In 2006, my brother and I would regularly play Warcraft 3 with a few friends. Warcraft 3 is what’s called a real time strategy game. Players gather resources from gold mines. These resources are used to construct buildings, like a Barracks that can train Knights or the Arcane Sanctum where you can recruit Sorceresses.
One unique feature of the game was that you had heroes. These heroes were super powerful compared to a normal unit, and had unique abilities. You can choose different heroes to start with, and you might be able to recruit more as the game progressed. Your hero also became stronger as you won skirmishes.
A normal game lasted around 30 minutes, but that’s not what I’m writing about here.
Part 1
In this game, Eric and I were playing with two friends, Hansel and Chenga. So we had four people versus another four people from the internet. But near the beginning of the game, Hansel disconnected, leaving just three of us. Now, it’s important to know that when someone disconnects you almost always lose. It was typical that you would have to rapidly move your units, train more troops at your home base, and cast your hero’s spells all at the same time, so multitasking was always a challenge. So even though we had control of our missing friend’s units, we were constantly messing up. Our opponents were able to take over the area our friend used to own, destroying his buildings and taking control of his gold mine.
At this point (30 minutes into the game), our opponents decided to mess around with us. Normally players build armies of heroes and units and then fight each other. But instead of doing that, our opponents decided to create a giant wall of fortifications. In modern times, you would call this “trolling.” As you can imagine, building a lot of fortifications is really expensive and rarely works (c.f. Maginot Line). But they were just so far ahead since they had access to almost all the gold mines.
To counteract this, we built siege weapons like Catapults. Going up against a walled fortification head on doesn’t work, but like in real life if you have some siege weapons you can gradually destroy the walls and towers. Unlike real life, in the game our opponents had an Archmage and a Blademaster, powerful heroes at their disposal. The Archmage could summon a blizzard. The blizzard had just about as much range as the catapults, so we’d have to try to move them out of the way of the damaging spell. The Blademaster was a hero that excelled at picking off single units. It was capable of destroying a catapults in just a few swings. Worse still, it could turn invisible and run away.
The game had dragged on for an hour and it was more frustrating than fun. You might ask — why keep playing? Especially when you realize what happened next … the game dragged on for another hour.
Well, the answer is partially that this is what we do, play it out until we win or lose. And this time our opponents had thrown some trash talk our way. The longer the game went on, the more invested we were.
Back to the game, our opponent had this Great Wall setup that we are trying to chip away at somewhat inefficiently (I’ll be the first to admit we weren’t playing our best). They had a superior amount of gold, but they invested most of their money in the Great Wall, so they didn’t have much of an army. How are they actually going to win the game? What they did is send out their Blademaster, kill a stray unit of ours, then go invisible and run away until he healed up. In Warcraft, gold mines eventually run out of gold. It’s been over two hours, so every mine is dry, meaning our unit losses are more or less permanent. Both our forces were whittled down from a full blown army to a Hero and a few strays. And we were losing the war of attrition.
I had two heroes. The first hero was a Death Knight, sort of a horseman of the apocalypse type. My second hero was a Lich, a fragile magic user. It’s rare for your second hero to unlock their ultimate ability, but since we had been playing so long, the Lich learned his final spell, Death and Decay. Up to this point, these two heroes were important at keeping the Blademaster at bay because they could instantly damage him before he turned invisible. But since I had this ultimate spell, I thought it was time to go on the offensive.
Death and Decay outranges towers, so I could take down parts of the Great Wall without being in range myself. The disadvantage was that the Lich has to stand still like a doofus while casting it. My plan was to bring the Death Knight, who has this ability to heal the Lich, to keep it alive. The Death Knight also carried an item called the Town Portal (henceforth, TP). The TP can return all nearby units to our base if it’s used. Using it takes a few seconds and crucially the hero using it (but not anyone else) is invulnerable during this time.
Thus prepared, I’m off to combat with my two heroes (pretty much all that’s left of my army at this point). And I feel good because we are finally destroying a good chunk of the Great Wall.
