This was one of my first pc games back in the day and my very first rts. It blew my mind with the possibilities that could be made with the same engine and graphics; like imagining an rpg or simulation instead of rts. I especially liked the dungeons with their unique units and treasure chests/barrels that could not be searched. I beat the game back then but do not remember how many times or how much I did custom matches. I am pretty sure I never went back to it after Warcraft 2, until now.

I played the war1gus remake rather than fooling around with getting the original working on modern pc. This mod did not include the game and thus had to extract info from my old CD, which failed twice because I had to add 2 programs to my antivirus exception list for attempting to modify protected files. When I got the game running I tried the human campaign only for it to crash. Orc worked though. It turned out that the mod crashed frequently, mostly upon winning a level. Playing levels was mostly stable, but custom matches crashed constantly. The human campaign worked fine the next time I started it; seemed like the program had trouble loading the intro, map animations and end screens on occasion. The biggest problem was that once a level crashed upon winning it was not fixable by loading the game. Instead I had to start that level over and use the instant cheat win. The mod added modern rts controls, such as double or ctrl clicking to select all visible units of the same type, right click move/attack/harvest/repair, control groups, production queues, easy drag box selection, and selecting up to 50 units at once. It also had explore, patrol and waypoints for some units but I never used that. Other options that I turned on were fog of war, rebalanced stats, multiple town halls, and simple auto attack. Fog made the game a little more difficult while the town halls benefited the AI more than me because they would build halls outside their base. This made them more time consuming to kill while attacks against expansions caused them to send troops to defend. I tried with and without the simple auto attack and did not notice any difference. A big problem I had was my units automatically moving to engage any enemies that entered their visible range, which led to me frantically pulling them back to prevent them from over extending. I am pretty sure the original game was not like that. I did eventually notice stand ground commands that helped me maintain formation but magic users did not get that. My clerics and necros kept running ahead of the proper troops, which was incredibly annoying. I replayed the final mission for both campaigns without rebalanced stats to see what exactly changed, and watched a video to reacquaint myself with the original UI.

Yes I remember the 4 unit selection cap but did not recall the lack of control groups and having to press the move and attack buttons (or keyboard hotkeys) to get stuff done. It made the game awkward but the slower game speed options made it manageable. It did not have the impetuousness problem, with troops mostly just standing there unless the enemy was in their face or attacking very close. The mod added food display to the UI but also caused summons to take up food, meaning new troops could not be built while too many summons were active. It also added auto cast for healing and group casting for all spells. I tried putting raise dead on auto cast but it did not seem to work. Shame since group casting made then waste mana so I had to cast individually. The biggest change in the rebalanced stats was reduced gold costs for just about everything while adding significant lumber costs. This meant I needed more workers on trees but also that gold ran out more slowly, leaving less need to use some of the many extra mines. Footmen had 1 armor while grunts had 0 with +1 to attack. I like this change because it added to the flavor of the factions; the humans clearly have better armor while the orcs clearly are stronger with bigger weapons. I made similar changes to Warcraft 2 back in the day. Ranged units had 0 armor with new light armor upgrades in the blacksmith. Training and researching seemed to take significantly longer. Mounted units started with 0 armor with knights gaining their armor back from new upgrades in the stables. Raiders got passive hp regen instead of armor but I am not sure how I feel about that. As a player I loved the freedom of using raiders on hit and run attacks while letting them heal up between attacks. It made non base levels much easier too and gave the orcs a way to preserve units like cleric healing did. On the other hand it did not feel thematically appropriate for the orcs. Perhaps it would be better to have a vampiric or corpse eating style of healing, or gold/lumber gain from kills and buildings like the raiders in Warcraft 3, or make raise dead skeletons permanent until slain (with no food use of course). Mounts and catapults used 2 food and all units past the basic footmen required lumber; good changes. Catapults were nerfed with a much longer travel time for their projectile, making them easy to dodge. They still did massive damage and splash, and had upgrades in the smith and mill. Mages became immobile after summoning a daemon or elemental and did not regen mana during this time. If the summon was allowed to expire before it died or was cancelled then it would create an explosion around the summoner killing him and causing massive damage around him. These summons were vastly overpowered in the base game, so nerfs were needed. At first I thought the summoner always died after, until I noticed the cancel button. I don't like the added micro but it does make summoning a high risk high reward strategy and somewhat limits their power. Maybe they are still too powerful; maybe there should be a maximum range the they can go from the summoner, meaning no hiding in base. Or maybe there should be a hard cap of 1 ultimate summon at a time. Yeah there was a very good reason these summons were not in 2 and only available to heroes in 3. The last change was the new watch tower building, which was ridiculously overpowered. It could kill a footman before he even got close enough to attack. The entire orc campaign was trivial because I put 2 to 3 towers at each bridge or choke point, easily slaughtering any attacks. There seemed to be some inconsistency with how far they could be built from base; sometimes they could be built half way across the map and others only near the base. Since the AI did not use towers at all they should not be in the game. Now if the campaigns were edited to put in enemy towers and the AI adjusted to build and replace them, then they would be good for catapults to destroy. Their offense was way too high though. They should start off with no attack, just giving better sight range for the fog. Having them function like Starcraft bunkers with a single archer or spearman being stationed in the tower to give offense would be cool but probably too complicated for the game. I am kind of against the concept of unmanned defense turrets in rts, especially when they can be built away from bases. I loved the road concept in this game as a great way to prevent building far from the base. I tried to build long roads to put a lumber mill a screen or so from base but there was a limit how far I could build from other buildings. I did not think to try creeping out with farms along that road.

