Warcraft II: The Dark Saga (1997)

I own the PC version and this was one of my most important games growing up completely overshadowing Warcraft 1. I beat all of the campaigns back then and probably downloaded maps online. I spent extensive time making my own levels and getting my friends to play them but sadly those files have been lost. I still hope to find them on a long forgotten floppy disk but those odds are slim. I had over 40 maps, including 1 campaign with a series of around 20 levels and simple story. I don't remember much but I do know the 1st level was a non base mission playing as Chogall. The campaign went back and forth between both factions and featured a lot of heroes and non base gameplay. Other stand alone maps I remember include a small map based on Braveheart, where you played as the Scots with mostly grunts. I set knights to have max sight range so they charged immediately and were overwhelmed by grunts. Archers were given max range and victory was about quickly mobilizing the vast number of grunts to close in before the archers inflicted too much damage. There were also cavalry hidden behind the archers to rear attack but they could only succeed if the human army was already engaged with the grunts. I had a training camp map where knights and ogres were given ranged attack, but still could not hit air, a delivery map where you had to use dwarves to blow through a mountain to bring wood to a rescue base that ran out of wood, then build a transport to attack orcs. There was a prison level, and 1 with realistic stat changes. I do not remember the details other than footmen had higher armor while grunts had higher damage. I probably did the same with knights vs ogres but realistically knights should be faster with higher armor and a decent chance to change into a footmen upon death, while ogres should be slow with high hp and damage, and possibly some hp regen from eating corpses or critters. I also remember another campaign based on Final Fantasy 6 though I only had a few maps.

It has been something like 20 years since I last played this game. Last year I watched some pro versus matches and found the tactics used there to be very interesting even though I am not interested in playing vs other players. Rather than install my old CDs or play a modern remake like I did with Warcraft 1, I decided to check out the playstation version. RTS is infinitely better with mouse and keyboard but I was able to beat all campaigns and some custom maps without much trouble. The playstation version had some new cutscenes, which were nothing special, and the world map in between missions was interesting to relate to locations in World of Warcraft. It was annoying that the minimap blocked part of the screen rather than being inbuilt to the UI and that I could not click on it to move the screen to that location or move units. There were hotkeys to remember locations and instantly jump to them; the same buttons as the control groups in Command and Conquer. I usually set then to my base and the front line to quickly command workers or train reinforcements in between attacking. Unfortunately this version of Warcraft did not have control groups. There was a button combo that kinda almost worked in that it sometimes allowed me to switch between selecting 2 different groups of units but only if I set it up before hand and did not deselect either group. In practice this was not worth using at all and I instead relied on playing on the slowest speed to give me time to select and command units. The selection cap was almost double in this version so it was possible to have a mixed force of melee and ranged moving together and focus firing. I would have preferred control groups instead of map locations. Even better if there were buttons for both. I did find it very annoying that the same button was used for selection and commands because I often did the one I didn't want to do or accidentally deselected. Given how often I changed the speed between slowest and fastest, that should have been a single button press. The L1 and R1 buttons were not even used at all so it was shocking how the controls were not even close to the best they could be. The game could be saved during missions for proper save scummimg, a huge step up from playstation C&C, and there were automated unit production and passive upgrade queues which eliminated a lot of unnecessary micromanagement. Though half the time I went into the unit builder the D pad buttons failed to work. Depending on how tight resources were I either fully controlled upgrades and unit production to get exactly what I needed, or put it on auto mode to forget about it.

