Starting WC3 in 2024 - Reforged Version Help, Graphics, Guides, Grid Hotkeys, Micro, Multitasking

so you're thinking of starting Warcraft 3 in 2024 or you've played a little bit before but you've got some questions that don't seem to be easily answerable you've searched the web but there's still some confusing points I get a lot of new and beginner questions about Warcraft 3 in my stream or on my YouTube and I would like to take a chance to use this video to answer some of your most common questions I've asked people to send me questions on Discord and Twitter and people have done so and there are some questions I couldn't have thought about because they seem so obvious to me uh by now that I don't have the answers to it uh or that I couldn't have thought of the questions myself and I've got your answers so hopefully this will be a fun opportunity for you to hear about Warcraft 3 in 2024 to learn if you want to start playing it how to do it if it's anything like 20 years ago Etc we'll also cover some strategy questions we'll cover some basic things like when to Scout how to scout what you're looking out for how to multitask I know RTS are not the most casual genre in general a Warcraft 3 isn't entirely an RTS though it is not entirely a classical RTS like Age of Vampires 2 or Starcraft 2 and it is not entirely down to EPM and multitasking but in some way that is always a little bit a part of it but I hope that with my questions and answers some things will become a bit clearer for you and you may be able to enjoy either the custom games one-on-one four on four game modes because let's face it at the end of the day there are new rtss coming out this year this decade and this Millennium but some of the greatest RTS games that exist right now that are still very playable include games like Starcraft 2 Age of Empires 2 Age of Empires 4 and also Warcraft 3 so if you're looking to start let's jump to the first question a question here from uni which version are you using using and which version has the most players let's jump into that because it is actually a bit of a multifaceted answer I wish things were simple but they're slightly less simple than they should be because of the way that blizzard handled the information around reforest let's begin by answering this so to begin with Warcraft reforce which you can launch via the battle net launcher is the new Warcraft 3 client that combines all players together from all the regions America Asia Europe and so on whether you choose to use the new graphic settings that was promised and delivered together with Warcraft reforged or whether you use the graphics that came from 2002 it's all in the same client now called Warcraft reforged some people like the new graphics but most people don't as it drops your FPS to about 30% capacity of the original it lacks visibility and It suffers from a poor overall design aesthetic resulting from a rushed downsized and outsourced design process with changing design philosophies along the way during the development of Warcraft reforged some great models of the warcraft art were created but they lack polish as work on Warcraft reforced art was never actually finished with blizzard Activision forcing the product to Market in an unfinished State following massive crunch sta firing and budget limitations the new graphics could have been good for some or many but at the moment I cannot recommend them luckily while the old art may look a little dated to some it benefited from a passion filled 2002 blizzard proper design process when they were a little less cocky and a little less soulless and every frequent Warcraft 3 player has simply reverted back to Classic graphic settings even in 2024 via the reforged client this is how it looks like when I start my copy of Warcraft reforged so the game boot this is the new client and this may not be what you remember looking at back in 2002 2005 or whenever you last played this is the only full legal version of playing Warcraft online and if you jump into a game you may see that you're using the old graphic settings at least that's the way that I've calibrated my settings so you jump into a game and this is pretty much how the game used to look like now you may remember that there were new graphic settings promised alongside with Warcraft reords and that's exactly what you can get when you go to the settings down here at the hamburger menu and you press options and then you toggle to Warcraft reforged Graphics settings enables reforge graphics and content for the versus and campaign for custom games reforge Graphics will be used where possible and if you click you switch back to classic Mode each has their own own distinct campaign some changes and improvements were made specifically for the reforged campaign and they are not compatible with each other so there are like two versions existing at the same time I and many other multiplayer players and not just competitive players just you know casual players we pretty much prefer classic but I'll show you what it looks like when you do switch to this keep in mind that when you in purchase and install Warcraft via the original uh method right now which is the warcraft reforge client on the battl net launcher you will be downloading all of the reforge graphics package which is 30 GB worth there is no way not to download the reforge graphics if you're using a copy of Warcraft reforged which you purchased this is how Warcraft reforged looks like personally I don't like these Graphics as much but they are playable and if you do prefer them that is an option refor retailed at $30 and has been on sale I think once since so this is the legal option that you have available and the only one that I will be recommending to you for online play now you may be rightly wondering what the hell happened to my old Warcraft CD key I still have the copy of Warcraft The Frozen Throne I still have the copy of Warcraft rain of chaos I still even saved my CD Keys way back when from 2003 why can't I play with those anymore well the simple answer is you can if you navigate to your Battle.net account and you go to account settings in the top right and you click that and then you click on games and subscriptions you will get a list of all CD keys that you've entered into your account you can also enter new CD Keys into your battl net account adding any The Frozen Throne or rain of chaos CD key will give you the ability to access Warcraft re forged via Battle.net launcher and you'll be able to start Warcraft reforged it'll install the 30 GB of reforged graphic settings even if you won't actually have access to them with this old CD key you do have legal access to play Warcraft reforged together with everyone else that does own copies of Warcraft reforged uh new license itself at the same time that blizzard started selling Warcraft reforest at in 2020 they also remove the ability to directly purchase the old CD keys and the old discs from them you may still be able to find CD key copies on some CD key websites but of course there can be no guarantee that those CD Keys haven't already been used by someone else and I don't know about the legality of that route so I personally cannot recommend it but if you still have your own CD key then you'll just be able to add it into your account and play the game that way in my opinion you don't need Warcraft for Forest but if you do want to get it then you can purchase it and it all plays together in one client together I hope this takes away some of the confusion for people that are wondering what version are you playing what version is he playing and so on and so forth these are the two ways to play in the online multiplayer platform of battl net for Warcraft uh in the current day and age however you may be one of those people that wants to play the old Warcraft no matter what you want to see the old client you want to play the game as it was you want to be able to access Warcraft rain of chaos settings that is possible you can find versions of the game uh where people uploaded the entire game version of Warcraft 3 for example um version 1.27 this is the version that was there before Warcraft reforged came out by Blizzard or version 1.26 you'll be able to go to that and remain entirely offline if you really want to be a purist and play on an old version and not be able to go online you can still probably find a version like that online somewhere and as long as you stay and play offline that is legal and you will have to add your own CD key to it via the windows directory I may be able to add a link to the description on how to do that because there are some other people that have figured those things out so there are essentially two major places to play Warcraft 3 online into 2024 with a legitimate copy of the game via Battlenet by