War3 Replay Part 1
Posted by TimothyJul 14
Krib and I have started up some War3 again. I’m trying to get back into the mindset of RTS games on a general level. War3 is a completely different game than Starcraft or than what Starcraft 2 will be so I can’t carry over a lot of the same practices that I employ.
Depending on how Starcraft 2 does replays I may throw a few up here unless Battle.net has a really great system for sharing innately. So this is also a test of how this pans out on the site.
Anyway, we’re very rusty, but I think this particular game was very crazy because the level of skill of our opponents is clearly better than ours so there’s a lot to learn from our mistakes in this game. Hit the break for a brief summary.
Ok so anyway, in the early game you can see some pretty good hero harassment on my base. As they flee they’re VERY good at using various units to block our path to the unit we really want to kill. Excellent micro on their part.
After countering their heroes we decided to see if we can catch them creeping which is why we sort of run around aimlessly, but it turns out we didn’t predict their motion well enough and never found them.
While creeping an orange group the night elf comes in from behind and strangely doesn’t decided to attack us. This is a big mistake I feel like, but on the other hand his partner was pretty far away and his army+creeps may not have been enough. The NE is going bear tech so his army is pretty thin at the moment while he’s basically in the middle of his teching.
After some recovery we attack the orc base at which point I don’t know what I’m doing. My battle selections are curious at best while I focus on a DH instead of units. Their tech at this point is pretty solid going with a team combo of spirit link+bears. We’re forced to retreat but at this point as I retreat I tend to focus on my town. It turns out I should have watched the units as many of them could have been easily picked off by myself.
I decide to TP to Krib’s base but as expected the enemy sees this and heads north. We’re temporarily stuck in the base unfortunately but we realize that the NE has an expansion going and we need to strike at his economy since he’s pulling ahead.
This attack could not have gone better. In my mind I’m still not particularly sure how we pulled this off but some mistakes are revealed in the replay. In the first place, the elf portals without his army, which is incredibly costly. The bears come in eventually but having 2v1 doesn’t help them. Also Krib’s use of witch doctors also factors into tipping the scales our way with traps. The NE switches a few, probably too many, of his bears into caster form where they’re quickly executed. Looking at Krib’s army vs what is attacking us it seems really crazy. Something like 2 tauren vs the remaining bears and my army clean it up.
At this point we have the advantage and we press to victory. I rewatched it from their perspective and they spent a lot of time scouting out our expansions. Normally this is a very good thing. But since we’re rusty, they only ended up creeping, which is still a positive for them, but since our motion was more aggressive (at this point we’re heading straight for the NE expansion) it played out to our advantage to play like idiots.
It was a crazy game where they had better micro, a possibly better combination of units, economic advantage, and probably should have had better leveled heroes with a better array of items, but somehow Krib and I pull out a win.
4 comments
Comment by Mike on July 14, 2009 at 7:13 PM
So I am watching the replay now.
Going through it, there are definitely things that should be cleaned up.
One thing that kills me is that you let your tower auto attack on the early harass. You wouldn’t have lost your mountain king if you had told the tower to attack the blade master first instead of letting it hit that grunt for 4 damage a shot. The mana burn hurts, and often times if you run your hero back into your base, while the tower is shooting them they use the rest of their mana to wind walk back in to catch your hero, which is a death sentence when you use call to arms and get surrounded.
Second thing is that cats should NEVER be used to hit heroes if there are any unarmored in the area. Krib really could have changed two encounters early on if he had used the Cats to focus the Huntresses the first time and the Spirit Walkers the second time. It is hard to micro cats while watching your heroes, but it is only 1-2 shots from siege to kill each one and often times people mass and pack their unarmored so they go down incredibly quickly.
The stun totems worked incredibly well. With the flamestrike cap and the bloodmage as a second hero, I prefer to get siphon mana instead of flamestrike. Then you can dump the mana into your MK for more stormbolts and siphon off other heroes once he hits near empty.
Good replay. Makes me want to play more.
Comment by Timothy on July 14, 2009 at 8:37 PM
The tower is usually an annoyance and not an assurance of keeping heroes/units in and out. I should have microed it, but I imagined if he’s going to be running around windwalking making me focus micro on it I can be doing other things. Losing my hero vs him losing his TP I think was a better trade.
I didn’t notice what Krib was attacking, his in combat micro is almost always better than mine but we’re both pretty rusty. Watching some other games of the night I think he focus with either HH or cats could have been better.
I’ve considered doing siphon first after last night, typically when I play it’s MK/Pally second and I was giving this a shot. We had a few games last night where AoE would have made a significant difference is situations so I was reacting to that.
Comment by Mike on July 14, 2009 at 8:52 PM
The amount of mana burned from heroes is not small, and the damage on heroes is far better than anything else that can be rushed with anyway (low piercing damage is worthless against medium or heavy armor). You say he would have windwalked either way but it only takes a couple of shots to milk the second windwalk out of him and if they are getting pelted by the tower the loss of life and loss of mana forces the windwalk much earlier.
Forcing the TP costs more gold than a level 1 hero, but that also comes at cost of the experience you don’t get and the experience he does get.
Oh and I forgot to mention. Spell breakers were the absolute best choice when facing bears. Nothing beats the extra damage they do and the ability to strip rejuv from his targets to yours with an autocast.
And early siphon typically tends to get your Blood mage focused, as it the ‘threat’ against enemy players is extremely high for some reason, much more than flamestrike. With low hitpoints it is risky but more mana for a rank 2+ storm bolt is almost always worth it IMO.
Post more replays please 🙂
And tell Krib to micro his cats more!
Comment by Timothy on July 14, 2009 at 11:18 PM
The most important thing I REALLY need to work on is my insane reliance on hotkey groups. I tend to tell all my guys to do something and waste time in motion when I should be more specific in telling which units to do specific actions.
Meaning if I have group 1 as all my units, and I see something low, I’ll tell all my units to try to kill it when I should actually probably just tell whatever is close by to do that unless I’m going for a surround kill.
Ok as for the mana, if it wasn’t a BM I would have focused more, but I don’t want to get caught up in adding the tower to my things on my to do list when he comes out of WW. While he does get the experience, it’s the tradeoff I decided to make in that situation. Of course I could have added the tower to group 1 too. This again goes to my things I need to work on with control groups.
I’d post more of what we did last night but the rest were boring steamrolls. So we just have to play more and I’ll post more of the interesting games.