Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos/Cry of the Warsong

Five days later, near the foothills of Stonetalon Mountains ...

Mission Objectives
🇨🇴
 * Main Quest - Establish a Base
 * Build a Great Hall
 * Thrall must survive

🇨🇴
 * Main Quest - Secure Zeppelins
 * Destroy All hostile units at the laboratory
 * Return two Goblin Zeppelins to your base

🇨🇴
 * Optional Quest - Pacify Humans
 * Destroy the Human bases

🇨🇴

Overview
This scenario should be called "Death Cry of the Warsong" or something, because the Warsong, with inadequate resources, do everything possible to commit suicide. Outnumbered 4-1 (more than 10-1 in gold), they run around the map, causing all sorts of mayhem, provoking absolutely everybody, and just generally being stupid. Oh, and disobeying (your) orders. In principle, you should discipline them, although maybe the fact that Grom dies repeatedly is sufficient.

BE WARNED, this section contains significantly more spoilers than usual.

The designer set this scenario up so that various events happen according to a script. Basically, your expeditionary force arrives near an allied Orc base and sets up a base. After you start your base, your ally (subordinate, really) attacks a human base. Naturally, the humans get upset and counter-attack, except that they attack YOU. Your ally proceeds to do this to all four of the human factions, and pretty soon, all four of those factions are attacking you.

The designer assumed that you would set up your base as instructed, so he set the trigger for your ally's berserkness to be when your TC is finished, although it could have been triggered on a simple timer. Therefore, you can exploit the scenario "bug" by not building a TC until later. This approach would definitely lose under normal conditions.

One section of this guide describes how you can effectively exploit the bug. The solution is rather elegant. You can also exploit the bug a little bit, scouting the map until you get the feel of the scenario, which will allow you to form a decent plan, and then restart, or you can just play normally for a while to see how fast you get overrun, and then restart.

It turns out that this scenario is actually rather easy, even though it may seem pretty hard at the beginning, especially if you play normally. The main reason for this is that all the human factions build a bunch of troops, but not an overwhelming force, and you kill them all. At an average cost of 200 gold, every 5 units the faction loses is 1,000 gold that they have burned. You should lose far less, so you keep getting stronger, while the humans do not.

There are many ways to win. This walkthrough focuses on a solid strategy, where you will always be in control of your destiny.

You will need to use the keyboard shortcuts for certain key (sic) commands. Specifically,

Thrall:
 * F1 to select
 * F1 x2 to jump to him
 * C for Chain Lightning
 * T to summon two wolves

Raider:
 * E to Ensnare

You really should know the most important general commands by now.

As usual, assign control groups to units by type, but here, you should assign another control group to all your healthy melee units, and another one to all your badly wounded troops. Keep the wounded troops well behind your Tower line, and the good-order units where they will intercept the human attacks. You will need to keep reassigning these numbers.

The plan
You are at 20 food, and you have 4 workers. Normally, you would want a lot more workers, but here, you can't do a lot of research, so you don't need a lot of resources, as long as you keep your units alive. You will produce only 2 workers more. You want to stay at the zero-upkeep limit until further notice. You want to have a catapult; this will be the last unit you produce until you need replacements. Raiders tend to die too fast, so you won't produce any more of those, except for replacements. Get 2 Grunts and then 4 Trolls, and that's all you can have.

You will easily get enough experience to level Thrall up as far as is allowed, and the creeps don't have a lot of items in this scenario, so killing them is not a priority.

You only have one gold mine, but it will be plenty, as long as you don't throw away your troops needlessly.

You have almost zero healing capacity. Only your buildings and catapults (and Trolls) can reasonably be repaired. You will also be attacked frequently. This means that you will have to commit wounded units to fight, and you will lose a lot more units than you were used to in the previous sections of this linked campaign. The humans have a lot of ranged fire capacity, and they tend to pick on weak units, so you will really need to be on your toes to minimize your casualties. Unfortunately, the humans also use artillery in their attacks, so you can't just sit behind your Towers.

Whenever Thrall is at maximum mana or when you are expecting an enemy attack, summon a couple of wolves and place them ahead of your real units. As your wolves get better, go exploring with them as well. Note that the Lizards can disbelieve (instantly dissipate) your wolves.

