Can you beat Warcraft 2 with only Troll Axe Throwers? 

:D It's a fantastic game, I've had a ton of fun with this series!

Agree 100%, continiue with your videos!

@@user-jn7eo1ji2x this is actually going to be my last wc2 video for a little while, mainly because I make videos primarily for fun, and I basically feel like changing to something new now. Having said that, I’m still planning on continuing videos. No idea what my next one will be, but I will still try to make them entertaining!

@@redwings13400 Great!

@@redwings13400 Might I suggest beating the game with the DAIFE mod? It consists of bug fixes and improved AI that makes the game substantially harder. I recommend using war2_daife_v6953_vanilla as it doesn't have any of the bloat he adds to some versions.

Yesss :D P5 has such an amazing soundtrack. I originally wanted to make this video entirely with p5 songs, but I ended up using a few from other games too. Still, I absolutely love the songs that I used. I’ve been using music a lot more deliberately in my last few videos and have been having a ton of fun with it. I’m quite happy with the results! :D

hehe, thank you! :D

Aww, thanks! I had fun with it :D

Fun fact: I had to google that. I've never played WoW, so I had no idea what that was!

Yeah. I understand why the AI cheats in other rts games, but it does create some really interesting scenarios when you can actually try to run the AI out of gold. Makes the map a bit more dynamic and gives the player a very natural reason to be aggressive.

This video is long enough already! There’s no reason to spend time on the levels where nothing new or interesting happens, it would just waste both of our time. :D

Haha. Rip turalyon. Im happy I was able to kill all the paladins there, it made things feel much more fitting for this series.

Thanks so much for your comments! I appreciate getting called out on my mistakes, and love it whenever I learn anything new about the game. Also, yeah. While I was initially upset with getting soooo close and losing, after calming down and thinking about it some more, I realized just how thematic and fitting this ending was. Then I knew what I had to do :)

Yesss :D P5 has such a good soundtrack. I’ve been waiting to use it for this video.

The voice acting in this game is definitely special. It’s just so goofy while also being so memorable.

Thank you! The last level is definitely doable with the strategy I showcased, but it's so easy to mess up, and each attempt takes so long!

Very nice! I figured it was definitely possible with trolls only, and another commenter suggested the spot where a troll could target the paladins out of range at the end. Figuring that out would have changed a ton with the endgame, and I know there are a lot of players who are way better than me at micro, which could have saved a ton of money. Congrats on completing the challenge! I hope you enjoyed it!

Yay! I hope you enjoyed! Also, good catch, I just added it to the playlist :D

yay ! It was great ! :D@@redwings13400

Probably not. I think this is my last WC2 video for at least a while. I've loved the series but I wanna do other things too! Thanks for watching!

I did that last level for peons only. Hard challenge and happy to complete it, but in reality it was kinda boring as it took ages to kill all the towers that the computer started with and many other issues that was very time consuming to solve, ballistas, mages etc. Point is, trolls only is way more viewer friendly.

@@TK-xt1it whoa, that’s really impressive! Did you just stall out the enemy with a bunch of towers? How did you complete naval landings and the final section? I’d love to hear the details, because I probably would have guessed this was impossible for this level.

@@redwings13400 I uploaded the full video in my profile. But the short version: You cant just sit and wait I need to kill teal early, cause I need around 80k of his gold. That part is hard to time perfectly between attacks, but after I nailed that I towered up that gold mine and waited for the computer to run out of gold. Second thing is there is a trick to cancel shipyard and jump into blues island and take out his main base from behind. Last thing is I used sapps to blow up mountian where the heroes are so I could get up towers to kill them. I made myself a rule in the beginning that making sapps to blow up rocks was alowed.

Thank you! :D

Yessssss :)

But what do throwing axes need?

hehe :D

@@mwperk02 A hello to a little friend!.

​@@skl-1371hello

:D Thanks!

Thank you! :D

:)

I considered it, and if you can find a spot where you can consistently lure the enemy ships to just be in range of the cannon tower, it would definitely be worthwhile. I’m not sure where that spot would be though, and a cannon tower is also pretty expensive, so I decided the trolls would be better for this task. It’s definitely a potential strat to save a little money at the end though!

It wasn’t a perfect parallel, but it just felt really thematically appropriate for the situation! :D

Hahahahahaha I knew but that didn’t click to me until now. Dang, what a missed opportunity in the script!

Ooh, that’s a strat. I never thought of that, I don’t know if a troll fits there in range. If it works, it definitely would help a ton!

Hehe :D

It always seems to come back to the footman for this channel. No matter what campaign I’m running, they seem to always come back, and I love it.

