Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos/Footmen Wars

Footmen Wars is a genre of multiplayer, user-made, maps for Warcraft III and its expansion, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

Definition

A Footmen Wars, oftentimes abbreviated to footies, has the following features:

• Continuous unit spawn; usually a periodic spawn at each player's base. These units are controlled by the player.
• A base to defend for each player. A player is defeated when his/her base is destroyed.

Most Footmen Wars also include the following:

• Four teams of three players, though some variants of Footmen Wars have two teams of six players.
• Heroes which are either trained or hired. Because of the various heroes' special abilities, they are an important factor in most strategies.
• Items sold at shops for heroes to use.
• Multiple Tiers and Base-types, where players upgrade their base to higher levels, called tiers, which may provide stronger defenses, more upgrades, and/or more powerful units.

Variations of Footmen Wars

The First Footmen Wars

Originally there were maps in which only footmen were used. Later, heroes were added. These basic FW maps were probably the foundation of Classic FW.

Classic Footmen Wars

Called "Classic" because it is the oldest branch of Footmen Wars other than the first maps described above. This branch of FW was at one time very popular, but has been superseded by new variations of Footmen Wars. Often, these maps contained unbalanced gameplay.

Each player starts out with a wisp which was used to build his/her base, choosing between the four races (Human, Orc, Undead, Night Elf) from which units would spawn from (Footmen, Grunts, Ghouls, Archers). After that, the player purchases one hero based on the chosen race, although in some versions of Classic FW custom heroes were added to each race. When the hero dies, it can be revived at the base.

Footmen Frenzy

See main article: Footmen Frenzy. Footmen Frenzy, a map made by Clan NoHunters and TheBigGame, has set the standard for other maps of this genre. This version has the default twenty-four heroes included in the original game as well as twelve custom-made heroes. In Footmen Frenzy, a player can have unlimited amount of heroes but must pay 1900 gold for each one¹ with the exception of the Death Sheep and Avalanche, both which cost 2000 gold. Frenzy offers twenty-one different tiers; five for each race and a neutral starting tier known as Tier Zero, which spawns footmen, the weakest and most basic unit. The racial tiers are numbered one to five and each higher tier spawns more powerful units and/or has a faster unit spawning rate.

Footmen Frenzy XV

A very balanced variation to Footmen Frenzy made by Shadowdestroyer and Clan MoRD, which is currently based on the Nohunter's version up to date. It uses the same custom heroes , the same techs, and all the items in the original Footmen Frenzy, but features its own custom heroes such as the Sniper, the Frost Elemental, and the Blood Warrior. There is a total of 30 more heroes than the original footmen frenzy (22 custom heroes, 8 "super heroes"). This version also features its own unique items and creeps.Other features include the custom ZXCV hotkeys for EVERY hero, a game optimizer which allows you to choose options such as all random, no teching, and no resource trading. This version is updated much more frequently than the original. New versions often come out every few weeks, and severe imbalances are fixed almost immediately.

Ultimate Footmen

Ultimate Footmen is another map of the Footman Wars genre, created by MrApples and VG_Emblem. The current version is v0.79c. It features over 30 custom-made heroes, along with 23 of the original Blizzard heroes. A player has five unique racial techs to choose from, with a total of seven tiers each (five main tiers and two 'alternate' tiers, a completely new feature to this map) including with the standard 'Footman' tier or 'Tier Zero' for which the map is named. Ultimate Footmen takes the original Footmen Frenzy's balance style to a whole new level, which supposedly makes the game fast-paced and different every time, but it just makes many players feel that this map is imbalanced. If you thought the original footmen frenzy was throwing around numbers everywhere without much thought behind it, you should check out this map. Many imbalances found in the old versions of the original Footmen Frenzy are present in this variation, such as creep whoring with rock golems and that spells are too strong. Although the spells are meant to be very strong, this system leaves very little room for micro and skill, since all your units will die in 1-2 casts of anything. Some heroes are definitely better than others, for an example, the Archmage is fairly weak in comparison to all the others. Hero abilities pretty much dominate the game. There doesn't seem to be any effort put in balancing the creeps and towers. Towers are very powerful and can be placed almost anywhere. In every major release several new heroes are added along with many new imbalances. This map is a prime example of the types of imbalanced footmen wars-type maps you see floating around all over Battlenet that force players to stick to the original Footmen Frenzy.

External links

• A guide from the Clan NoHunters website for Footmen Frenzy.
• Website and Forum for Ultimate Footmen.
• Forum for Ultimate Footmen/Legends.
• Clan MoRD The official clan forum for Footmen Frenzy XV.