launching Warcraft reforge through the battl net launcher and likewise with a legitimate copy of Warcraft reforged while also installing the W3 Champions launcher and then using it to find games note that if you're from a region that is not Western Europe or Eastern America it is going to be much easier to have a good connection to the global servers of W3 Champions both battl net and W3 Champions are Global servers but W3 Champions has way more server points and nodes which will give you a much better ping personally I'm presiding in the Netherlands so I have a really good ping to Europe America east and west but even when playing against Korean players I'll have a ping of something like a 100 and Australian players are able to play with sub 300 pings whereas on battl net you could easily be stuck in a 400 plus ping game without any way to get out of it on W3 Champions you can type minus draw and if your opponent EX steps the game can be unscored players often do this when one of them admits that they have a really poor connection to that particular matchup so for this next question I think this is a really common one that I get all the time but I've never really put a lot of effort into trying to find out how people are best served with the better hotkeys after all the way I use keyboard settings on Warcraft is the old way it is I mean I I started using this the classic default settings and in the classic hotkey settings for Warcraft 3 you use the entire keyboard you've got hot keys on Q over here and you've got hot keys on P all the way over here then how do you use your items on your Heroes is with your numpad so the way I do it and of course I use mirrored webcam now I'll have my mouse here and I'm on my keyboard here and then when I need to town port or invulnerability potion I'm like this FL play like and when I think maybe my hero is about to die I'll hold my finger over the numpad 7 which means I'm not doing anything with my 123 123 qwe ASD zxc so then like I think I'm going to get attacked and invulnerability potion okay back to the left side so obviously I don't think that's the best way but it's still the way I do it and I haven't rebuilt my muscle memory to be different but it is possible to be different and there's a really cool guide out there that I found that I think will be very helpful for beginning players this guide gaming minus tools.com Warcraft minus 3/ hotkeys so this guide is good I'll put a link to it in the description and I tried this out myself basically what you need to know is that when you are playing Warcraft reforged you can go to the settings via F10 or by pressing on the hamburger menu here you go to options and then you go to input and then at preset key bindings you've got some choices now this is a little arcade where in newer games like Age of Empires 4 you can change all your hot keys inside the client what happens is when you start the game when you launch the game for the first time it is on classic which means patrolling a unit is p and making a peon is p which is about as far away of a letter as you can on most standard keyboards and then attacking something a left click is a a and b is this far away from each other that's very far away so not really very convenient right but there are ways to improve it aside from hot keys for items on the hero inventory pretty much everything can be changed and this is how to do it first switch from classic to custom then you can enable specific hotkey overrides per unit and per ability this can be accomplished by creating a file called custom keys.txt in your Warcraft 3 user data under custom key bindings the moment that you choose custom I believe it automatically makes that file and if not you have to find one online but I believe it makes it automatically so then what happens next is the following you open your folder and then you click on custom keys.txt then it opens this file and this of course looks probably a little bit confusing to most people but basically the way that I set my hot Keys up so it's a simple case of finding the ability that you want to change for instance lightning Shield which used to be on L and then you just change the hotkey to e so now e is the lightning shield hotkey for me bloodlust is B and perch is G I'm fine with those they're on the left side there are some others I changed for instance quill Beast used to be on Q and I changed that to F because alt+ q+ Q used to quit the game and I didn't want to accidentally do that so I've made a couple of custom edits myself and you can continue to do this for yourself as well but there's also a way to set it up systematically in a much better way number one way is to go to grid grid profiles map each slot in the command card to a specific key these keys are all applied to the unit command card so let's try this out I've actually never tried this out before so let's see how that is actually set up okay so so this grit hotkey really works very nicely top left icon is the queue for both burrow and build structure barck is W so you can download this from the description it works very nicely for custom though there are some Online files that you can copy that give you the best grid experience that even puts all Hero abilities on qwe just like it is in most mobas and this website will explain how so first of all you're going to be using custom keys for Warcraft it explains how and why it was really simple to follow it's saying that the method by blizard isn't that good and the best way to use your current hot keys for Warcraft is by using a custom key file that he is going to be giving to you and also the auto hotkey auto hotkey is a Windows application that allows you to tie certain hot keys to certain uh script commands let's say and and that means that instead of having the hardcoded numpad 7 correlate to the top left item in your Heroes inventory you could set it up at something more simple for instance F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 or Ty yui o p something like that so you've got a couple of uh options quas uh quas settings for your Grid or quir or aex for different languages and then for the auto hotkey items you can also set it up to F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 so if you follow this guide you'll be able to find something to set up your hot Keys the way you like it but if you're like me classic dude basic Lich then you can just use classic and go to the custom Keys files like I showed to start changing some hot Keys yourself now to answer the part of the question that didn't completely get asked specifically what hot keys do you recommend well Warcraft 3 has hot casys for almost everything but I think the really important ones are control one keystroke this saves current selection of units into group one and then pressing one pressing one refers to that same group of units this is really useful because any units that you have you can do a left click box select on all your units then you press control one and then you can reference it again later another nice one to add is your barracks I usually put contrl 3 for my barracks and then when I press three then it opens my Barracks again and then I can train units from there in an easy way I also like to hotkey my town hall on four and then I'll be able to make workers in that way these are pretty much the most important you can have two groups for your army Me by actually using control two so two could be ranged units and one could be your melee units plus all heroes that's a pretty easy way to control your Army in Warcraft and these are nice hot keys to use then there's the backspace backspace goes to your main town hall or to all of the tunnels that you have you can cycle between them and then if you don't mess with auto hot Keys F1 is first hero F2 is second hero and F3 is your third hero Escape is cancel current building or unit or upgrade and I think with those you have the most important ones when you start Warcraft 3 you should probably start against AI so you can work on some build orders but more about that later okay the next question is going to be what strong and weak points would to highlight for each faction and this ties in with another question I got a lot I'm new to Warcraft 3 and which race do you think is best for me now it actually all comes down to why we play games in the first place they're supposed to be fun to distract us from something or to entertain us to stimulate us uh to challenge us and then to try and push past the challenges learn more and get some fun experiences along the way so I wouldn't say that any race in particular is correct for you when you are beginning there's no simple buildup where One race is exceedingly simple and the others are just really really Advanced they weren't made in mind uh with the idea