strategy

Table of Contents

Tips	Tricks	Facts	Fun Stuff
Great strategies on how to get out of tuff positions and how to over power your opponent!	Shows you how to take advantage of bugs to give you a good head starts!	Cool facts about the way the game WarCraft II works so you can creat your own strategies!	Awsome stuff to do while your bored since your woopping your enemy because of my great Tips, Tricks, and Facts!

Tips

If Peons/Peasants repair a building that is being built it will build much faster. One Peon/Peasant repairing divides the time by 2, two divide it by 3, and so on.
Transports can be repaired by Peasants, and can be made invisible just like other units by mages. Remember that clicking on the unload button will cause the transport to be visible, you must click on the individual units to unload.
If you think that there are invisible units wandering around, left click your mouse and draw a large cursor box around the map. If an invisible unit is in that area it will show up in the unit box at the left of your screen. The only problem with this is it takes time and a lot of chance. (This works for land or water units, and can on units that have gotten invisibility from training or spells).
Have an air unit follow, or preferably lead, a group of Destroyers and/or Battleships to prevent an attack from Subs/Turtles. This can really be helpful because if one of your units can see the invisible units the rest of your units can see the invisible units too, allowing them to attack the ones they normally couldn't see. Think I said the word units enough!
Towers under construction can see Subs and Turtles. So if your naval fleets are in trouble just start building a Tower. You can even cancel the construction after the danger is gone!
Build a Subs/Turtles as fast as you can, preferably before your enemy gets their first oil platform but after will still work, and put it on your enemy's most conveniently located oil patch so that when he goes to build an Oil Platform he will get a big surprise!
One way to attack your enemy without them knowing is to use the spell Polymorph. It doesn't set off the "We're under attack!" alarm, so you can slowly pick off your enemies' units, one by one, without them realizing it, especially if there are several things going on at once. They'll go to use their use their footman or grunts only to find critters.
Use Demo Squads/Sappers to blow away terrain, like forest or mountains, or to destroy walls. This can come in handy when trying to surprise your enemy. He'll never expect to see you attacking from where there were once mountains.
Cast Slow on enemy Sappers so that your Towers and/or Archers can kill them before they deliver their blow.
Don't cast invisibility on your own Demo Squads, or Unholy Armor on your own Sappers because they will blow up. This is a good way to stop an attack of bomber units though. Just cast one of the 2 spells on them and they will die!
Cast Haste on catapults to make them a great hit and run team. They'll leave your enemy wondering what hit them!
If you need some soldiers quick, kill some of your Peons and cast Raise Dead on them. They will come back as Skeletons and more powerful.
Use Exorcism to kill Death Knights. This can be very useful if your enemy's Temple of the Damned is to heavily guarded for you to destroy it.
Use your Orge Mages to cast Runes between the enemy's gold alley, entrance to his or your base, or any other area with lots of unit traffic. It will be pure luck if your enemy gets a glimpse of the Rune's occasional flicker of light in time to stop his units from walking into a mine field.
Mages don't get hurt by their own Blizzard spell. They can cast Blizzard on themselves for defense (it'll still hurt your other units though). So Mages can stand in the middle of an enemy's gold alley and cast Blizzard on themselves. The Mage will be semi-protected from enemy units, and the Peons will be killed as they walk by!
Cast Invisibility and Flame Shield on one of your units and bring chaos to the enemy's base. Casting Flame Shield won't make your unit visible again because he's not technically "attacking", so your enemy's units won't be able to destroy yours since they can't see it.
Use Bloodlust and Haste on Dragons. They will be even more destructive and will double their number times they strike to attacks (only Dragons will attack faster).
If your enemy's units are in a clump, cast Flame Shield on the middle unit. Your enemy will spend time moving his units away from the flame, instead of informing them to attack you.
If your enemy has so many Guard or Cannon Towers that you can't even get close enough to destroy them, use Catapults/Ballistas to take the Towers out. They have a longer range, so the towers can't hit them.
While attacking your enemy's base, instead of going for the big buildings that take a long time destroy, go for the enemy's Farms so that he can't make any units until he rebuilds them. This will severely slow your enemy's unit production down, giving you enough time to build up a large force so you can go for the kill.
Fully upgraded Rangers do more average damage than a Guard Tower. In a sense they are walking Towers, so upgrade them fast.
If your enemy is attacking you with a load of Gryphons or Dragons that are all grouped together send any unit (preferably a unit that has a high number of hit points or a unit the enemy has a high priority to kill) into the center of the group so they end up shooting each other. The computer may be able to cheat but it is not smart. This also works well in multi-player because humans aren't usually quick enough to stop their units from killing each other.