It definitely would have been even worse lol! However, there is actually one technique I learned about super late in the run that would have helped a ton here. It’s actually possible to mass unload transports, and I had no idea until I watched admiral iddys deathless streams. Basically, if you have a control group of a bunch of transports (say it’s control-1), you can select one transport, hit the unload button, then hit alt-1, and suddenly you have the entire group of transports preparing to use the unload command. I actually do this a couple of times in the final mission, but the landing zone is so narrow it doesn’t help all that much. On the two tides levels though, I bet this technique would make things way better.

Next time you can try out to play on a bit slower speed if you wants. You actually played in the fastest game speed for war2 BattleNet Edition. One slower level I think is the very best to play war2. Fastest speed is just too chaotic. Even its used on Multiplayer and you cant really micro any unit. Thanks for the video bud.

@@dannyldd I use fastest speed because my brain is so used to it that any other speed just feels like slow motion to me now, lol. It’s extremely chaotic but that’s what I find fun about it! No judgment to anyone who plays slower speeds though. It’s a single player game, so everyone should play at the speed that’s comfortable for them. Most of the video was fast forwarded too, so it isn’t quite as fast as it looks for a lot of it. But yeah, I find fastest speed to be the most fun mode for me :)

I refered to prior to fastest speed as best game speed because that's the fastest you can find in War2DOS version, which I used to play for over a decade and it definetely matches the best to play Warcraft 2, in my opinion. The thing is, its a legit strategy what you did but trolls could turn way more effective if could be microed with that a bit slower speed. Its my opinion, though.

@@dannyldd oh they absolutely could be. I consider game speed to be Warcraft 2s version of difficulty selection, because the extra time to react is pretty massive when it comes to micro and macro. I just don’t like slowing down the game speed, and am pretty stubborn, so I refuse to do it. There’s no doubt it would help a ton :)

Hahaha I’m the best commander! :D

Thank you! :)

Face Down from Cassette Beasts! :D It's an awesome game! It has a gimmick where you can fuse your monsters in a battle, and whenever you do it, the soundtrack changes from the instrumental soundtrack to the lyrics soundtrack to add to the intensity of the battle, so I wanted to try my own version of that trick in this video. I absolutely love the soundtrack to this game, and have used some of the instrumental versions of a few songs from it in other videos as well.

Oh wow! That information wasn't in the sources I looked at before! That's fascinating! This upgrade does feel like its most impactful vs high armor targets, so I believe you, but that's super interesting information!

@@redwings13400 2 days ago I too thought it was bullshit. But I tested it in a .pud. and the results surpriced me. According to an admin of .ru it is hardcoded in the combat equation. I would love to get my hands on the source. So I can test all my other "findings through tests". Also, did you know that the 2nd axethrower damage upgrade has no use against 3 or more armor? Unless you have bloodlust or that archer +3 upgrade.

hehe. I couldn't beat it in my sleep, but I did come pretty close :D

Thank you! I had fun with it! :)

Haha. I’m honestly ok with this ending. After doing footmen and archer runs, I got really attached to danath and Alleria, which is why I find it super fitting for this channel for them to live. I do think the final level is very doable though with my final strategy and just slightly better play

:D Hope you enjoy!

@@redwings13400 a lot of enjoy : )

I personally would view that as cheating, but it’s definitely a grey area. My rule with sappers is that I could only use them when I’ve destroyed every single reachable structure first. This means I only used them if the level was actually impossible without them, and only if making additional progress was impossible without them. So under my rules, I think it would be cheating. However, these challenges are very subjective so it’s definitely up to interpretation.

@@redwings13400 Okay, then we expect the demolition brigades to complete the game. Then there will be no cheating in this. :)

I was upset at first, but then when I realized who was left standing, well... there was only one way this video was going to end.

@@redwings13400Only way it could've been better was if Turalyon and Alleria were the ones left standing.

Any reason you say that? I feel like for my channel, there's no better two to survive, especially considering my last two videos were footmen only and archer only. I'm quite satisfied that I was able to kill turalyon.@@BerengarLex

@@redwings13400 Nah, lore reasons. That's all.

@@BerengarLex Ah. I actually have very little lore knowledge, since I've never played WoW and haven't really looked in to Warcraft lore that much other than through playing the games. I actually had no idea they were canonically together until I looked it up just now lol

So here’s a fun fact about the last level: I actually did save right before attacking blues base! It’s the only time I saved in the campaign, and I did it because I thought I might need to practice the naval landing to figure out the best way to do it. Here’s the hilarious part though. When going back to that save, the glitch actually makes the level much harder! The ai no longer moves their battleships, even if you aggro them, and blues ships completely block off the back of their base, making the only available landing zone the cannon towers in the front! Which is an awful landing spot and is basically impossible to beat with trolls only from that point. Also absolutely, lowering the game speed and microing more would have given me fewer losses. I don’t like adjusting the game speed, partly because I consider it a pseudo difficulty meter and I want to play on the hardest difficulty, and partly because playing on slower speeds just feels boring to me. I’m so used to fastest that everything else just feels like slow motion, and I don’t have as much fun in it. I have nothing against changing the game speed, I think everyone should play at the setting that’s most fun for them, but I personally like fastest the most. I had enough money for beyond 4 anyway, so I’m reasonably satisfied with how I played that level. I prioritize macro over micro and it shows in these videos, lol