that one is the starting easy class and some other classes are really tough and advanced it really comes down to how you like to play the game you see an RTS is basically a game genre that combines many different skill sets at the same time this is part of the reason that RTS can feel a little bit more overwhelming or intimidating to some players after all if you take all the different things that an RTS has all the different skill requirements and different facets of play and you start eliminating some of those aspects you usually get very popular other genres take away the real time aspect and you may get something like a turn-based game or a card game that are very popular you know card game Rog legs uh turn-based strategy games like you know Stellaris or civilization and then you taken away the stress of the real time aspect take away the economy and base management and you basically get some kind of battle simulator maybe something like team fight tactics or Hearthstone Battlegrounds you know no Base building but it's just uh some maybe some economy management and then there's the fights you've also taken away the micro cuz you you don't need to fight do the fights yourself they're Auto Battlers so many game genres have successfully innovated on the earth while popular RTS back from the beginning of the Millennium and have spawned many different popular game genres you take away Base building and unit production and economy management and you actually get the Moa right there is some economy management there in your own gold but no more Base building or unit production you start with the entire base and the units are marching down the lines all the time so you see really it is not crazy to feel like that you are being taxed and multi Tas a lot and that there's some requirement for APM when you're playing RTS and yet RTS is still a very fascinating game genre for so many of us but it doesn't mean that you are required to play at the highest level or that everyone is a sweat Lord and everyone that you're going to be facing is going to be impossibly good there are plenty of weaker players in the game as well plus you're not even required to play at high level online or to play online at all I find Warcraft 3 very fun even just in the single player so long as you're not beating the AI there's plenty of Challenge and fun to be had with the game as well so the strong and weak points for each faction uh aren't that important every race is roughly equally good you may hear me and others sometimes complain about the balance or this race that this race that but the fact of the matter is for such an asymmetrically balanced game Warcraft 3 is phenomenally well balanced so all the races are roughly equally strong and each race has easy ways to play and difficult ways to play perhaps the most uh challenging thing in a Warcraft 3 game isn't the multitasking there isn't that much of it in my opinion uh it is perhaps how to control your army and we'll be talking about some of that later in this video as well but you can even just build simpler units rather than some of the more delicate and laborious and tedious to use units with more different abilities having said all that what are some strong and weak points for each faction I think humans and elves probably have the most multitasking of all the races so if multitasking is something that you maybe think is a little bit more difficult for you I would recommend orc and Undead have less multitasking then when it comes to how many different bases you have to control at the same time I'd say human and elf are more often taking multiple bases whereas Orcs and undeads more often are trying to attack earlier and to try and put pressure and deal damage or to end the game earlier a strong points for human are to take extra economy very early strong early economy elf has strong harassment orc has strong Heroes and Undead has strong direct damage spells and ranged nukes so whatever appeals the most to you can be really fun and challenging to delve more into as for the weak points human workers are really vulnerable vulnerable workers elf can have trouble with healing sometimes and weak against some rushes orc has weak anti-air and antimagic and Undead very reliant on death knight and tier three with that in mind I hope that you can pick a fun race for yourself maybe try them all out and pick one that fits you next question a question from Meadow mellow he asked what is a good way to improve micro fighting for a beginner well here's what I like to do you see when I'm in any online game of an RTS I feel like it's pretty pressuring to play against an opponent that is trying to beat me so I feel like a lot of the learning uh in Warcraft 3 starts by just starting a single player game without an opponent and then just kind of trying to use units yourself it can be really helpful to learn how to control larger armies by just starting a Sandbox game against no opponent by removing the opponent from the menu and then using several cheats in order to quickly get a large army you're going to want to use warp 10 for fast building greed is good with a large number in order to get infinite resources you use Synergy to skip the teory if that's what you like to do then you can make your buildings like so you'll make some Burrows and of course this doesn't have to be fast there's no opponent there's no stress you'll make some Heroes and some units and then you just kind of try to see what feels good how to control your units for instance I have all of these in contr group one and I have all of these in control group two and then I just kind of try to move around the map and see what spells they have I check their hot keys and I just kind of learn about the game you see if you're new to the game a large part of the fun of a game is to learn what all the different units do think of ways that their abilities might be used and then read what they do you can also watch my orc tier list or any of the other tier list to learn about what all the units do I've just made them and they're uploaded on my grubby talks Channel and then you can go find some creep camps as delineated by the colored circles on the map the orange and the green circles and you just start fighting against those direct you want to try out what it's like to use uh lightning shield and you can upgrade that ability and you can just watch its effect have fun with the game see what the game has to offer take down some creeps and learn to do so in a unpressured environment I think a large part of the multitasking of an RT a large part of learning that is by separating it into digestible tasks it's going to feel very overwhelming if you do everything at the same time which is why you can first against no opponent learn uh to practice a build order you can use the cheats in order to try out an army but if you don't use the cheats you can learn what it feels like to have a standard buildup of your base by putting five peons in Gold seven peons on Lumber you start with an altar you make a burrow then you make barracks and you just go from there and just kind of see how that feels like then in another game maybe you'll learn how to do creeping go from one C creep Camp to the next and then eventually you learn what it's like to play against AI opponents work complete so how do you then end up improving your micro fighting I always think that in order to improve something that requires agility and that's true in any game or even in a sport in order to improve your agility you first need to improve your brain and so first you need to come up with a theoretical answer to the question that you essentially have because micro is a combination of knowing what to do and then doing it and of course you'd rather like to do it fast and at the right time but first comes what to do so I can't tell you do the fight with 200 APM because you need to know what to do first and so how do you figure that out well that is it going to be a combination of what your opponent has as an army what you have what your army can do and in the end that comes down to of course experience but a large part can be understood via looking at different units and looking at their tool tips for instance if you look at the Raider unit and you hover over their damage type it says Siege attacks which is what he have do extra damage to unarmored units but reduce damage to medium that itself is already a clue what you might want to be doing with a Raider ideally if you can think of remembering of doing it the Raider should be attacking someone with unarmored units so who are unarmored well the header below shows this guy is type medium armor who takes reduced damage from Siege whereas this Shaman here has unarmored taking bonus damage from seeds damage so if you have a Raider and