I attended a small LAN party this past weekend and it reaffirmed that I still suck Warcraft 3. We did have a chance to sit down and play a little bit of the popular mod, Tides of Blood.
For those of you that don’t know, Tides of Blood is a custom Warcraft 3 map in which each side of the battle has installations in addition to the main stronghold. Periodically computer-controlled troops will come out and run to the opponent’s base… and mostly get slaughtered. So you control one hero on one side or the other and it’s your job to turn the tides of the stalemate.
Long story short: you control one hero and slaughter the other side. Fun!
This map/mode makes for some of the longest games of Warcraft 3 that I have ever played. The match that we played the other day lasted for nearly two hours and 40 minutes. The game was really a back and forth struggle, and, had the other team not given up, the game could have easily eclipsed the current record of three and a half hours. It’s a fun map, but it totally ruined my ability to play a normal game of Warcraft. Since you only control heroes, I completely forgot what a good build order remotely looks like. Well, I shouldn’t say that that’s the only reason that I suck at regular Warcraft 3. I haven’t actually played the game in several months. I suppose that could play some small part in the whole thing.
For those interested, here is a REPLAY(link removed 7.21.05 since it’s no longer relavent) of the match we had. It requires version 1.14 of Warcraft 3 and version .99M3 of Tides of Blood.