There are several choices for positioning your initial defenses, but this walkthrough uses a particularly effective one. The general idea is that you want to deny the humans any access to your territory, and you want the Warsong to handle part of the defensive load until you have built up. You should also be aware that the Warsong will not tolerate your buildings close to theirs. There is a group of three rock piles in the middle of the pass west of the Warsong base. Since a Barracks is a large and durable building, it is a good choice to plug up that area. Run a line of 4 Towers from there to the left canyon wall, and build some Burrows behind your Tower line to give workers a place to hide, and maybe provide a bit of firepower more. There is little chance that the humans can breach this line.

Strategy
The mission starts off when you find Grom Hellscream and the Warsong clan engaged with the humans. Help him out by destroying the Mage and the base. Focus on wiping the workers out as quickly as possible in order to maximise the gold that you seize. After that, let the Warsong deal with the buildings while Thrall does a bit of scouting.

Send one worker to build a Mill a bit west of where your Great Hall will be. As soon as a good spot is cleared, start building the Great Hall near the gold mine. Build two Orc Burrows NW of the Great Hall with your remaining two workers. When the Burrows are finished, build two Towers as indicated in the plan above. This will leave you enough gold to produce one worker as soon as the Hall is finished, after which you get a second one. Allocate about three workers to gold, two to wood, and one to construction, but shift them back and forth as the situation demands.

As resources become available, build two more Towers, then a Barracks and two Grunts, then a third Burrow and four Trolls. Finally, produce a catapult. Keep upgrading continuously at the same time. Pretty soon, you run out of things to spend money on.

You will have noted to your chagrin that your friend Grom disobeyed your orders and attacked the dark blue human faction. RIP, Grom. Shortly afterward, that faction shows up in your base, loaded for bear. Immediately leap all over them with your rapid response force. If there are more than three units, C! If necessary, C again! Assassinate artillery. Beware the ranged fire. Don't be afraid to run away (temporarily).

When Grom recovers, he heads out again, and this time, he provokes ANOTHER human faction (the greys). Eventually, he provokes all four of them, and they all try to get their revenge on you. Eventually, you will no longer be able to keep all your units alive. However, you have plenty of resources, and will have no difficulty replacing your casualties.

When you have built up to the maximum for this phase, push your army forward to the small oasis near where a canyon branch heads left, to the light blue base. Kill the creeps there and set up a new Tower line. Put three Towers on the left side and three on the right, with one more behind each group, and add a couple of Burrows for your workers to hide. You should use two workers as combat engineers for the rest of the game. This is where you will start to lose troops and Towers.

The reason for this second Tower line is that you want a strong position to serve as a jumping-off point for your own attacks, with the route to your territory blocked by fire, and your expeditionary force able to rapidly return from the enemy base that you are attacking.

When it looks as though the coast is clear, rush into the light blue base. You will find resistance to be light, especially if you just fended off an attack from them. Your one catapult can easily take out the two human Towers, and after that, you are into the soft parts. You will probably need to send in two raids, but when all the workers and the TC are dead, pull all your forces back to your second Tower line. The exception is your Raiders, wounded or not, it doesn't matter. Pillage! After this, you should have a second gold mine that you can exploit at your leisure.

At this point, you might want to save the game. You have now effectively won the scenario. You control half the map, you are at full strength, the humans have been reduced by 25%, you have access to a huge amount of resources, and the list goes on. You can win any way you like. You could build an overwhelming army and just crush each faction in sequence, or you could stay at 40 food and do a Tower attack. However, this walkthrough recommends ...

MAP

(to be revised)

Regroup all troops in the middle of the map, the next target is the Gray team. Move all troops towards that direction with the two Catapults following close behind and just rush all the human troops while having the two Catapults destroying the three Guard Towers during this time; back at Thrall's base, the Barracks should be hiring more Grunts, Headhunters and two more Catapults to replace what might be lost. The Blue Team will send an Arch Mage and his army to the base, so make use of the newly trained Headhunters and Grunts and have Thrall back them up; train additional Grunts and Headhunters as necessary. Soon the Green Team will also attack with Footmen after taking care of them regroup Thrall's troops and send them to the Gray base to destroy whatever is left over.