your opponent has a shaman it might be a good idea to attack the enemy Shaman and then it's going to do increased damage compare that to a Raider attacking himself and you see it doesn't nearly do as much damage so a very simple way to answer is how to micro better is put the right dudes on the right dudes Raiders on shamans I am yours and so on and so forth there are also micro Arena custom maps where you can practice fighting over and over eliminating the need to multitask to think about your base to think about training units to think about managing your resources there are plenty of custom apps with micro Arenas and you can just download them from hi workshop.com and you can practice either against AI or against human players the next question is from Dimitri who said which heroes are best for a beginner I think we can keep that pretty simple for orc it is much better to play Far seier first than anything else Shadow Toren chiefton and blade are all a lot harder to use as a first hero so for orc just stick to farer first and the second hero should be Taran chiefton he's nice and tanky and farer creates summons which are nice and tanky both of them together are going to have a pretty easy play style and they have strong area of effect damage and they are not as finicky as a blade master or a shadow Hunter so far are first and if you get to a second hero torren Chief in for orc then for KN elf easiest hero is going to be Demon Hunter the Demon Hunter is naturally very tanky as a first hero uh he has evasion and high agility class which means that he can absorb lots of physical damage and he's got an easy to use spell mana burn that removes enemy spells by not have allowing them to have the Mana to cast them so that makes him safer as well he's relatively cheap to heal up on your moonwells which is where you can get your healing and as a second hero I would recommend either Naga seawitch or Keeper of the Grove or Priestess of the moon for human best first hero is going to be Ark Mage into Mountain King or Ark Mage into Paladin both are really solid combo with Ark Mage first you get a brilliant aura that gives you a lot of Mana which allows you to be more forgiving with Mana expenditure and you also get water Elementals which is a summon that can help you creep and can help you fight early game Pala as a second hero is going to give you healing and another strong ARA for devotion Aura which is to give armor to your entire Army Mount King gives you an easy to use bolt bash combination the bolt is a targetable stun single Target and The Bash is an automatic passive that you won't need to worry about using because it is automatic note that almost every single of these Heroes that I've shown so far have at least one passive which means that you don't need to manually think about using it which is great when you're starting to learn the game for Undead best easiest hero is going to be death knight into second hero is going to be Lich Lich deals a lot of damage and his Nova spell is a strong area of effect ability they can damage and slow enemy attack and movement speed he stands way far back the main thing you need to worry about is that your death knight doesn't get surrounded and focus fired and that your Lich will receive a death coil from your death knight anytime he drops a little lower this is the classic combination of Heroes that every race would like to be starting with as a beginner question from coyote xli how do you decide when to expand or when not to expand a very multifaceted answer available for this and the short answer is you don't necessarily need to expand in Warcraft 3 unlike in Age of Empires or Starcraft games you can play every race as a single base it is possible while some races are more incentivized to go for an expansion and others are less incentivized due to the way that the meta and the strategies and the timings works it is not necessary however as a general rule I like to expand either very early or very late expanding early creates a simplification of the way that you're going to be playing the game the earlier you expand the smaller your and their army are that means that both of you are creeping very slowly uh creeping means where you take down the neutral NPCs on the map in order to get gold items and experience during the game during the course of an RTS game during the course of Warcraft 3 normally you'll be training extra units and you'll have a bigger Army late game than you would have early game so it stands the reason that your efforts of killing neutral NPCs will ramp up as your army gets bigger because a bigger Army can handle bigger creep camps and that means that the resource usage of taking creeps the essentially creeps are a resource so you'll be assimilating those more quickly that means that people's power levels is going up exponentially the stronger people are the more under threat you are of being attacked so if you're choosing to do a midgame expansion investment you are taking one of the most um tumultuous times where people have bigger armies and they're creeping fasted getting lots of advantage through creeping and you're branching off and splitting yourself into a secondary Advantage potential of trying to in some time starting to get bonus resources from an expansion and that is a risky moment to do it in your army is midsize your opponent's Army is midsize you might start to meet each other because the amount of creep camps on the map um is going down as both of you are eliminating all the creeps on the map So eventually things are going to come to a head and you'll be fighting over some rather big objectives there's going to be a a large important creep Camp somewhere your army will meet their army will meet but you just sank 600 resources in to an expansion that hasn't paid off yet but he has three more units because he spent it on units expand really early while you're under 35 population means that you are far more likely to either get the benefit of the expansion or if he attacks it and you're forced to cancel it you might have been at the same time doing something else maybe you are expanding and then you keep creeping you don't even defend it you just keep creeping he sees the expansion he's like hey I got to stop that so he travels all the way over to your expansion and you're completely willing to cancel it because you've been making other investments into other directions and you keep taking creeps you keep taking creeps right so you basically uh much earlier on you gave him an option are you going to creep or are you going to attack me and if you're going to attack my expansion hey my main base is still safe and I'm creeping so now I'm getting ahead in another way so there are lots of different advant advantages in Warcraft 3 that are really interesting lots of different objectives expanding is just one of them unlike in other more classical RTS games where it's all about unit production and more units Warcraft 3's hero components actually adds a lot of complexity because now you've got the creep objectives you've got the gold you got the items so there's not only one way to roam there's many different ways the interesting thing every Warcraft 3 game is that you decide for one of those advantages to EXP exploit or sometimes multiple this next question is from Red Mac a newbie question which should be easy to answer back in my early newbie days in Warcraft 3 I would wait until I build massive Army and at least one of every unit and all the way until I hit 100 pop cap before I would even consider attacking the opponent can you explain why this is wrong yet it sounds like such a solid idea to beginner and newbie I love this question so much I have played so many different video games in exactly this manner uh many turn-based strategy games I fall prey to this and the really crazy thing is that even after I became a competitive gamer in Warcraft 3 I still play games like this sometimes because this is my natural default goto I like just taking my time building up my town building up my units getting everything there is unlocking every single research and I find it very difficult to choose a prioritization of no I need to do this thing now and I need to have a tunnel vision because I'm going to get attacked and I can't get everything I need to choose you know I totally get it and the way that I actually got rid of this and went to something else is uh need necessity right I get attacked I lose my base I die I'm like oh I guess one wind rider with blood lust isn't good enough one Taran and one witch doctor so I start looking at how other people are playing the game and then you start realizing okay don't make long-term don't upgrade my Knights to three three upgrades without even having a single night in anticipation of making a knight that