@@redwings13400 Oh, absolutely, it just made me go a bit baffled to see about 6 paladins cut thru 2 lines of trolls while they meandered with their piss poor auto targetting AI As for the last map, I meant to save just before the FINAL-FINAL landing vs the portal (so, after skyree and kudran slef yeeted at you), and since beating that was a no go with what you attempted, THEN a "micro'd slower speed" strat would be in order. Would landing a pair of sappers to widen the portal's landing zone be considered cheating? (as long as they dont hurt any enemies?)

@@JKRevanBR haha. I mean, six paladins cutting through multiple lines of trolls is also just what paladins do vs trolls. Better micro would have helped a ton, but yeah, fully upgraded paladins just demolish trolls unless the numbers are ridiculously one sided. Ah, yeah. That would have been a good point to save. I think I still like the binary no saving for a challenge like this, just because sometimes allowing saves creates questions, and I’d rather things be more clear cut. That said, if I had thought of saving before this point, I probably would have tried again from there just to see if there was a better way to micro everything in that section. I would consider blowing up walls to allow more surface area to be cheating. I did use sappers a couple times to reach areas that were unreachable, but only after I destroyed everything I could reach first, and only if there’s no other way forward. It’s regrettable but oh well, had to be done.

The song in the description is the only copyrighted song I used in this video according to youtube copyright checks (trying to figure out their logic never leads to positive results, so don't even try). I didn't place any songs there myself, even though I arguably should have. Thankfully I'm apparently allowed to use it and it doesn't effect my channel. The song at 5:09 is the Dawn of War 3 main ork theme, which I felt was fairly fitting to place for that section :)

@@redwings13400 Much obliged, sir

Haha. Don’t worry, I’m fine, I actually did this playthrough before finishing the archers only video! :) The reason I want to switch to a different series is mainly just because of how my mind works. I go in to deeply obsessive phases where I focus intently on one thing, then my mind shifts focus and heads to something else. I’d get bored if I made wc2 videos forever, and I’ve been obsessed with wc2 for a while now, so it’s time for me to head to something else. Not sure what quite yet, but maybe I’ll start working on something new over thanksgiving break!

@@redwings13400 Great, I will watch any of your content. You have a good voice and explain stuff in a fun way (you have 30 hours compressed to 1 or so)

Yep. I think this upgrade for something more durable would be a whole lot better. Regen on grunts or ogres would be very good, because the utility of a full health melee unit is pretty drastically different from the utility of a low health melee unit. That’s just not as true with trolls. A fully healthy troll isn’t going to tank many hits, and a weakened troll in the back still deals the same amount of damage. There were a lot of times I desperately wanted healing in footmen and grunts only. It’s just not as useful with trolls or archers.

@@redwings13400thats something I find kind of strange with most games that health has no effect. An almost dead unit moves as fast/far, attacks as fast/far and deals the same damage as a fully healthy unit (try to operate a bow with an arrow in your arm). That makes wounded ranged units still dangerous. Even in most ego shooters 1% life has little effects. While badly wounded MELEE units are pretty terrible in most RTS. The only game i know is advance wars. Its not RTS but round based. Less life means less damage and an almost destroyed ranged unit unit has much less value compared to other games.

Yep. I was a brony back in college. It was a good show, I got sucked in to the community, and I’ve always really enjoyed video editing. My amv background probably influenced the format of this video a bit, as I just really enjoy editing to music and figured I’d try to do that here.

Thank you!

No problem man, I have really enjoyed your videos. Best of luck with whatever you sink your teeth into next. I'll be there to watch xD@@redwings13400

I talk more about the bugs in some of the other videos, so I don't say as much about it here, but basically, reloading saves really screws up this game. If you save and reload, the AI completely changes. It can change the AI's attack wave cycles, make the AI forget to chop lumber, and do a lot of other weird things. The truly bizarre part of this glitch is that when I say 'change', I really mean change. The AI doesn't go completely passive from this glitch, and doing it multiple times can change the AI further. Sometimes this glitch will cause the AI to only train catapults, sometimes only grunts. It still will usually train dragons with it activated, and I've even had the AI research upgrades with the glitch that it wouldn't research without it! The save glitch is really weird, and because its so weird, I only learned about it while watching the footage from a previous challenge on this channel. However, it does trivialize a lot of missions, so I've banned saving and reloading in my recent videos.

@@redwings13400Thanks, do you know if the bug also affects Beyond the Dark Portal or just Tides?

