencies. It’s really not on par with more modern games. But for what it is, at the time when it was — the campaigns are fun. The maps and the tasks are enjoyable still, as long as you have the patience for the real-time turn based game and can force yourself to suffer through the tiny FoV in a strategy game.
Inside my shell i milk and hate 