don't make no kind of sense right so uh you basically start doing things in a less perfectionist way and you start valuing time and pressure more but why do they matter why do time and pressure matter more well there's in a multiplayer game right there's two reasons it matters one you could be attacked before you're ready with a more refined laser focused approach they take you down uh you lose and you were still just ramping up like you didn't have any units yet you've got three barracks and two blacksmith but nothing else right so you realize it is common for me to be attacked early I need something first usually how that looks like in an RT S is to always keep combining everything so you don't only invest in infrastructure you don't only invest in technology research upgrades and so on and and and options you don't only invest in units of the most basic kind you do a little bit of everything and the way you want to do it is to always be making a couple of units and then getting some research and then a couple of units and then some research you want to see everything kind of grow at the same time at least before you understand the nuances and the timings better and the reason that this is important in Warcraft is because first of all people can attack you like I mentioned and the second reason is there are objectives on the map so while you think you're being efficient saving up resources and making sure your units are all in tiptop fighting shape by having all the research upgrades the reality is that in Warcraft there are neutral creep camp and those neutral creep camps represent an alternative wind condition while having a fully upgraded Frost worm is very strong having a fully farmed hero is even stronger those Heroes demand to be leveled up they want to gain in power level and there's only two ways of doing it and one of them does not involve your opponent it just involves taking down creep camps you should see the resource of your gold mine to be at least least as important but not more important as the resource of creep camps so what you want is very early on you want to create a couple of units so that you can start taking down Green creep camps there are three colors green orange and red green creep camps can generally be taken by a hero by themselves or a hero and one or two units you can be taken efficiently and like not taking too much damage and you kill it relatively Fast Orange creep camps can generally be taken with a hero and anywhere from 3 to seven units and red creep camps is generally two Heroes and 6 to 12 units so in order to take those camps it can be really attractive to get those two Heroes and those 10 units relatively quickly so that you can take the red camp and that might be worth even more than an expansion and it might be worth even more than a frost worm it's raw because you're losing out on the opportunity cost of creeps and a very similar question here from the Cinnabon at lower levels what decision making determines when and where to creep and when to engage can't the opponent just keep teing while you're creeping and show up with a better Army well technically they could I have before lost with level three three Heroes against someone with a level one hero because they made a lot of an air unit and I had no anti-air and then they killed everything it can happen but this is where the multitasking component of Warcraft comes in if you Scout and you see what they're taking towards and they're investing their army into a high-tech Army but you have several higher level heroes and you build an army that is relatively versatile that can deal like you build a lot of the bread and butter units that I covered in my unit tier list then creeping is almost always better than just fast stacking and making units it gets you a lot of value of course it does keep you more busy so it becomes more difficult to focus on scouting and then reacting but you know baby steps you focus on one thing at a time couple of games you focus on trying to become better at creeping and a couple of other games you try to start focusing on detecting what your opponent is doing and then coming up with theoretical answers for how to deal with that first the theory perhaps in replay review and then later you can try to implement the multi tasking and the awareness of implementing it during a game while you're creeping I recommend focusing on one skill at the same time and then trying to blend them together into a game as for determining when and where to creep and when to engage I recommend setting some form of goal you don't have to be correct you don't even have to be confident but at least confidently set a goal in a Direction so for instance just it can be anything it could be like I want to attack my opponent when my second hero is level three it doesn't matter if top Pro level players would do it the same way but now you've got something to work towards you could also say I want to attack my opponents when my expansion has produced enough resources for my Army size to become 65 population when my total population is 65 I'll attack and by having something to work towards it adds a level of purpose and certainty to everything you're doing that may not be correct maybe the correct number is 75 population But first you set a goal and then you work towards it now you know when you're going to attack so what are you going to do with the time that's given to you and where are you going to creep you know your army needs to keep growing because you want to get to 65 population so how do you grow it right where do you get your resources well creeping gives you gold right maybe you want to get your hero to level three creeping gives you that so then the question is where do you creep well generally you always go for the creep camp that is closest to you first and then within a circle of what is close to you you go do creeps that follow each other in a smooth route so from here you go to here and then to here and then to here instead of from here you go whoop and then Circle back and then across the map here right so you want a good pattern that kind of all stays together at the same time you want to take creep cams that you can handle for the Army size that you have and you want to take the biggest possible creep camp that you can confidently and efficiently handle so if you have an equal option between a tiny Green Camp that you are right next to but a little bit further away there's a red creep camp that you can handle perfectly well you take the Red Cap you don't waste time with the green and you don't even worry about cycling back to eventually go to the Green Camp take the biggest thing you can handle that is near enough and walk in smooth patterns once you feel like you have reached some kind of power spike a new Hero level or an army size attack and while attacking can be scary it is the best way to practice and learn in an RTS where you're at attacking being attacked is something that happens to you reactively and you passively absorb the shock learning to attack and just doing a repeatable timing from game to game teaches you the most in an RTS be the aggressor it teaches you the most here's a question from hectar hectar asks how can I mentally be in two places at once when I'm Base building I feel like I'm neglecting my roaming and harassing but whenever I'm roaming harassing I have the feeling that my building is stopping my base development uh so that is a very good question by haor uh technically I believe that biological science shows us that we cannot mentally be in two places at once multitasking is essentially a farce it is not about thinking of multiple things at the same time it is actually about allowing yourself to momentarily stop focusing on the primary task and then switch your focus into a secondary task so the main thing is to stop vising and being in a trance while being occupied with one thing as usual when doing a skill of agility is important to first know what you should be doing and then to adopt the speed and the multitasking agility to do so during a higher stress situation where you're actually against an opponent so I would say hectar that first you need to learn how to build your base the early part the middle part and the late part and have that be a skill by itself and that every 40 seconds you train new grunt new raider and new spirit Walker roughly know how long it takes for a unit to finish and then start another rotation of units when you need it to learn the hotkey of your building that produces that unit and to learn the hotkey of the unit that is coming out of that building to learn to press for me it would be press four and and then G for making a grunt for my Barracks I then press Tab and R to toggle to the second building in my control group which is the