Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos & Frozen Throne

I recently finished Warcraft III and its expansion for the third time. I'm not really a fan of real-time strategy games; I mostly like the game because of its story and theme.

Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne offer quite a variety of missions in their campaigns. Some are more interesting or even great, and others are boring. For instance, a mission, where you basically have to max your tech and army before streamrolling the passive opposing forces, are of the worst kind. At least for a player of my level.

But like I said, there's much variation and there are rarely two boring missions following each other. Frozen Throne's bonus campaign takes a step away from the army controlling and instead, you are only given few heroes to do questing. Sort of a prototype for World of Warcraft, really. And WoW does run on a modified Warcraft III engine after all.

Warcraft III's GUI fills a huge part of the screen, and only a small part of the map is visible at any given time. The game is old, and it doesn't support larger than a 1024x768 resolution (though it can forced wider with register editing), but I think there should be an option to zoom further out. Instead, one has to settle for the minimap and scrolling around.

Another negative thing, and this is one of the reasons I dislike the RTS genre, is how easily units die and then you have to train new ones in your base. I don't want to lose my units! In the Dawn of War series this is better as infantry units are squads instead of individuals, and they can be reinforced on the go. But as this is not the case in Warcraft, you have to rely on unit micro management. Which requires skill, and which has to be learned during hours of gaming. A great aspect for competitive gaming, but I don't really like it.

Also, I suck at it! I suck at Warcraft III multiplayer so bad, that I can't even beat the AI on Normal difficulty, unless it does something stupid (like suddenly stops building units). It is interesting, how this is not the case in DoW (Soulstorm) where I can usually beat the most difficult AI setting, Insane, without much trouble.

But apart from me being bad at it, Wacraft III and its expansion are great RTS games. And for once, evil wins. Well, "evil"; not much is really black and white in the Warcraft III universe.