My strategy as the orcs was 7 or more peons on gold, 2 on lumber and 1 floater to build and mostly do lumber, 5 to 6 raiders doing hit and run attacks, and forming the front line for 5 to 8 spearmen. I kept the original 4 unit selection limit in mind when making my control groups but did not actually limit myself. Sometimes I made another group of raiders so I could rotate them around to let wounded ones regen. I had a group of 3 to 4 necros raising skeletons, which I sent on ahead to either wear down enemies or be the front line tanks for a push. I never used unholy armor but it would synergize extremely well with regenerating raiders. Catapults did not mix well because of friendly fire. In the orc vs orc level I chopped a little path towards their base so my catapult could attack over the trees. Otherwise I had them attack the enemy barracks while the other troops killed troops. The fog made them more difficult to use on troops. I made 4 warlocks and 4 daemons could wreck the enemy. Spiders and poison cloud were garbage in comparison but still found use on occasion. Spiders were ok for scouting and swarming enemy conjurers, while poison was difficult to use without seeing exactly where enemies were. I did not build grunts at all because fast regenerating raiders were infinitely better. Playing the final mission with original stats went pretty much the same only more raiders died. My raiders, spears and catapults wrecked 1 base while 4 warlocks supported by 4 necros wiped out the other 2 bases. I still didn't use unholy armor on the demons. The human campaign was a little harder because I resolved not to use the broken overpowered guard towers. Instead I used similar amounts knights, archers and clerics. The clerics were the most useful so I rushed them to keep my troops alive. Tried invisibility a few times but it was not that useful since the enemy would swarm anything invisible that attacked them. Elementals were not as good as daemons so the strategy I used for the final mission was to send 4 elementals in front of the conventional troops to soak damage, which was enough to overwhelm the defenders and take out the base. The final human mission was tricky because the center of the map lead to all 3 bases rather than the 2 separated bridges in the orc campaign. There was a gold mine in the center so I often ended up in 2 or all 3 pincer attacks when my guys attacked the peons around that mine. It did not help that the main orc base built another townhall near the center, which made them send defenders. The key was to avoid the peons and town hall to focus 1 base at a time. The original stats did not change human strategy at all. I did notice that the enemy did not always attack my base, and did not use catapults or certain spells so I wonder just how much this mod changed the AI. In particular I don't recall any invisible units or water elementals, only 1 daemon and maybe a few weak summons. They also never seemed to build mages. The AI was very on the ball with spamming necros and making use of unholy armor, raise dead, poison and rain of fire. It was difficult to tell how well they used healing.