By now the Light Blue and Gray Team's bases should be completely destroyed, now start expanding by sending a Peon to where the Light Blue base used to be and build a Great Hall near the Gold Mine. Regroup all troops in the middle of the map and prepare for the next assault against the Blue Team! Just rush in the base as one large group and destroy all the human troops while the catapults are targeting the Barracks then target then Guard Tower. During this time train more Grunts and Headhunters just in case something goes wrong.

After finishing off the Blue Base head off to the last human base target, the Green Base! before entering this base make sure everyone is grouped up so they can move in as one giant force, also be sure to have two Catapults with the team at all times. Have Thrall summon his wolves and use them as bait to lure out the humans back to Thrall's brigade of troops, have Catapults on the towers while killing any humans who followed the wolves. After killing the humans and the towers you can now rush the Green Base; make sure to target the human troops first, then the buildings. While destroying the Green base train five Raiders and have them go to the center of the map for now.

With the green base destroyed regroup all troops in the middle of the map with the raiders and proceed west until the troops run into a few Marauders, kill them to obtain a  Tome of Knowledge. Head north until Thrall reaches a second camp of Marauders, destroy them and keep on heading north until Thrall reaches the third encampment of Marauders only this time there is a hero accompanying them! make use of Thrall's Chain Lightning attack and focus fire the hero, he will drop Gauntlets of Ogre Strength. If Thrall is running low on troops; train plenty more, just make sure to have at least four Raiders. Proceed east and engage some Harpies, these guys are pretty tough, they will Cyclone and Sleep random targets, use the Raider's Ensnare ability to bring them down to melee range. The Harpy hero will drop the Circlet of Nobility.

After the Harpies are taken care of have Thrall go to the Goblin Lab and fetch two Zeppelins and bring them back to base. Make sure to destroy ALL human structures to get credit for the optional quest.

Once the Zeppelins reach the base the mission will be victorious.

Alternative strategy #1
This takes a while, but is easy to do as long as Thrall has at least level 1 Feral Spirit. The Humans will not attack you until they have already been attacked, and Hellscream will not attack them until you have completed your Great Hall. Instead of building a Great Hall, use Thrall and your combat units to scout around the map and attack all creeps that do not require you to move through an enemy base. If all units but Thrall end up dying then only send in the Feral Spirits. By the end, you will have around 2400 gold.

As you gather the gold from the creeps, send your peons past the 3 rock formations that are in a triangular pattern to get to the the large round rock with a smaller one nearby that is surrounded by trees. Have one Peon build a lumber camp as close to the rocks as possible. As you gain gold and lumber use your peons to build Orc Burrows stretching out from the rock formation with the lumber camp towards the canyon walls to create a blockade. Build them very close together so that units may not pass in between them or the rocks and make sure to leave at least 450 gold left so you can build a Great Hall. You may have to build the Great Hall as part of the burrow blockade to stretch it from one wall to another.

If done correctly, you now have a wall of buildings with gaps big enough for a peon to move through but not Hellscream or his troops. You may now move at whatever pace you like, collecting gold and lumber to build your army. A Beastiary on the outside of the blockade is the only unit-producing building necessary, because after upgrading the armor and weapons of a Raider and giving them the Ensnare and Pillage abilities, you can use 24 of them along with Thrall to destroy any one of the human bases.

If you want credit for the optional quest, you can destroy a Burrow from the barricade and let Hellscream and his men out; when you do, set all of your Raiders to follow him and you can destroy bases before they send anyone to attack your base. If you only want him to attack the blue base, then you can replace the Burrow that you destroyed to let Hellscream through. After you have taken down the blue enemy base, with or without Hellscream, take Thrall and your Raiders through the canyon behind it, killing the Centaurs and Harpies while replacing any units that are destroyed.

Alternative strategy #2
''Version note: this strategy does not work in the latest patch (1.26.0.6401). Grom's troops will attack humans anyway.''

While Grom and Thrall are talking after destroying the brown human base, have your peons box Grom in with orc burrows. Don't kill him. He won't be able to get out. His troops won't attack the human bases without him, so as long as you keep him locked in the burrows, you'll be fine. You can release him later to begin attacking the human bases when you are ready.

Treasures

 * Berserk Owlbear drops Claws of Attack + 9. Take the road to the Green human base, turn south about midway.