I am aware that the Horde is considered better due to ogre blood lust being so much better than paladin healing, even to the point where the top human matches I watched skipped knights altogether and relied mostly on mages. My strategy was to place buildings to block access to my workers and create chokepoints to funnel the enemy. Sometimes I built arrow towers behind the wall of farms (and other buildings)to defend against ground attacks, but mostly I put them to defend against air. I either put them near the workers to screen them or waited to see where the air units tended to attack. I did not like cannon towers because they could not attack air, tended to miss moving units, and inflicted friendly fire. They would make a good addition to arrow tower defense if the enemy actually attacked in threatening enough numbers, and could be built far enough from shore to sink ships without taking damage, but I hardly ever built them. I usually had 10 or so workers with 3 on lumber, 1 floater/builder and the rest on gold. The AI was not nearly as difficult as it could have been, sending only small attacks and often with only 1 color attacking. So the PvP tactics were not really needed and it was more about preserving my units over time. This was why I focused towards paladin healing and troll regeneration. I played with fog of war off (unlike back on PC) and rushed a flying machine to scout maps; intelligence was the most important asset so I could find enemy weakpoints and new resources. It was fun to decide the overall strategy of where I needed to conquer to stop enemy attacks and secure resources. Grunts and footmen were not that useful except as early on meat shields. Knights and ogres were better in every way except cost, so there was little point to build basic infantry once the cavalry was available. The extra speed of cavalry was good for kiting, luring, and chasing down slower enemies, especially catapults and mages. I did prefer paladins because they could stay alive with healing, even helping archers mages and gryphons stay alive, while ogres needed a constant supply of reinforcements no matter what. I had to decide whether to throw away wounded ogre magi in melee or keep them separate to just cast spells from the back. I mostly used healing after combat, even putting red hp units off to the side until healing was researched. Bloodlust however needed to be used during or just before battle, which put more pressure on casting it in time. Spells were several times more tedious to use here than on PC due to having to cycle the cursor around rather than instantly click the mouse or press the hotkey. Runes created a trap on the ground to 1 shot any unit, which was great for taking out paladins and ballista, but could kill my own units if I was not careful. Exorcism specifically countered death knights, 1 shotting them with full mana. The AI was really on the ball with nuking my death knights from off screen, making them much more risky to use than human mages. It was still good when I used it but the stupid way that units remembered orders (not accounting for enemy movement until after getting very close and realizing the target moved) meant they often still got a death coil off before being killed. I didn't use the map revealing spells much, unless I had no flying scout. I actually disabled flying units on the levels I made to make scouting more of a risk.

I used a lot of archers/trolls even though they were almost never used in top pvp matches. Ranged units were very good at focus firing but that required watching the battle and micro from target to target. They worked best with melee meat shields to protect them but could still do well on their own through focus fire, kiting and the dumb way the AI would often retreat to try and lure my troops into their towers or town hall. It was easy to exploit that with archers and keeping a tight rein on my units, but it was annoying how impetuous they could be; even random units running off on their own after explicitly being commanded to move. Elves were a little better than trolls due to better range and damage, but troll regeneration gave them the attrition edge when paladins were not available. In fact as the Horde it was better to let trolls fight simpler battles without melee support because the melee could never heal. I prioritized lumber mill upgrades over blacksmith, and for those did shields first. Catapults and ballistas were powerful but difficult to use. They could do massive damage on units but the projectiles were so slow that they would miss any moving unit. They could snipe stationary units to start a battle or damage units moving behind a target, but I usually kept them out of such battles due to the risk of friendly casualties. They were annoying to fight against because of their splash damage, but they could not hit in melee so I usually sent 1 unit to solo. This did not work if there were other enemies or towers nearby, so I had to either kite them back, micro a decoy, use magic or rush them and eat the damage. They could not move for several seconds after shooting, which made them very bad at hit and run. All units seemed to have a delay between attacking and being able to move, though only catapults, battleships and air had long enough delays to matter. Siege units were 1 of the few with max sight range (along with mages and upgraded archers, though I didn't buy that upgrade). This ability for certain scout units to reveal the map beyond attack range should have been in C&C too. I did find that they needed the blacksmith damage upgrades to be useful, especially when the enemy repaired towers. I usually had a few siege units to snipe ships from the coast, destroy towers and any other sniping but they were outclassed by mages and death knights; the best units in the game.

