Getting Started
Alright...so you're new to the multiplayer version of the game and you're wondering how players can kill you so quick. This page is designed to help you through those first few weeks of playing Warcraft 2. Alot of this can be applied to any other RTS game as well.

Production
Production is the most important thing in this game. Your goal is to have enough resources being harvested, so you can continuously replace your army. A multi-player game is fast and intense. The more production you have the better. You will lose units, and you will lose buildings so you have to have the resources to replace, and outnumber the enemy. It all starts down at the bottom with your peons. Ultimately, Warcraft 2 is a game of production.

Peons
The most important unit in your army...I'm not kidding. With the exception of a few smaller maps, you want as many peons as you can get. As you get better, you will learn some low peon rushes, and powers, but to start off, it's a good idea to just keep building peons. The more peons you have, the more units and buildings you can produce. It's that simple. A good habit to get into, is to train another peon, before giving a command to the one that just completed. This way, you will be sure that you always have a peon being trained at the Hall.

Know Your Hot Keys
The hotkeys are easy to learn, and will increase the efficiency of your playing (in any game!) by a significant amount. Get to know the hotkeys, and use them! It saves you a lot of time. You can see the human hotkeys here, and the orc hotkeys here. You should be able to remember some of the important ones, after a few games of playing. P for Peon, BB for build barracks, BF for build farm, etc.

Unit Tips
- Grunts/Footman are much stronger than Archers/Axethrowers. You should try building all archers one game so you can see how they just can't compare against footman. Just use footman until you get better at the game.
- Smith upgrades do alot. A level 2 footman will always beat a level 1 footman. A level 5 footman will even beat a level 1 ogre. Upgrade your weapons and shields at the smith.
- Knights/Ogres are much stronger than footman/grunts at the same level. Eventually, you will want to upgrade in order to get knights or ogres. Going footman and grunts for an entire game won't win you many games against better players.

Building Tips

Placing your buildings becomes very important as you play better players, but if you're first starting out you don't need to be TOO concenred with it. However, don't just be careless with your building. There are many important things that you have to do each game. - Build your Hall as close to the goldmine as possible. - Do NOT place any other buildings between your Town Hall and the goldmine. - The first building you build after a Town Hall will always be a farm. - Any towers you build should be protected by other buildings. Do not place towers in front of your buildings. - Try to protect your peons by placing buildings further out from your hall. When buildings are built next to each other, no unit can pass by them. This is known as 'walling in' and will be one of the most important parts of your game later on. - Keep your mill close to some trees, and back in your base so your peons chopping are protected. - Your barracks should be out at the front of your base. Multiple barracks are usually best next to each other so you can easily group any units you build. - You always want to keep ahead of your farm usage. Do not wait for your food used/available to be 18/18 and then start to build your farm. You want to be have a new farm going so that when you do get to 18 units, you have 22 food grown (18/22). There are more sections later on, in this strat guide that deal with intermediate and advanced building placement.

An early town with an unrestricted gold flow. The peons are protected out further by units and buildings.

Be Active
It's no good having units if you are not going to use them. If you have a few grunts, go out and scout. Don't be scared of what may be out there. As soon as you have a grunt or 2, go find the enemy, just to see what he's up to. You don't have to stay and fight...if you are outnumber, just run away.

Upgrading to Keep/Stronghold
I just want to say here that you should always have a minimum of 15 peons before you go stronhold. If you are finding that you have too many resources when you have 15 peons, it just means that you are not using them fast enough. If you go Keep or Stronghold with fewer peons, you will surely fall behind later on in the game.

Ask for help
There are lots of players who will point out mistakes you made in the game that you played with or against them. Ask them for pointers, and they will point out specific things that caused you to lose (or win!). Some players will even show you things to do in-game.

Have Fun
The best players of any game, are the ones that enjoy it. You can't make yourself play a game if it's no fun for you. It's a game! So don't sweat it, and just have some fun. If you like playing you will cotinually get better.

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