Beery and then make a Raider once you know all those and you can do so when you're only focused on it that's where you start to try and mix it in with doing something else but not before figuring out how to do that hypothetically and theoretically by itself so now you start a game against no opponent what soever you finish your base building and you don't worry about it anymore you have your army and you don't worry about it anymore now you're going to learn how to roam creep harass without thinking about your base at all once you know where you want to take that on an average game and you've tried that a couple of times and you know how to use your units now you're going to try and start to merge these two skills and the way to do it is every time where you start a creep Camp you will check with your base your currently creeping the creeping has begun your units are hitting the creeps and the creeps are hitting you looks like it's going fine I can leave you alone for 5 seconds it might take a pro 1 second but it might take you five or 10 go to your base see what needs to be done based on what you know how bases should develop and then you go back to the creep Camp then you're finished up you now issue an attack command to move your entire Army to the second creep camp and once that Journey Begins check your basic again then you arrive at the second creep Camp you engage it then you check your base again these are the most natural moments to check what you don't want to do is to teach yourself a habit where after creeping is done it's standing still your army then you check your base because now there's no progress in your army it's standing still so always start movement first then check your base then engage with some kind of fight and then check your uh another question from Dimitri he asks what units do I focus in a fight and so I've already talked a bit about unit and damage type uh unit damage type and unit armor type so that can be a great help but I would ask that you formulate for yourself a strategy based on these three things I think the ones you want to focus are either the units with the highest damage the units with the highest control or the units with the most healing and saves so one valid strategy would be that you enter a fight and you roughly know what every unit does which is of course a requirement in that case otherwise you know you've got more learning to do about the units and the heroes which is also a fun journey of Discovery but let's say that you know what the heroes and units do already and you say okay he has a Healer he has a damage dealer and he's got some support units he's got some damage units right and so he's got this hero that gives everybody armor and he can give a big heal to anyone that's getting focused and his name is the Paladin so do I focus something else that now has more armor and can be healed or do I focus the Paladin so then you say okay I think I will just try to kill all the healers first so you start focusing priests and Paladin first you try to kill those first once you deal with those you deal with the rest that would be one way to play the game but you can also Focus the one with the highest damage you say to yourself well I have enough damage to take down his high damage healers or maybe he doesn't have a lot of healers let's take down the biggest threats in damage output which also happen to be the lowest health and that would be something like archers so instead of attacking the mountain Giants or the Demon Hunter or The Druids of the claw you say hey archers are really vulnerable yes they're far back but they have really high damage should I not be focusing them can I just let them free shoot me and that would be one valid way to play the battle the fun thing about Warcraft 3 is there's many ways to play the battle and even the very wise cannot see all ends so come up with your strategy and then later you can evaluate whether you liked the way that you played it and the final one would be the ones with the highest control so that would be for instance Raiders or sorceresses control is sometimes called crowd control crowd control is all effects that slow root silence stun inhibit so you take those down first so if you make a job of taking down all the Raiders then the opponent loses the chance to ins snare your stuff that means that you are more effective at saving your units because it's not going to get rooted by Raiders within snare all of this can feel really Advanced but the only thing that you need to worry about is that you just come up with a way you see an army and you say I will specifically Focus their damage dealers their controllers or their healers I hope this gives you a nice simple tip to follow that you will have fun with to implement in your games a question from Raphael C of Santos and his question is what's the elevator pitch to sell Warcraft 3 to a mobile player no teammates imagine the depth and skill expression of a mooba but you don't have to have teammates sounds pretty good right uh this question also touches upon creeping that's a big Topic in Warcraft 3 it's from Force how do you know which creep camps to take early is it memorization similarly how can you tell which creeps drop an item and what item that is going to be is that also just experience and memory for each map yes it's all based on experience and memory and in an Ideal World Blizzard with reforced would have added a little Treasure Chest icon to uh creeps that says this is the creep that also carries an item and a little book icon that says this is the creep that drops a Tome of knowledge but they haven't and so it comes down to you just need to know Warcraft 3 by now has a great variety of different maps and for a long time there were was a smaller more unchanging pool of maps at the end of the day I don't even know which creeps dro the item in a lot of the new maps because I've only played on them three times so far and I haven't even taken down every creep Camp so there are old Maps I've been playing for 20 years and there's new maps I've only played three times I could relatively easily play a new map in Starcraft 2 and be like okay I see the terrain I kind of know how this is going to work right but in Warcraft 3 there's additional complexity which means that I roughly don't know how much xp everything gives I roughly don't know which creeps have which items so not the answer you want but it's the true answer you just need to know and it is memorization there is however a very interesting guide that can teach you a little bit more that you can actually learn about that it will help you to understand the value of creeps and creep camps as you see them a little bit more this is an interesting guide by marcher rram on Warcraft 3.in that by the way have a number of interesting articles I think it's a really fun and useful website to visit that I don't think ranks that well in the search engine optimization terms of what people might be looking for on Google so big recommend for me if you just go to Warcraft 3.in category strategy you can go over here click on this as well there's all kinds of articles most of them are years older but they can still teach you a lot about the concepts of the game about different mirror matchups about different hero choices and a lot of this is still true even today the one that I'm looking at with you guys right now is hero experience in Warcraft 3 and how it works so the basics are that you get experience from creeps when you're within 1200 range or roughly as far as the Catapult shoots then Heroes need level up EXP p a level one hero has no XP and then to get level two you need 200 XP then you need 500 which is 300 more 900 which is 400 more and then you need, 1400 which is 500 more and then for level six you need 2,000 which is 600 more 700 more 800 more 900 more and then 1,000 more so the amount of experience keeps going up by 100 extra uh starting with 200 so that kind of makes a lot of sense then you get experience for killing enemy Heroes you get experience from killing non-hero units so this is the part where it starts to get a little bit interesting a peon wisp Acolyte and peasant are Level One units they give 25 experience so if you kill eight of them you get 200 XP and then you will be level two so that is pretty easy to understand except the game doesn't tell you that acolytes are level one you just need to know when when it comes to level two units they are footman Head Hunter Archer and they give 40 experience again it doesn't tell you what level they are but usually this corresponds to the amount of Supply that the unit casts peasant acolyte peel and wisp are one Supply and are level one footman Archer Head Hunter are two Supply and they are level two grunts give 60 experience and guess what they are three