It was all about blizzard/death and decay. It had longer range than catapults, minimal delay to flee, continued doing damage over time, and hit an area. It took 3 to 4 castings to inflict enough damage to destroy a tower though the damage was somewhat random. It was excellent for taking out towers, ships, catapults and groups of units. The only issue was mana, which was why I built 4 or 5 and rotated between them. I am not sure if there was actually any difference between the spells but decay seemed to more reliably destroy towers in fewer casts. It makes me wonder if decay repeatedly did damage over the same randomly chosen tiles each cast while blizzard chose random tiles from the entire area of effect per tick. The mage was overall better with more useful spells and no critical weakness to long range exorcism. The basic fireball was ok for nuking units and towers, but not worth using at all over blizzard. It made a level 1 mage still good against towers that could not be repaired since it took a long time to regen the mana for enough fireballs. Slow was the only other spell I researched most of the time, mainly to make it easier to cycle the cursor down to blizzard. Slow was amazing against dragons and ogres, severely reducing damage output and allowing them to be kited. Invisibility was good for scouting and special operation style missions, but the AI still cast spells on invisible units, so it was not that useful in singleplayer. Flame shield was the worst spell for mages even though it could do a lot of damage when cast in the middle of enemy groups. The cast range was short and I always found it better to just use blizzard. Polymorph was the most powerful spell in the entire game, instantly killing any 1 non mechanical unit for very high mana cost. It was best used on dragons (though slow + archers was better), and made it unlikely to take out AI mages without losses. Without spell research death knights were a little better than mages because of death coil. It was better at dealing damage than fireball but only worked on living units while healing the DK. It pretty much functioned like polymorph, killing or severely wounding 1 unit per cast. These 2 spells meant that catapults were often the best for taking out these casters. The other spells were not as useful as the mage though. Haste worked well on dragons as it significantly boosted their attack speed, but other units only gained move speed. Still could be useful for scouting, kiting and hit an run. Raise dead fixed the problem from Warcraft 1 by making the skeletons permanent (or long lasting?), but they were still weak. They could be used to scout or supplement standard units but I did not see the point to spend that mana instead of saving for death and decay. Whirlwind was useless; why ever cast that over decay? Unholy armor could be very useful to save an already low hp unit and allow them to tank huge amounts of damage during a fight. An invincible catapult taking out towers or an invincible ogre on the front line sounds like a good idea, but I could accomplish the same goal with decay. Could also be good on a DK to survive exorcism.

The most expensive and time consuming units were dragons and gryphons. They were powerful but I did not enjoy using them because of their catapult like delay and friendly fire. They were more like siege units than nimble cavalry. They were useful for taking out enemies that could not attack air but died shockingly fast when they could be attacked. Dragons could be blood lusted and hasted for massive short term boost to dps, while gryphons could be healed to prevent losses. Non combat air units were for scouting and detecting subs; 1 was enough for non naval maps while any fleet and the home harbor needed another for subs. I almost never used sappers/dwarves other than to get through mountain. They could do a lot of damage, even 1 shotting towers, but magic could accomplish the same without losing resources on suicide. Lastly, to talk about the naval aspect. I did not really enjoy naval combat. It always seemed like a technology disparity to have medieval weapons on land but oil powered ships with cannons on the water. Or I suppose the oil was for gun powder and sails powered the ships. Mechanically, it was very difficult to keep ships alive and I hated that they could not be repaired (other than the transport). Transports were annoying because it was difficult to select units near them. Destroyers were good at hit and run being able to move quickly after attacking so that properly microed a single destroyer could take out multiple other destroyers, or a cannon tower, or catapult. They also wrecked subs if another unit revealed them, and were the best way to fight dragons. They lost hard against battleships, often sinking from just 1 shot. Battleships countered everything except air, but their slow speed and delay after attacking made it difficult for them to avoid damage, especially when attacking towers or ballista. I used a mixed fleet of 5 or so destroyers with 3 or 4 battleships supported by an air scout. Subs were invisible but incredibly easy to kill once spotted. They were the best way to take out surface ships, if they could manage to not get spotted. I found that the AI would send air or sub units to a ship being attacked by a sub, but return those units to the original position if nothing was found. So I could use 1 to 3 subs to do hit and run attacks to avoid losses, and even to lure enemy subs into ambushes. Getting naval superiority in any mission with significant water was important since the enemy was no threat if their transports could not safely attack my base. On the other hand it was also easy to slip transports around to take out the land economy supporting ships, especially with invisibility. I never tested unholy armor on a transport but that would be useful.

