OzWL Strategy Forum

Contents
No.	Who?	Date Added	Name/Comment	For ...

1	Inferno	7/12/96	Changing the colour of your name Customise your name colour in Warcraft games
2	Inferno	7/12/96	Use the keyboard Using shortcuts
3	Inferno	6/1/97	"ALT-M" Music toggle
4	¿Danzig the Misfit¿	11/1/97	The Famous Lumber Bug Get more lumber!
5	MolG	17/1/97	Lumber Bug Addition Extending it to gold
6	Blake Knowles	4/4/97	Ocean Map Pointers Useful tips for sea puds
7	Inferno	11/4/97	Defending against the Grunt Rush For newbies
8	Stretch	4/7/97	Peons with the Grunt Rush
9	Christine Hancock (?)	9/8/97	Kabab Shop Tactic
10	==]:~+(_	23/8/97	Three Town Halls in Friends.pud

I'm sure you've seen people in the Warcraft chat room with multicoloured names. Here's how you can get one. Firstly, you should use the DOS editor - Windows' notepad doesn't work. Open the war2.ini file and search for "name=". This should be followed by whatever name you've picked.

Then, straight after, press one of these key combinations for the appropriate colour :

Ctrl-C = Red
Ctrl-D = White
Ctrl-F = Black
Ctrl E = Grey
Ctrl B = Yellow
Ctrl L = Clear

A little symbol will appear at your cursor point. Letters after that symbol will appear in the colour selected. Further symbols will "override" previous symbols causing a colour change. Note - You can change the colour of the text you "speak" while in a game by putting a symbol after your name.

Take the time to learn some keyboard shortcuts. They speed up your gameplay and are at times far superior to moving your mouse across the screen and back. Also, make sure you use the right mouse button. Some of you may not believe it, but I have a friend who, whenever he wants to move a unit, clicks on the "move" icon on the left menu bar, and then on the place where he wants to move them. If he's made a mistake, the mouse has to travel all the way across the screen, and sometimes it's too slow.

This tip for newbies (no offence if I call you one). Pressing Alt-m turns off music. This makes the games over Kali faster.

I have a tactic for low resource map, I found this bug by accident when playing a friend of mine. I got my peon to chop some lumber and when he finshed I made him build a lumber mill and to my surprise I got a hundred extra lumber so all togerther I got 125 more wood than I shoud have . It really does help.

[ Hmmm. Basically, yeah this is the gist of it, but this is actually what it is. If you click to harvest lumber (no need to for the peon/peasant to chop anything) and then immediately build a town hall or lumber mill, when the guy pops out when complete, your lumber count gets bumped up 100 (if you built a hall) or 125 (if lumber mill) points (so basically you get an extra 100 or 125 lumber). This is a cornerstone trick to Warcrafting.

Well to add to Inferno's notes on the lumber bug it should be noted that this also works for gold. You right click on the Mine then before the peon reaches the Mine use keyboard shortcuts (yes these are worth learning) to build your building. Upon finishing construction you will have an extra 100 Gold. Of course what seems to cause a few problems is which buildings it works for. Well it works for everything accept Farms and Towers. Everything (and I mean everything) else can be milked like this.

(i) Never build an Oil Refinery unless your really, really good. A second shipyard is much more useful than the +25 oil you get.
(ii) Never build towers right next to the sea... There no match for a battleship.
(iii) Try and get lumber inland on maps like High Sea's Combat. Squares that have had lumber removed are a dead give away to where you are, and if your not quite ready to beat off an invasion its best to lumber wood thats not within sight of a sea unit. [Blake didn't send me his nick]

Newbies may have trouble working out how to grunt rush, as they often get grunt rushed before they can do anything. Okay, there are a few viable solutions to this ...

One - Build a walled-in guard tower near the peon stream (the line of peons that go mindlessly back and forth from the goldmine to townhall/great hall), or near your "front line". If possible, use farms to wall in the side that is closest to where the enemy is likely to come from (eg: in one way in/out, "farm in" the right side of the towers). If successful, the rushing forces will (if you built a cannon tower) be demolished after running into large metal balls. If you built a guard tower, while your smaller forces are keeping the larger rushing forces at bay, the tower will be wearing away at them, making it easier for you to kill them. If they pull their forces away, be weary of a regroup and then a rush for your tower.

Two - Play a scenario/pud which it's difficult to get grunt rushed. This is my theory (actually, Dopefish's) on why PoS (Plains of Snow) is so popular - it's large and there are 7 goldmines to search so it's hard to really "rush" someone. An even better pud is bridge to bridge combat (I think). Large, 8 players with a labyrinth of forests and tracks to navigate. Of course, the person you're playing may not like you playing such a pud.

Three - Learn how to grunt rush yourself :). On high res, go straight for production of grunts with barracks - most preferably two. I saw some guy playing with 9 barracks once :-0. Pump them out, making sure you have enough farms. Once you've got a sizable force, head for the enemy camp and slaughter. If they are using the same strategy, you will often find your swarm of grunts passing each other en route :). Normally, they'll then turn around and you'll watch them bash it out in the middle of nowhere and decimate each other. It's pretty funny when that happens.
Once I was playing Dopefish and our grunts passed ... and kept going. We smashed each other's peon streams up but I ended up winning as I had more gold than him :).

There's probably better ways to counter the rush, but since I'm not a professional warcrafter, this is what I know. If you know, tell me :).

What I have been doing is, when I grunt rush thsese days, or even just go into attack, I take two peons with me when I go. When I get there I leave the two peons at the edge of there city and send in my Grunts to attack. I send one grunt to the gold mine to take as many peons as he/she is able. Once the Grunts start to fight I send the two peond in the Guts of there city. I use one peon to make a tower and the other starts walling in the tower. I also keep producing grunts and sending them down. When I send down my next lot of grunts, I also take yet another peon, this is to make a barracks just outside there city. This depends on what pud you are playing.

I think taking PEON is a great strat, and if players better than me mastered it, it would be very hard to counter.

One thing I only learnt recently, and am certian newbies dont know about, when you make a second city, upgrade a second steel mill and even upgrade your second hall.

1. You simply make a large port with lots of cannon/guard towers.
2. Then you get a lonly transport to tempt the enemy ships onto your defenses thus destroying the enemy outright.

(This also works on land and is very usefull if they have a large army that you want to work down gradually without to many losses.)

I play a lot of team games on friends.pud!! My favorite strategy is to build 3 camps right away:

First build a TH. Then 1 farm. when farm is done send this peon to make a new Town Hall at the right empty mine. The 2nd peon will build the 2nd farm. And the 3rd peon will go to the left empty mine to build a Th there! Build Lumber mill and wall in towers in your main camp. Now the funny thing is that your enemies come to your main camp and kill all your gold peons but then your towers kill them and they think that U are lost and a newbie!! Boy are they surprised when they find 2 more huge camps full of towers and armies!