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Tricks

The Transport of Doom- You must be the orcs to do this trick. Upgrade your Death Knights with Raise the Dead. Then kill some land units that you don't care about and cast Raise the Dead on them when you can see their bones after they start decaying and they should become skeletons. After that put the skeletons in a transport and take it to a safe place. Leave it there for a while until the skeletons die of old age. Once a skeleton dies it will be replaced by the first unit or building made by any player because the game doesn't know what to do when a unit dies inside of a transport without the transport itself sinking. After the skeletons are replaced unload the transport and if any of the skeletons were replaced by buildings, the units and other buildings you had will be on top of each other. This trick can be very helpful in a game by cutting the cost of units and buildings but there are some down sides. Here are some of them: You can replace a skeleton with a tower but it won't fire. Also if the enemy builds a unit before you do it will replace the skeleton with that exact unit with the exact same color and it will be under that person's control. Although that unit can't attack you in the transport it can still attack you once you unload it. And last but not least if you are caught using this trick in an AOWL Ladder they will suspend you for 3 months. If you want to see some pics to help you understand click here!
This one only works on very narrow patches of water between two shorelines, you can move Peons/Peasant to new shores without transports! Build any shoreline building (Shipyard, Oil Refinery, Foundry) between two shorelines where the building touches both. When the building is done being constructed, if you have placed it correctly your Peon/ Peasant will appear on the other side. This requires some playing around to get the Peon/Peasant to pop out on the right side. What's better is that you don't actually have to finish the building. Just begin construction and then cancel. If you find the proper map and know what you're doing you can transport a Peon/Peasant to a new island and construct a new Townhall/Great Hall to harvest a new goldmine or transport a peon to an enemy land and build a Barracks!
Lumber Bug- This is a cool and quick way to give yourself a little head start when building your town, especially on a custom game with low resources, but it doesn't work on the Battle.net Edition. Take one Peon/Peasant to get lumber. After he chops once at a tree, move the screen to somewhere you can't see him. Then go build a Town Hall or Lumber Mill (or their orc equivalents). After the Hall or Lumber Mill is completed, you will get a little bonus lumber back, about 100-200 lumber. This also works for goldmines! Just substitute the word trees for goldmine for the directions to do this, but you can only do one or the other. This trick can really speed things up for you, so I recommend using it.
If you want to cheat but don't want to get "cheater" as your rank, first play with whatever cheats you want until there is one building left, like a farm, then save your game that you cheated on. Next exit to the main menu and load the game you were just playing on. After the game has loaded finish of what is left of your enemy. When you get to the ranks screen your true rank will be there instead of "cheater"!

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Facts

There is a maximum of 600 units per map. This means 2 players may build up to 300 units apiece; 3 players, 200 units; etc. Having a limitation just keeps the game to a playable speed, since too many units would definitely slow down the game considerably. Also another thing about this limitation is if the game starts with 4 players, having a unit limit of 150, and one player dies (that is, leaves or is eliminated from the game), the remaining 3 players' unit limit rises to 200 units apiece, and so on.
Usually when you cancel a building under construction, you get most of your resources back. However, if you start building a Foundry and cancel it, you will not get your oil back, no matter how far along the building was. So make sure that you build the Foundry in an area that you want it for the rest of the game.
Sometimes during a game with laggy or very long games with lots of units moving (at or near the unit limit, 600) are played, buildings will occasionally be visible on the map after they have been destroyed. When this happens in a game the buildings served no purpose and can be walked over. This Ghost Bug is rare, but still occurs every once in a while.
If you build a Scout/Watch Tower, and upgrade to a Cannon or a Guard tower, at the end of the game the stats count the Scout/Watch Tower and the Guard/Cannon Tower as separate buildings, even though there was only ever 1 building. This also happens when you upgrade a Town Hall to a Keep, and Castle, etc. So, if you build a Scout Tower and upgrade it to a Guard Tower, the computer counts it as 2 buildings in the game statistics.
Cho'gall is the only unit to start with any spells.
After an Oil Platform blows up from pumping out all the oil in an oil patch, a certain amount of gold and lumber is returned to you. This Oil Platform Bug may just be a "deposit" that is returned to you once the Platform has no more use.
Catapult/Ballista Bug- The Catapult has less animation frames than the Ballista therefore taking less time to aim and fire than it's Human counterpart does. If you want to test this, set up a map where a catapult and ballista start out within each other's range at the opening of the game, with no outside unit or terrain. Then slow the game down all the way, observed the fight, and take several screenshots to compare. The Catapult fired first, hitting the Ballista just after the it had fired back. Right as the catapult fires, the Ballista draws back its bolt to shoot. This delay is a lot more noticeable when you give them very low hit points cause you can watch to see who dies first. I have done this test and here it is if you want to see it! This could cost you Ballista/Catapult wars on NWTR, so always be orcs any time you plan to use catapults/ballistas as a main weapon of destruction.
Most people who have played WarCraft II for a while know that the computer cheats. What most people don't know is how the computer cheats. Well here's a few ways the computer cheats:

The computer doesn't need a Lumber Mill to upgrade a Scout Tower to a Guard Tower.
The computer gets the lumber bug no matter what. It doesn't even have to go through the steps. Start a game playing against the computer, and before your enemy harvests any wood surrender. According to the end stats the computer will have harvested 100 lumber just as if it had done the lumber bug.
This one most people know from experience. The computer can do multiple things at the same time. Whether it's casting spells, sending units, building, or upgrading, the computer can do it all at once. The only reason the computer doesn't win every time is because it's stupid!

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Fun Stuff

Click continuously on a Critter and it will blow up. Unfortunately they do not harm any thing near them.
Continuously click on any unit to hear the different response they will make, there are some pretty funny ones, especially Alleria's (don't worry, they won't blow up).

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