I started with the Alliance campaign and almost lost on the 3rd or 4th level because there were enemy units on the starting island and scouting made them wipe out my starting force. Had to use peasants to win. The orc campaign had a similar level and the overall progression from simple tutorial levels to harder maps was pretty much the same in both campaigns. The final human mission was difficult and I had to restart it once because I settled at the first gold mine instead of clearing out the ogres and building there. Then it was a grueling process of building up while weathering the constant dragon and death knight attacks. Had to build multiple arrow towers, regularly repair them and put a decoy farm for the DKs to decay, after losing a lot of my troops to death coil. Rushed to knights as fast as I could so I could chase down and kill those bastards. After that the DK color did nothing. Instead of attacking them or going the long painful naval route I just did mass gryphons. The orcs did not have any mission that difficult for their base campaign. Next I did orc dark portal campaign. These missions were generally more difficult but not as hard as they could have been. Biggest issue was the hero DK getting exorcism nuked from off screen. The campaign was a rehash of the previous orc campaign though. The final mission was fun, getting to use all of the heroes at once without worrying about their deaths. Only deathwing survived. The mission to kill all the Alliance heroes was interesting because I lured the gryphon away to be shot down while killing the rest with 2 catapults and a transport. The Alliance campaign was more interesting due to taking place mostly on Draenor. Alleria stood out as the best hero due to her 7 range, which allowed her to snipe arrow towers and battleships. Khadgar was good too with 6 range. These missions were again pretty tough but could have been harder. I did have to restart the mission about taking out only orange because 1 of the heroes died and I forgot to save. On the 1st try I wiped out teal on the top and took over their base, then used subs to snipe their naval infrastructure to prepare for a landing. The next time I still took out teal first but let my workers start a base at the free mine below red to get a head start. I did have to defend against red but never attacked them. Instead of attacking orange from their harbor I noticed a tiny tile on the other side of their land mass where I could land a mage to blizzard their forces, then blow a path through the rock with dwarves. Nice and cheap. That way I immediately took out their economy and barracks while taking out their navy and towers from safe inside their base.

After this I tried out many of the custom maps. Most of them were multiplayer maps and I did not want to play much of that. I was looking for more interesting campaign style maps. The 1 time I did 1vs1 absolutely wrecked the AI. I rushed a zeppelin while pumping out 5 grunts and 5 trolls. The enemy had less troops and 2 arrow towers built ass backwards that did not defend anything in their base. It was easy to overwhelm their units 1 at a time because they kept fleeing to their town hall. Meanwhile I destroyed their barracks and the dragon roost they kept trying to build. I would need to play vs multiple AI, all with clear paths to attack me but I do not know how many I could handle. There was 1 map that was 1vs4 naval, which was brutal. I had to restart after 1st try to rush shipyard and 3 oil rigs, more so to deny them to the AI. Then I made several destroyers which I used to destroy the ship yard of the nearest enemy and keep their naval ability down as much as possible. So I only had to deal with attacks from 3 colors, which seemed to come in large groups after a period of quiet. I barely kept naval superiority, mostly due to a ballista and blizzard. The AI massed subs that were easy to kill but wore down my ships. Sometimes they sent battleships that I cheesed with my own subs. Near the end they started using destroyers. I had to rebuild those oil rigs multiple times and could barely keep any ships afloat. I knew from scouting that they had very poor ground defenses so I sent 2 transports of knights and archers over to wipe out the 2nd closest color. Then the game crashed and I stopped since I had not saved at all. At that point I had pretty much won. I think 2 of the factions were running out of oil, and the faction with oil could not build ships because I kept destroying their ship yard and tankers. So it would have just been a matter of repeating the ground assault 3 more times.

