Zelaron Gaming Forum - Anyone care to tell me...

I haven't played in a while and my mind is fogged by alcohol but I'll attempt to give you a quick overview.

You can play as the orcs, the humans, the night elves, and the undead. I think there is also a way to play as the high elves, but I've not attempted to do so extensively.

There are special "hero" units in the game, which is pretty unique to Warcraft 3 I think. It's not in starcraft, anyway. These units are named, such as "Thrall" or "Jaina", and they have special abilities as well as more health and mana and such. They can also carry items which you find on the maps, which sometimes give bonuses to stats or give you the ability to heal your hero or units around it or things like that. Also, heroes level up and get new abilities. This aspect of the game gives it a bit of an RPG feel at times, which is pretty cool.

As far as standard units go, they're pretty basic compared to most other strategy games. You typically have the "worker" units which gather resources or build/repair buildings and things like that. Offensive units have certain strengths and weaknesses. For instance, siege sorts of units are great against buildings, but not all that great against footsoldiers. Archers are great against footsoldiers, but pitiful against buildings. This naturally leads you to using certain units together, rather than just making tons of the same thing like you would do in other strategy games. You'll find that usually if you just make a ton of one thing, you'll not be very effective at all. Also, this will lead you to have certain strategies for attacking your enemies. If you're starting to attack their base, you can pull up your siege units and take out their defensive towers before you bring in your foot units. Otherwise, the defensive towers will be peppering your foot units with arrows or whatever else they've got, and wipe them out.

There are also some unique things like the night elf buildings are actually units as well, and you can uproot and move them around, similar to the terran in Starcraft. However, the buildings can even attack, albeit pretty slowly. This means that if you're being overrun by enemies and you don't think you'll have a chance to survive, you can actually uproot a large majority of your buildings and have some extra firepower.

There are a lot of unique things for every race, which keeps the game fun and exciting for a while. The campaign is pretty good about teaching you how things work, as well. The only real complaint I have about Warcraft 3 is that I feel that it's somewhat overcomplicated sometimes. I prefer the feel of Starcraft more, myself. There are only 3 races and they're all very similar but also very unique. I also think Starcraft is better balanced(near-perfectly balanced, if you ask me.)