WC2 Mission 1, Zul'dare: Building Stuff

From the game’s main menu, I choose Single Player game and then New Campaign. We’re then presented with four options—the “Tides of Darkness” campaign with Orc or Human as choices, and the “Beyond the Dark Portal” campaign with Orc or Human as choices. We want Tides of Darkness--Beyond the Dark Portal is an expansion that continues the story after Tides of Darkness and is also a lot more difficult, so for now we’ll stick to the original game. I choose the Tides of Darkness Orc campaign, and we’re shown a map with “Act 1: Seas of Blood” superimposed on it. Seas of Blood covers the first four missions of the Orc campaign and essentially acts as a series of tutorials to introduce the player to game mechanics. It’s centered on a relatively small theater of conflict along the Lordaeron coast, and for the first mission we learn that Orgrim Doomhammer wants us to build a base in the Zul’dare area in preparation for an eventual offensive. Our task on this mission is incredibly simple—just build four Farms and a Barracks, with no combat necessary. There are a handful of enemy units on the map, but as long as we don’t provoke them they’ll leave us alone and we can build our town without interference.

We start the mission with one Great Hall, one Pig Farm, three Grunts, and one Peon. As in the original game, the Great Hall is the hub of any city and produces Peons to act as a labor force. Peons are physically weak Orcs unsuited to military service, so they serve the Horde as laborers instead. In the original game Peons would run away if engaged by enemy forces, but in Warcraft II they are able to fight, albeit not very well. Either way, they’re responsible for building all structures, military and civilian, and have the ability to repair any that take damage. Peons are also needed to mine the gold and harvest the lumber necessary for creating units as well as structures. Despite being scorned by other Orcs, Peons are vitally important to the overall war effort and without them defeat is just a matter of time. I begin by creating a new Peon while putting our starting one to work collecting gold from a nearby mine. Once our new Peon is trained, though, we’re completely maxed out because we only have one Pig Farm. Orcs live on meat, and the Pig Farms breed hogs to serve as food for all the Orcs that we control. One Farm can support four Orcs, while the Great Hall can support one. That puts us at five “food units”, and with three Grunts and two Peons we’ve reached our limit. If we want to train any more units, we need to build more Farms.

I put the new Peon to work building a new Pig Farm, and once that one’s done I have him build a third. That puts us at plenty of food units, but now our gold is a bit low. I decide to have our builder join his buddy mining for gold to make the process go faster. Each Peon can collect 100 gold per trip to the gold mine, so having multiple Peons working a gold mine gets gold in our coffers more quickly. Once we hit 400 gold I train a third Peon and likewise have him start mining gold, as well. With three Peons collecting gold I’m able to quickly train a fourth one and then have him build another Pig Farm. That meets our requirement of building four Farms, but now we have to build a Barracks and lack the resources to do so. A Barracks costs 700 gold and 450 lumber; we have the gold, but our lumber is down to just 250. We’ll need more, and so I put two of our Peons to work collecting that instead of gold. Just like in the first game, trees can be found on every map, and lumber is collected by having Peons chop them down. Each such trip causes us to collect 100 lumber, so once both Peons have finished their jobs we have enough for the Barracks. I have one of those two move from cutting down trees to building our Barracks, and soon enough it goes up and we gain credit for a successful mission. We definitely won’t have another one this easy.