It seemed like there were 2 batches of custom maps with the 1st lot being mostly multiplayer while the 2nd lot had more interesting set ups. There was a Gauntlet map based on that game, soloing as a powerful mage but unable to replace him. I tried once and failed. The Hell map had 4 very powerful established factions, which was somewhat challenging. They could not directly attack me with anything other than gryphons though, and there were barren spots for 3 other factions. The Ironcross map was interesting because it had rescueable towns on islands surrounded by mountain. 1 was human and the other orc so it would allow playing as both races if I could get to them before the already established AI killed them with air. I only played it long enough to reveal the map and they were already getting attacked.

The Anarchy map was the most difficult in the entire game. I lost 1st try due to overwhelming ogre attack. Loading the game broke the AI as they did not attack, so I restarted to win legit. It started off with a large fleet and some ground forces on an island. The enemy had a lot of dragons so I had to manage the destroyers to get them while carefully clearing out the river ships with my subs. It was too narrow to send the entire fleet so I did hit and run while avoiding dragons. When my ground forces finally landed I took out the units guarding a gold mine and started my base. I built a lumber mill much further down where a 2nd mine was hidden behind a thick forest. The 1st time I built up as usual and had nowhere near enough to take out the massive assault that orange sent; like 12 to 15 ogres with some trolls and a few catapults. By far the largest attack force I have ever seen the AI use, even though they were spread out. I tried to lure them to the battleships but it was not enough. So instead next try I rushed a tower defense down by the lumber mill hoping they would attack there instead of towards my town hall. I built a line of farms and a barracks just barely out of reach of the nearby enemy black outpost (good thing they never built any troops). I left only 1 tile gap to enter and put a line of arrow towers behind. It worked amazingly because the 1st ogre blocked the entrance attacking a tower while all the others had to waste their time outside attacking farms. I massacred them and they consistently attacked that position instead of where my troops and gold mine were. The only problem was catapults, which could attack my towers while being covered by black's towers. This was the first time I ever used the patrol command; to use a knight to bait catapult shots while I used archers to carefully snipe. Eventually I got a ballista online to take out those towers so my knights could intercept catapults. It took a while though with frequent ogre attacks. Black also had 1 death knight but I got him by luring into range of my towers. After this I built up as usual and beat the map without much trouble. The entire enemy area was a massive settlement of 4 mixed colors with the most ridiculous concentration of towers I have ever seen. It just meant a lot of ballista and blizzard use. They also had a lot of troops and peons stuck on a peninsula that I wrecked by sending a ballista and mage in a transport. The level would have been much harder if the AI had better pathing. I micromanaged a peasant to cut a path to the 2nd gold mine, which took a long time since it was probably 20+ loads. There was not much further threat from the AI, just extremely well fortified positions.