I then got the original version working. Downloaded dosbox, copied my CD to the same folder where I wanted to install, and dragged that folder into dosbox so it would mount as C drive. Then had to download and install the no CD patch. It worked fine. I cheated to only play the final missions. The biggest problem was how the mouse did not automatically scroll the screen but rather had to be clicked on the edge. That was awkward so I used the arrow keys and found it awkward to have to move my hand between those and the A, M and ctrl keys. These old games were not ergonomically streamlined at all and there seemed to be no way to edit files to change keybinding. I played at slow game speed to make the controls manageable. The map had slightly different gold mine set up with 1 large mine instead of 2 smaller at the beginning. I pumped out peasants to get around 10 and made a line of 5 to 6 knights with around 8 archers behind them, 4 clerics and the 2 starting catapults. I resolved not to make any conjurers, only using the starting 1 to send periodic elemental attacks. The area of map revealed by far seeing was tiny compared to the mod so I guess it was balanced around having fog of war. The enemy sent a lone daemon every now and then, which usually killed a knight before I could heal it. It was better with full upgrades and kiting the target knight away. They attacked my peasants with an unholy armored warlock using poison cloud but did not kill any. Unholy armor was much more powerful because there was no graphic effect showing it. The orcs sent occasional weak attacks; lone necros or warlocks, a raider with 1 or 2 spears, or a lone skeleton. I set up my line at the center gold mine and pushed the west base, luring enemies to my archer line and inching the entire formation close enough for the catapults to destroy the barracks. It was very tedious moving units 1 at a time to set up the proper formation but this is how I like to play rts; I hate it when games don't have slow motion or pause so I can properly micro every single unit. Then I pushed the main base and had to kill a few catapults with knights or elements; they definitely built extra catapults and warlocks, unlike in the mod, and a few times I seen them trying to rebuild razed buildings. At one point they sent 2 catapults so I sent a knight after each, who both died as the catapults killed each other with friendly fire. I had a fairly steady stream of knight losses and kept making replacements. I did need more knights overall with some at the flank to prevent attacks to the clerics and a few at base to stop the occasional lone enemy. Unlike in the mod, the units stood their ground unless they or an immediately adjacent unit was attacked, so it was much easier maintaining the formation and no clerics died from rushing to the front. Then I played the classic orc final mission, where the AI sent a steady steam of water elementals, invisible knights and small attacks of knights and archers. I had my raiders, spears and catapults set up to completely block the entrance to my base while I built walls north and south. I even built a long road with spaced out farms to get walls around the 2nd gold mine to the south, then cut through the trees to mine it. I did need to assign a catapult and 2-3 spears to the north and south of the base to prevent the enemy from smashing through the walls. Elementals were easier than daemons because they stayed at range to be picked off by catapults. I wiped out enemy bases using only the starter warlock to summon a daemon, and a necro to follow him and cast unholy armor. It was ridiculously easy. After most of the enemy units and barracks were wiped out I sent raiders to help mop up. Last I tried out the custom game mode. I beat a forest level as humans starting only with 2 peasants. I later discovered using cheats that the AI started every game with a fully built town, including defenders. So it was impossible to win without starting off with some defender units. The only reason I won that match was because the AI was too stupid to go around the forest. I ended up accidentally making an entrance into my base by cutting through trees, but it was right along the edge of the map with buildings making the path only 1 space wide, so my archers easily held it. Then I walled it off and defended with a catapult and several archers. I won by sending a few conjurers around the long way to summon elementals. Next game I lost because the AI attacked before I could even get a barracks built; need to start off with way more than 2 peasants! Then I started off with 6 knights, which was enough to rush the enemy and wipe them out. Dungeon maps were just against neutral enemies without any base building. The only really interesting thing about custom mode was challenging yourself to start off with as little as possible, and disabling certain units. Otherwise it was disappointing.

Warcraft was not the legendary masterpiece that 2, 3 and Command and Conquer were, but it was an extremely well crafted and ground breaking game. The controls, AI and level design were primitive, with the controls probably being the worst aspect, and there were some balance and design issues. Larger variety in missions and custom maps would have made the game much better, like more than 1vs1 in custom mode, different objectives, neutral creeps like in Warcraft 3, and even special maps where you could rescue to hire neutral units. I know that user made maps were made but never played any.

8.0/10