That’s when the enemy Blademaster shows up and starts attacking my Lich. I follow the plan and use my Death Knight to heal my Lich. But despite the heal I realize the Lich is dying too fast to be saved even if I have the Death Knight use the TP right away. Here I make a split second decision. Instead of having my Death Knight use the TP, I have him hand the TP to my Lich. If I can have the Lich use the TP scroll, he will be invulnerable and the Blademaster cannot kill either him or the much stronger Death Knight in time. It all happens in slow motion:
I rush the Death Knight over …
The Death Knight hands the TP to the Lich…
The Lich is about to use the TP when…
The Blademaster kills the Lich.
Part 2
With the Lich gone with the TP, the Blademaster — the strongest hero in a small skirmish — finished off the Death Knight. The death of my two heroes (essentially my whole army) is bad news. My base was destroyed, then most of Eric’s and Chenga’s.
Increasingly it began to feel that the game was about the Blademaster. Our opponents had squandered so much money that they had seemingly no more units (though the Great Wall stood). But even though the Blademaster was strong, he could not destroy the combined heroes of Eric and Chenga. The problem for us was all our buildings and units were spread out, so the Blademaster could come in and kill whatever wasn’t near the allied forces.
It’s important now to note how a game is won. In Warcraft, you don’t actually have to kill every unit of your opponent before you win. You just have to destroy all their buildings. The Blademaster kept picking off our buildings. Soon Eric’s last building was standing by its lonesome. It was surrounded by the heroes of Eric and Chenga. The Blademaster would come in and attack it once or twice. Eric and Chenga’s heroes would try to kill him, but before they could, it would go invisible then run away.
From our opponents perspective, he was bound to win eventually. Repairing the building takes gold, and gold had run out. Plus, even if he didn’t kill the building, we’d have to destroy the Great Wall.
Two things were in our favor.
1) Hansel, our long departed disconnected friend, was playing a race called the Night Elves. The buildings of the Night Elves are giant trees. These trees can actually be uprooted and walk away (like in Lord of the Rings). Unbeknownst to our opponent, we had taken one of those trees and hid it in the very corner of the map before Hansel’s base was completely wiped out almost 2 hours ago.
2) We had more money saved up than our opponent thought. Every time he attacked the “last” building, Eric would repair it slightly. But he would always leave it very damaged — maybe at 40% of it’s health. We took this risk because we had the tree.
Our opponent started playing more aggressive, letting the Blademaster attack the building for a longer time and get more damaged by our forces before he turned invisible. I can only presume our opponents wanted to end the game as much as we did.
The Blademaster is at it again. Eric’s hero is called the Tauren Chieftain. He has two important abilities — War Stomp stuns people near him, and Shockwave does damage to anyone in a line. The Blademaster gets to pretty low health and Eric uses War Stomp to stun him, hoping to do enough damage in this time to kill the Blademaster. But before we can kill him, the Blademaster turns invisible again and runs away. We can’t see him anymore, but it’s at this point that Eric shoots a blind Shockwave spell off in a line, predicting where the Blademaster would run to. It connects and the Blademaster dies.
Part 3
With the Blademaster dead, the back of our opponent’s army is broken. It was a new dawn for the allies, not just in the game, but also in real life as the sun was probably close to coming up.
We slowly feel confident enough to move out from our defensive position (and by we, I mean Eric and Chenga, since I was useless at this point). We essentially had to do the same thing the Blademaster was doing to us, slowly destroy each building then heal up. Except we had to cut down the entire Great Wall. I don’t remember how long this process took, but it must have been a long time. Finally we destroyed every single building of our opponents and took the win. Exhausted, we all collapsed.
Looking back, I ask myself if all that effort was worth it. Certainly, if all I got out of the three hours was winning a Warcraft 3 game, it wouldn’t be worth it. It wouldn’t be worth three hours to wipe the smirk off of some annoying people from the internet either.
But it was one of the most memorable games we’ve played. From initially being cast as the underdogs as Hansel disconnected, to the buildup of our opponent’s Great Wall, to their increasingly irritating war of attrition, to the low of the death of my two heroes, to the high of killing the Blademaster once and for all, it was all something. And now I can tell this story.
Good Game.