Burn it was a simple small map with limited forces against a fortified base. It was similar to my Braveheart map because it was think fast with immediate enemy ballista shot that triggered my troops to rush the base. Deadmeat was almost like a campaign map as it was against 6 established colors. The 1st was quite weak while guarding the 2nd gold mine and some rescuable peasants. Playing as orcs this meant I had a mixed force of ogres, paladins, death knights and mages for the entire game, which was incredibly interesting. The paladins kept themselves and the ogres alive, while the ogres blooslusted, and the mages took over from the DKs if there were gryphons to slow or exorcism to fear. The 2nd faction was the most challenging due to the early conflict, then I did white in the middle. I completely failed to realise the teal base was rescuable and was confused while I heard things dying when none of my troops were. I eventually did rescue them while attacking black, which was hidden behind trees and pumping gryphons. It took a bit to blow a path with goblins and from then on victory was assured. Fortress was a defensive siege that was short but difficult. 2 directions were overrun while 2 held and were able to protect the core. Then I went out to destroy their buildings, which were comically squeezed into a very narrow border around the entire map. Greatwall started me off with a huge number of troops up against a huge row of walled off towers and ballista. I guess it expected me to suicide charge them, but instead I spent ages building farms so I could scout from the air. They did not have much behind the wall so it would be easy to win with a few catapults. I did not bother to play it out. Heroes 1 and 2 were non base missions with very powerful units and felt very much like the actual hero missions in the beyond dark portal campaign. Default start did not give enough resources to build a transport so I had to start with custom resources to win. Invasion was reminiscent of some campaign missions but much simpler. It did not take long to win and the AI kept sending troops to a point near the middle of the map. So I had my regenerating trolls continuously kill them while ogres and catapults attacked their base.

Magicisle was a non base mission about rescuing units. There were several peasants trapped behind walls but there was nothing for them to really do other than repair transports and fight. I scouted around with ships rescuing what I could and did not bother to get 1 of the peasant groups. On 1 island was a mage with mage tower guarded by 2 cannon towers. Rather than fight, I sent a lone knight in to get the mage then slowly used fireballs to destroy the towers. I lost the mage tower but could not do anything with it anyway. This was a very tedious level due to having to wait for mana for more fireballs. The mage eventually died but I did manage to take out the last few units and towers with my forces, including the peasants. Massacre was non base where I started with a large number of skeletons. I scouted with zeppelin but did not find the map interesting enough to play. Minastir was similar to the Fortress map, where I started with a massive fortified base that was immediately under attack. The difference was the enemy also had a similar base with multiple colors that took quite some time to defeat. I even had to deal with gryphon and sub attacks. I only played Onslaught long enough to scout and found it not interesting enough to play. I did try adding more opponents but that did nothing. Rescue was a mostly water map about rescuing units and not difficult. Sparta was a short gimmick map about using overpowered archers holding choke points against huge amounts of footmen. The only real tactic was holding the line and occasionally rotating wounded units to the back. Siege was the opposite of Fortress, taking out a fortified base with limited troops. S stone was an interesting non base map with the enemy base surrounded by a ring of mountain and cannon towers in the center. There were a large number of gryphons to rescue defended by a well fortified position, but the tree line at the back was poorly defended. I landed there using ships and archers to kill what I could, then blew through the trees to get to the gryphons, who easily wiped out the rest of the map. Tym was the vicious mini campaign against a series of 5 enemies. It was fun but there was not enough threat to my base for it to be challenging. Waterrescue was pretty much a repeat of Rescue. Chess and football were silly gimmick maps. Chess was easy to beat by condensing my forces to focus on only half or so of the enemy. Football was about moving all my troops into the walled checkpoint and breaking into the audience seating with archers to cheese the entire enemy team. Then break through the walls to directly attack their barracks. 4 step started off non base having to rescue units from a fortified prison, then later building a base. I almost lost twice. Once before I had my base up when a decent force attacked. I had to get inside the prison walls and use that for chokepoint. Then the main enemy base was close to mine behind trees with a huge force waiting to get out.They almost did get out with numerous peons chopping the final layer. I had 2 ballista sniping them until I could tech up to blizzard to wipe out the enemy force. The only other map I remember was an orc rescue against bandits, which was not difficult at all.

Warcraft 2 was a Legendary masterpiece and the playstation version was actually a decent way to experience it. If I ever play again though I will want to play on PC, especially on a more modern engine and hopefully with much more difficult AI. There are also no doubt 1000s of player made maps online.

9.5+/10