Strategier Undead Undead
Dual Hero Pressuring 1.03
- May be valid in higher versions
Most strategies that have been thought of so
far either revolves around killing heroes or killing the heroes’
support. There are no specific openings that allow players to tech while
applying the pressure to the opponent; its either destroy your
opponent’s army at that time, or be prepared for counter attack or
possibly losing the game all together. Some strategies are more
forgiving in terms of failure, but failure usually means that you’d
fall behind in teching up since you have to recover for your lost units.
I’ve found that the undead has the least amount repercussion when the
initial offensive ends up as a failure for several elements. This
strategy takes those elements into frequent use and allow the player to
tech up straight to late game units while he / she is pressuring the
opponent’s base.
There are few skills that you have to
familiarize before you can pull off this strategy correctly. First, you
have to know how to multi task; This means that while you’re engaging
in the battle with your initial attack force, you have to be constantly
teching up the tech tree and upgrade the units / buildings as necessary.
Second, you have to know how to manage two heroes. Most people just try
to clump up to heroes and expect them to be leveled together. You cannot
afford to do this. When you go for two heroes, it should either be for
additional supports to your primary hero or you absolutely need certain
skills of the 2nd hero for counter-offensive against certain strategies
(such as treant rush). Lastly, you have to know what skills to invest in
to compliment your army most effectively. Not all skills are effective
against all the races or situations.
Having said this, I will explain the basic
principle of this strategy. This strategy involves using Death Knight as
your primary hero and Dread Lord as your secondary hero. Your army will
consist of ghouls (with few crypt fiends as support) mostly till the mid
game. While you’re constantly pumping ghouls and pouring them into
your opponent’s base, you will tech up fast to abomination and
necromancer / banshees. The following is the rough (may not be optimized)
build order
1. Immediately cue 2 acolytes then send 3 of the acolytes to mine gold.
Send the ghoul to harvest lumber.
2. Make a ziggurat, a crypt and then another ziggurat, in that order.
Send the acolyte to mine gold
3. When the 2nd acolyte pops out, build graveyard and 2nd ziggurat with
it.
4. When the first ziggurat is done, start building DK
5. After you get 2 ghouls / deathknight, start leveling up
6. When you feel that you have comfortable amount of ghouls, research
cannibalize – this will help keeping those ghouls around little big
longer. Always cannibalize with the ghouls whose health bar is at red.
Keep building ghouls after the production is done
7. Upgrade to Halls of the Dead while cannibalize is still being
researched
8. Queue dread lord as soon as the Halls of the Dead is finished.
After you get Dread Lord finished, you should
have about 6 to 7 ghouls with level 3 Death Knight, and already in low
upkeep if you made support units like crypt fiends. As for heroes’
skills, make sure to get lvl 2 death coil and level 1 death pact with
death knight. The reason you want to get death pact is your ghouls will
start falling behind in terms of their damage potential very quickly.
You want to kill units as fast as possible to make a corpse for them to
cannibalize and later in the game, for necromancers to raise skeletons.
Death coil will be used for either hitting your opponent’s heroes or
healing support units like crypt fiends or abominations later in the
game. As for dreadlord, get lvl 2 vampiric aura (again, for making
ghouls last that extra second longer) and lvl 1 sleep. Sleep is
generally useless unless you see their heroes coming. In the heat of the
battle, sometimes players can forget their hero has been put to sleep.
Although heroes can be woken up by being attacked from their own units,
that extra lag you cause in their heroes can save you some units or give
you enough time to death coil them with DK. After both heroes reach lvl
4, concentrate on leveling Death Knight rather than dreadlord for his
ultimate ability, Raise Dead. This spell raises 6 of any units that have
been recently killed in the area effect of the spells. As long as the
corpses remain, it will auto raise the higher tech units rather than
raising random undead units. This is useful when your support units like
crypt fiends die and ghouls aren’t doing enough damage to hold of the
enemy.
After your heroes reached certain amounts
of level, there are two choices that you can make depending on the map /
type of game your playing (1on1 or team game). When playing 1on1, try to
get a hold of temple of the damned and research skeletal longevity. With
continued production of ghouls (which are made fast and cheap) you
should have lots of corpses to make skeletons with. Skeletons, again,
aren’t supposed to be fatal to your opponent, but just enough in
numbers that you can hold your opponent off while you’re either
upgrading, leveling your heroes and going for higher tech units. The
support units should mostly consist of crypt fiends for several reasons.
First, they are the most cost efficient support units you can get due to
their high damage and high hit points. Also, because of their sizes,
only few units can attack your group of fiends at once, if at all (since
your main portion of the armies, ghouls, will provide a line that keeps
your opponents from getting to the fiends). Second, they are highly
resistant to spells like shockwave, blizzard and carrion swarms. These
spells deal direct area of damage and the larger the unit size, the
fewer the damaged units when grouped together. Thirdly, they are quite
effective hero killers. Their projectile attacks follow the targeted
units until they hit the target. No matter what distance they run, the
projectile from crypt fiends will follow them once they are launched. In
fact, your opponent’s hero can town portal home, and those projectile
will still follow the target hero. (This has been tested). Continuing
with the branch of choices, level up to Dark Citadel as fast as possible,
gunning to get abomination with upgrades (don’t waste money upgrading
ghouls. They die too fast after the mid game. Ghouls are there for
making corpses / holding of enemies from supporting units heroes) Other
good support units in the late game are, of course, Abominations with
their huge hit points and damage. In fact, when you reach this stage of
the game, you should have an expansion and two slaughterhouses to pump
up lots of abominations.
In case of team games, I’d suggest start
pumping out crypt fiends exclusively since ghouls are really crappy when
they are surrounded or overwhelmed. Crypt fiends have lots of hit points
and deal enough damage with micromanagement. In fact, with enough
micromanagement, you will be able to hold off 2on1 rushes against you.
Just make sure to pump them back to their life with Death Coil when
their hit points go low. Also, in this case, I’d recommend getting
lich instead of dread lord since only the melee units get life stealing
ability with the vampiric aura. While it is true that Death Knight can
benefit off of this aura, it is generally more useful to have lich and
his frost armor / nova attack.
Additional Tips / Micromanagement :
1. Don’t try to be reactive to your opponent’s offensive. You have
to be offensive and let your opponent react to what you bring them.
Always be one step ahead of them in the technology by pouring your units
in and force him to get one type of unit that is most effective against
them (such as footmen / riflemen vs ghouls)
2. When healing your units with your Death Knight, consider what good it
will do to keep them alive. Try to calculate their damage potential and
their usefulness in the late game. (Ghouls don’t generally count as
good targets to be kept alive. )
3. When you feel that you can keep up with your assaults continually and
your opponent(s) is in defense mode, it’s time to expand. Make sure to
haunt a gold mine in the position where you can defend it. The
expansions in WC3 are more risky than Starcraft because they cost a lot
and need lots of money to be fully functional. However, if you do pull
it off successfully, make sure your money’s being spent, not being
stocked up. Get frequent upgrades, make extra crypt / slaughter house/
temple of the damned, etc.
4. Make sure to frequently purchase items like scroll of protection /
healing. Sometimes wand of negation is also useful when other players go
for spells such as inner fire / bloodlust or slow.
5. Banshees are very useful in the late game. However, make sure to keep
them alive and mind control everything you can find. You can do this
more effectively by hotkeying all of the banshees on the screen and
controlling them separately.
6. Make sure your heroes are safe at all times. You need your heroes’
support for holding of your opponent’s armies Tilbage |
