WC2 Mission 2, Raid at Hillsbrad: Jailbreak

For our next assignment, Doomhammer is sending us to recruit some potential new allies to the Horde. In Warcraft lore, Trolls are a race of greenskins native to the world of Azeroth, unlike the Orcs. They’ve fought numerous wars with the various other races in the world, particularly their archrivals the Elves, and lack any real allies. The arrival of the Horde presents a golden opportunity for them to change that, and the Horde likewise has an opportunity to acquire a new and valuable asset. As a race, Trolls are swifter and more nimble than the brutish Orcs; they traditionally fight using hit-and-run tactics with throwing axes as their weapon of choice. Once we recruit Trolls, they’ll serve as our primary ranged unit for the rest of the game. To do that, though, we have to help out Zuljin, a troll war leader who’s been captured by the Alliance. Zuljin and his troops are currently imprisoned in an Alliance jail near the town of Hillsbrad, and our objective is to bust them out and return them to their camp. This mission is designed to teach the player combat fundamentals, and it’s very easy. We’ll start with a large army that’s more than powerful enough to get the job done, and it’ll be joined by both Zuljin and five standard Troll Axethrowers after we break them out of jail. We do have to make sure to protect Zuljin, as the mission is an automatic failure if he dies, but that won’t be a problem.

The mission starts with our forces in the southeast corner of the map. We have a base consisting of a Great Hall and two Pig Farms, and we have one Peon we can put to work if we want. We won’t need the Peon or the base at all, though, since we also start with an impressive nine Grunts. As in the first game, Grunts are the standard Orc foot soldier, and they carry large axes they use as melee weapons. We had some in the first mission but didn’t use them, so this mission is going to serve as their de facto debut. I proceed to select all nine of our Grunts—unlike the first game, we can select a maximum of nine units at a time now, which makes combat much easier to manage—and send them to the north. We’ll need to follow a stream on the map to reach the Alliance prison in the north, and as our force advances we run into some light opposition from a Footman and an Elven Archer. Footmen are the Alliance counterpart to our Grunts, while Elves serve as the Alliance’s main ranged unit; as noted earlier, they’re the Trolls’ arch rivals. In any event, our army is able to easily defeat these two opponents, with only one of them taking any significant damage. I continue the advance, and after passing some trees we come across the prison and its guards.

The prison is protected by multiple Footmen and Elven Archers, and also has a Watch Tower near the entrance. A standard Watch Tower is unarmed but has a large site radius, allowing the player to be alerted to hostile forces. Despite what the Alliance has, though, our army is still larger and more organized than theirs. I have everybody engage two Footmen who rush out to intercept us, and nine against two equals an easy victory for us. Next, I have everybody attack the Watch Tower, briefly stopping to kill a third Footman who foolishly rushes us with no backup. Once the Tower is gone, we advance up to the north of the prison, where we kill two more enemy Footmen and two Elven Archers. The coast is now clear, and while some of our Grunts have taken a beating we still have all nine of them. We can now actually free the prisoners, and so I have the Grunts start attacking the wall containing them. Soon there’s a wide enough gap for the Grunts to pass through, and once they get close enough to the Trolls we’re granted control of them. Notably, their unit sprites are given different faction colors than the red our Grunts are using—Zuljin himself is green while his five followers are black. Regardless, they’re all our units now and we have a very imposing force.

All that’s left now is to move the Trolls to their base in the map’s southwest corner. We now have too many units to select all at once, so I divide our force into two groups, one of nine and one of six. The group of six, which includes Zuljin, is kept in the rear while the larger force acts as a screen to protect him from any further enemies. In all honesty, though, the precaution isn’t strictly necessary. There are only two remaining enemy units we encounter along the way, a Footman and an Elven Archer. We do lose one of our wounded Grunts to the Footman, but he’s the mission’s only casualty on our side. Soon enough we reach Zuljin’s base, containing two Horde Watch Towers and two Pig Farms that become ours. We still have to make sure each Troll unit makes contact with the “Circle of Power”, though. It’s a runelike marker in the rear of Zuljin’s camp that serves as the final objective, and once all six Trolls touch it we’re given credit for another successful mission.