Supply so that's roughly what it responds with which means Wyn for population 85 five is a chimera 115 it all checks out so though doesn't say the level or say what Supply it is your opponent's units if you know the supply count of every unit that's how much experience they're going to be giving you now enemy uh creeps like neutral creeps also have levels but these units are visible so you can see that a null brute is level three and therefore you know that a level three unit would give 60 experience being level three and if you see a troll warlord level six well that's 150 experience right well not quite not quite because creep XP is reduced compared to normal units and this is how it works when your hero is level one you get 80 experience only from creeps so whereas a enemy wisp is 25 XP if that wisp was a neutral creep it would give only 20 experience when you are level two hero you start getting diminishing returns from those same creeps something that gave 20 XP when you were level one if you kill that when you're level two it only gives 17.5 experience points and eventually when you get to Hero level 5 you you don't get any experience at all anymore so to go back and answer the question how do you know which creep camps to take early game well the biggest Camp you can handle efficiently without taking too much damage and take it fast and when you see the levels of the Creeps you can both gauge the value you get in experience from it roughly roughly roughly right and also how tough it is going to be green generally means extremely easy to somewhat easy Orange means relatively easy to actually really quite challenging so that's kind of a big range and red creep cams are usually really tough that require two to three Heroes of at least level three and maybe anywhere from 6 to 12 units in order to take it efficiently keep in mind that Warcraft 3 has a pretty large single player quotient even when you're playing multiplayer you're only engaging with your opponent very directly somewhere between 40 to 60% % of the time the other 50% of the time on average you're doing economy management Base building and creeping and creeping is a single player Endeavor that can be trained by yourself without a life opponent so learning how to creep better is a large part of both the joy and the challenge of Warcraft 3 uh people wouldn't be a big fan of Warcraft 3 like I am if we didn't also enjoy taking down creeps and taking down Creeps in Warcraft 3 can feel as challenging and as exciting some times as doing a boss battle in a soulslike game after all sometimes you can take really challenging camps with a very small army and manipulate the the micromanagement in such a way that you do it far more quickly and efficiently taking less damage than a more amateur player might and this can help Propel your power level forward in the game so there's a lot to learn I'm always happy to teach if you drop by on my YouTube or my twitch to ask me some questions here is a question question from ladan as someone who's only played RTS games like Age of Empires 2 before Warcraft 3 units seem to be more important on an individual level comparing something like a Warcraft 3 footman to an area of area of effect to an Age of Empires 2 Archer do you have any tips for someone that is struggling to keep his units alive because of old habits from other RTS games where units are more Expendable yeah it's interesting right because Warcraft 3 is an intrinsically differently prioritized RTS than classical RTS games like age vampires 2 and Starcraft 2 while all games have emphasis on embracing the multitasking inherent to RTS between combat Base building and economy management the percentage of effort and time attributed to looking at each of these three major areas of play vastly differs in Age of Empires 2 you spend maybe 45% of the time Base building 45% of the time managing your villagers and maybe 10% of the time fighting and or looking at fighting and skirmishes even while you're doing villager management fights might be going on right now that aren't important enough to look at because the value you get from setting up your villagers is going to be greater down the line so AOE is a very macro focused RTS in general you start a night rate somewhere and then you look away after placing them in the best location to to harass the enemy wood villagers you get night rated and you call the Town Center Bell to protect your villagers and then you look away to manage something else coming back only later once you have time to free your villagers and set them back to work so that is very different than Warcraft 3 because in Warcraft 3 I think you spend about 5% of the time building your base 5% of the time managing your economy and the other 90% of your time is base defense base offense killing neutrals efficiently and quickly fighting epic battles with your opponents with nearly your entire Focus or um juggling items between Your Heroes selling items buying items uh choosing which items to go on which hero and so on and so forth so you're only thinking about doing something with your base or unit production or resources 10% of your total play time and everything else is down to your Heroes it is more okay to forget to produce units for 2 minutes long just to focus on the battle than it is to look away for 3 seconds every 10 seconds during the battle to check if your base is still okay and that is so different than Starcraft 2 so different you look away from your base you don't look constantly at the Min map in Starcraft 2 your entire work line might be wiped out and the battle result is inconsequential because you just lost all your workers so Starcraft 2 is you're always paranoid you're always multitask in Warcraft 3 you often give give yourself to the moment to the battle and then you go flow flow zone right you start focusing on the unit so give into that learn that nourish that cultivate that the reason it's split like this is because Warcraft 3 is a pretty simplified and small scale Base building mechanic and build ordering and the straightforward economy management makes way for an extremely high emphasis on unit and hero value you can throw units at the problem in Warcraft 3 like in Age of Empire to but your opponent is leveling up from those units so it's better if your attention is there and you're last hitting and killing your own unit instead of giving it to an opponent because now he doesn't have the experience points so you are very incentivized to look at the Battle and to become better at that a similarly vain question from Mr dbon what's up dude nice to see you again uh what would you say are the biggest difficulties for an age of vampires player that has never played Warcraft 3 should he decide to try it out and I think the answer there probably is learning Warcraft 3's mechanical quirks and using special abilities and spells of all your different units and heroes you could have 15 different spells during a certain battle with three Heroes all having three of their own plus ult that's 12 Shaman has three spells maybe I have doctors that's 18 spells and I have a Raider within snare coded with devour that's 20 so the main skill of Warcraft 3 is creeping and fighting and my microing all your different units the multitasking part and the base building is such a distant second so get those out of the way and then start preparing for a lifetime of battling and also learning about body blocks and surrounds uh you may have seen it you may not have seen it uh the Viper and I had a series where he taught me Age of Empires 2 and I taught him Warcraft 3 and there's several VI several videos on both of our channels where we showcase that journey and we talk about some of these things so there'll be a lot of overlap in understanding between these two different games it's on his Channel at the Viper on YouTube and on Mine by now uh on actually I don't know on which channel it is it might be on at grubby talks because that's where I used to upload Age of Vampires but just search I don't I don't mind whose Channel you watch it on just go to YouTube search the Viper grubby learn Warcraft 3 and you'll find it question from wiim which items to buy and sell and when there isn't much info on items online and I just started playing so I've got a two-part answer to this very soon I'll be making an item tier list for Warcraft 3 which is probably going to be a three-hour video and we'll be going over a lot of different items I might I might have to go like one per race if it's going to be a global one about all the items that's going to be rather big uh but we'll see how I'm going to structure it so there'll be more info coming soon but let's give a simplified answer for now there are many options and it may feel like you engage in Choice paralysis when