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Warcraft III Expansion
Ultra Magnus writes "Looks like Blizzard is releasing an expansion pack to WC3. I've always been pleased with their expansions before, so I hope this lives up to expectations."
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Well, if this isn't late breaking news, I don't know what is!
Isn't online news supposed to be really fresh? This is a week old.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
"Yes, that's what the market needs, another $60 video game. "
That might be a valid point if a.) WC3 costs $60 (it doesn't, it's $50 just like every other game out there) and b.) If Warcraft 3 was another run-of-the-mill game.
As for your liking it, your choice. But if games aren't successful in the market, you're going to have fewer companies like Blizzard trying to do something interesting. The fact that they released it when they felt they were ready alone is a behaviour we (as consumers) need to encourage. It's not a guaranteed winner because they take their time on it, but it beats rushing it out the door to make a trade-show deadline.
What's your beef with this? I've never quite gotten the hang of playing undead, too much micro management of the hero's, and too weak in the early game. Magic as a general rule does whoop melee people, depending on what type of spell caster you are discussing, especially if they are ones that cast slow, this seams reasonable, Abominations are slow, they can't close. How many Abominations did you have, how many spell casters? Did you bring the hero that casts sleep on them all? Did you crack out the little wood gathers to make a zillion little targets? Did you bring a good mix of guys, or did you just bring Abominations? Did you bring something to resurrect them? Did you bring meat wagon's to have range on them?
If you hold StarCraft out as some great well balanced game, I've seen the 4-5 little lighting guys (Templar I think is the official name) take 120 Terran Unit points in under 10-15 seconds. Doesn't make any difference what they are. Battle cruisers, tanks, transports, marines and medics. I've seen them do it to a ton of Zerg units, generally Ultralisks are the only thing that hold up to a good batch of well played lighting guys. They've done it to Carriers. Best way to beat them, bring in zergling's or speedy units, possibly cloaked units.
I've been pissed when the Taurean Chieftan at the 7th level took 65 unit points and my 8th level Priestess of the Moon doing Star fall, pretty much single handly. I believe he had 4-5 grunts with him. It took about 120 unit points worth of Night elves to take him and his 40 unit points of grunts and spear throwers. Oh, did I mention, that it was the third time we'd taken over 100 unit points at him, and took getting him trapped between two different armies to finally kill him?
The game has met most of it's design goals. It's not a build a massive army and send'em. You need to go pickup items, you need to get your hero to level up. A high level hero can generally make up for a lack of a massive number of units. You have some incentive to go out early and actively fight creep while doing the upgrades. My biggest beef with it, is that losing the first big battle can be absolutely fatal. It means that more then likely you have given opposing heroes too much experience, and will spend a fortune rebuilding that you should be spending on upgrades.
The undead don't have a lot of game early, or really late. In the middle they are pretty good, especially if you can counter attack after whooping people with your superiour base defenses. They can expand and get a ton of money, and if they can get a good group of necromancer's with meat wagons they can be pretty impressive for fodder with the micromanage hero's well played, they can be devastating in the mid-game.
The Orc are great pretty much start to finish, but lack massive group killing spells or anything worth putting in the air. In term's of straight up melee battles nobody can stand with upgraded Tauran. Once an Orc takes an expansion, or a part of town, if they have pillage, they generally will roll units at you until you just can't keep up, it's a huge financial boon, especially if resources are tight on the map.
Night Elves, if you can get a big group of anything together, and get a level 6 priestess of the moon, you are hard to just crush if you can keep starfall running. They have good late game units, but don't have anything that can stand toe to toe with high-end melee units. Especially because they don't have a mass heal (non-hero based), or an auto-casting heal.
Humans seem to have good everything. Very well balanced, and can hurt you in a lot of different ways. Mortar men at with knights up front. The flying bird guys. The water elementals. The mass teleport, and auto healing w/ brillance to juice the healers, and a palaiden make them hard to beat. In general they can be pretty bad ass if they can level up the heros. Good magic, good range, good flying, good melee. Probably the race I consider too powerful. However, I play mostly night elf, and it might just be I haven't figured out the proper strategy yet.
I don't do much on Battle.net, a buddy of mine played it for StarCraft and said nobody online was worth playing because all the high ranking players ducked anybody who was good, so you could whoop on crappy players for weeks to try and get a game with a good player. However, we might try it on WC3, because what he's heard is at least the 2v2 and 3v3 ladder matches are really stiff competition, so that'd be fun to play. We gave up playing StarCraft against the computer after we took every defensible ground map 2v6, and every air and ground 7 player map 2v5. It just wasn't any fun any more.
Kirby