you're trying to make uh choices you can buy from the marketplace the goblin Merchant and from your own racial shop so what do you get how do you possibly as a beginning or even intermediate player know the value between different items and which ones you should get when when is it worth to prioritize buying an item over training another unit or expanding it's very complicated so let's keep it simple some item choices are far more important than others I'm going to tell you the most important ones in the neutral Goblin Merchant shop and in your racial shop there's also a goblin Merchant you don't need to buy from that at all let's keep it simple just don't use the goblin Merchant the goblin I sorry don't use the goblin Marketplace uh there's nothing there that you absolutely need but the goblin Merchant has three really important purchases Town portal scroll potion of invulnerability and healing scroll these three are the bread and butter purchases for Goblin Merchant and you probably want at least one of each at most Parts in the game having a town portal scroll allows you to escape bad battles or to protect your base teleporting your entire units and heroes back to your base an invulnerability potion is a 7sec invulnerability period on the hero that uses it which allows you to block damage and to avoid death which you can either use to escape or or to put out 7 Seconds of damage without being able to be assaulted back and the healing scroll is a certain amount of Health for all heroes and units in the very uh nearby vicinity so you can press heel scroll it has no delay whatsoever if your hero isn't stunned and every single unit and hero around you gets a burst of healing that is very valuable you don't want to use that on 40 population armies or smaller if your population C says 40 in the top right you should probably not buy heel Scrolls but if you're at 45 and above that's generally a good time to invest extra and to buy a heel scroll it might be worth more than just trading another unit and it is about the cost of another unit as for your racial shop I can't go over every single uh item that you need to get from your own racial shop but generally the most important ones are the ones that are concerned about giving you health and Mana like healing potion Mana potion it's nice to always have one of each one heal pot one Mana pot you can carry it on a certain hero and you can try to give it to another hero if he needs it more by right clicking it and then left clicking it on another hero also good items are items that give you regeneration of health or Mana like the clarity potion the Regeneration scroll and the healing solve so to make things simple health and Mana are nice things to buy as consumables heel scroll invol potion and town portal scroll good luck here's an interesting question from D Graves when do you target the Army when fighting and when do you choose to focus the hero instead on average it's better to focus enemy units units are easier to kill and they start giving you enemy damage reduction when the enemy unit dies he doesn't damage you anymore units are easier to kill so the quickest way to take less Dam Dage from an opponent is by starting to kill units and they're easier to kill than Heroes they also start giving you experience when you confirm kills which might result in level ups that you can still use in a battle spend all your effort trying to kill the enemy tanky strength hero you don't get XP and you don't drop enemy damage and meanwhile you're losing stuff so on average it's best to just focus units enemy hero should be really out of position for you to want to focus fire him with everything you've got or you should be very confident that with the amount of burst damage control and nuke spells you can kill that hero fast it can be really nice but on average you kill units first there is an exception if you're winning a battle or you're not sure Focus units if you're going to lose a battle Focus the hero that has Town portal scroll many players will choose to save their hero that carries the town portal when you're focused firing it it is your desperation play by focusing their main hero they're going to feel incentivized the town portal out to save themselves as a town portal scroll in progress offers invulnerability to the main hero so even a small Force may be able to surgically execute the enemy main hero it's a win-win either you kill it and he doesn't have it anymore or he feels forced to town portal out giving you a reprieve here's a question from n business I played when I was younger but I'm a Noob what is the best way to find people to play with either more experienced players willing to lend advice or other newbies to spar with I've played a few games on battl net but I got obliterated and I'm not sure where to start to look for improvement very common question we get here as well uh there's a couple of really cool places to go to my number one suggestion would be the warcraft gym Discord uh the warcraft gym Discord is a place for the community to come to together and to practice and talk about Warcraft 3 they have many new players so if you just go to the link that I will also share in the description of this video the Warcraft 3 gym that's the place where you can hang out and they even have a newbie leag as well you can also go to my Discord discord.com grubby or discord.gg grubby I also have a relatively active Warcraft 3 Channel where a lot of people are discussing the game but that would be option two Jim is more active in helping each other learn we're getting to the final two questions here's the pen ultimate question from I forgot to write the person's name so I don't know who it's from uh what do you think of The High Ground mischance mechanic so in Warcraft 3 you've got elevation of terrain you can be on the high ground or on the low ground there are two advantages High Ground gives the opponent has no vision of high ground when they are on the low ground so it's Vision occlusion until something from The High Ground attacks them that's a strong advantage and the second one is every ranged unit has a mischance when shooting to The High Ground what do I think of it I like it I like it when there are tactical advantages to exploit in a game of RTS you've got the ground Dimension the air Dimension you've got the cloaked dimension and I always like it when High Ground matters as well while mischance is a random mechanic there's a chance that you miss I think it's 33% and that can feel frustrating that you can't hit some unit because your last shot actually missed as you went on The High Ground I think that's a nice uh way for maps to offer additional advantage to the person that takes a good position I love it and the final question would you remove the upkeep mechanic if you could personally I would not I think Warcraft 3 has a really interesting balance with upkeep and I could talk about upkeep for hours and maybe someday I will but I think upkeep is very interesting basically if you don't know upkeep forces you to lose 30% of all gold income once you go over 51 Supply and there's different degrees of upkeep once you go higher you start losing more money and I think this is interesting because it gives value to a small ninja gorilla Warfare Army as opposed to someone just making new units all the time making new units all the time creates a big army and that's cool and we do that in all kinds of RTS games but in Warcraft 3 there's an incentive to sometimes keep it small and simple not only does that make it easier for more casual players to manage their army size as it doesn't get as big but additionally it is a tactical advantage that can be exploited by receiving more gold right now when I keep my Army small and trim I can agile move around the map achieve objectives press buttons Force reactions save up a large bank and then overwhelm him by using that bonus gold in a sudden burst of unit production I think that's super interesting and while it does add complexity I I love it and I think it's an integral part of the DNA of Warcraft 3 all right guys I hope you and understand a little bit more about how to start the game how to set up your hot Keys what Warcraft refor is and what version we're all playing on where to play and how to get the game and you kind of start to get an understanding of the different intricacies and complexities of Warcraft 3 and why I think it is such a great game hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: GrubbyTalks

Views: 34,311

Keywords: Age of Empires IV, AoE4, Age of Empires, Grubby, AoE, Relic, Microsoft, RTS, Multiplayer, Gaming, Pro-gaming, Progaming, Tournament, Strategy, Real Time Strategy, competitive

Id: QGB_Ysn69jM

Length: 78min 16sec (4696 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024