The bug effects both campaigns. I think it effects single player custom games too, but I'm not as certain about that. @@shadowscall7758

@redwings13400 thanks. Surprised there isn't a mod that fixes that, but maybe it's a bug that's too ingrained to fix.

@@shadowscall7758 I’m pretty sure there is a mod that fixes it, but I’ve never used mods in this game so I’ve never tried to install it. A couple other commenters have told me about one though!

It is the Dawn of War 3 Ork main theme! :D

Thank you! Yeah, those heroes are brutal for trolls, especially because there's no way to build up a critical mass on that island. It would have been fine if there was open terrain for that fight, but the only option here is to essentially unload small groups of units at a time that start within melee distance of paladins, Turalyon, Danath, and in range of a cannon tower. If the goal of that segment was to make a troll landing virtually impossible in that one spot... well... the humans succeeded.

That's probably true, my micro is awful and I'll freely admit that. I'm much more of a macro player at heart. Micro is incredibly challenging in this game when you play on fastest speed, but I absolutely make a ton of avoidable mistakes. Unfortunately, saving and loading glitches the game and makes missions significantly easier. I didn't know this at the start of my warcraft 2 challenge runs, but doing this seriously screws up the enemy AI, completely changing their attack patterns, often making them forget to harvest lumber, and sometimes functionally turning them off entirely. It's not super easy to notice because the AI can break in so many different ways in this game, but it is extremely impactful and makes missions significantly easier. After I learned about this glitch, I banned saving and loading, which makes the levels much scarier.

@@redwings13400 I didn't know that the AI could break. Are you using an AI mod? If yes, may be turning it off would help. If not, then getting one might help too, but I hear it might make things much harder. I have to say, seeing your 170-180 trolls get decimated in a single attack was quite entertaining to watch. Why not make an all-peon-run next ;)

@@pseudonym3690 No mods, that's just how the game works! You can try it out with your game if you want, or you can watch my footmen only warcraft 2 video where I go a lot more in depth on this glitch (since it's the first run I do without abusing it). I had absolutely no idea either before I started these runs and watched back my replays when I did grunts only. I don''t think an all peon run would be viable, simply because of naval landings. Towers and enemy bases would be tough but maybe manageable with some specific cheeses, but trying to land peons on an enemy coast that's fortified by towers would be absolutely brutal if not impossible. The peon AI wouldn't attack enemies without me instructing them to specifically, and even if they did I'm not sure they'd have enough stats to make any progress. It's probably possible on most levels, but not every level IMO.

:D I've had so much fun with this series! I hope you've enjoyed it too!

@@redwings13400 There are few ppl that enjoys really hard difficulty where all checks has to be completed in a single run & any slight error or negligence means a reset, including me sometimes, hope you liked the twist there :P.

​ @skl-1371 Haha, don't worry about it! I've fallen asleep while watching other youtubers I enjoy too, so I can relate. :D Yeah, everything is so much more stressful when there's no saving. Just knowing that screwing up means another three hours on the level minimum is so terrifying, and it really changes my playstyle/makes me think a lot more about each decision. When I can save, I play a lot riskier, doing things just to see if I can get away with it, but without being able to save, I need to be pretty confident I'm making a good play before I commit to anything. So, here's a fun fact about the last level that I didn't share in the video. I actually sorta cheated to get that defeat screen. In my actual run, I got really upset after losing my last unit, so I used deathwing (who survived the entire level) to kill Alleria and Danath, then I exited the program without even looking at the defeat screen (I was reallyyyy tired and not thinking). I had, however, saved right before attacking blue (I think I was planning to use it for testing naval landings if I failed on that attempt), and I realized I really wanted that defeat screen for the video, so I reloaded that save and tried again from there. Interestingly, this rerun of the final section of the level invoked the save glitch, actually making the final section pretty much impossible from that save. The save glitch meant blue never moved their battleships, so I couldn't destroy the blue base, and hilariously trying to beat it from that save file is actually pretty much impossible. However, I did use deathwing to kill every blue unit except two of them, then surrendered, getting the death screen that's in the video. So the defeat screen isn't real from the actual playthrough, but its accurate enough to give a good representation of what happened in the level.

@@redwings13400 Damn, 3 hours prep!. This is an actual difficulty multiplier as it very much governs your whole process, you know you want to try something new but doing so meaning return value is totally unknown, sit static & it still could highly go south (thank god in 1941 I could just sit there at time calming myself out after scary moves & attempts). All with the limits of the unit & WC2 in general. A true feat of strength completed righter!.

:D

Haha. These challenges are generally not super conducive to speed running, but if someone wants to try it, I’d be curious to see what strategies develop!

You would think that, but the save glitch is weird! For instance, I did actually save before attacking blue after they ran out of money (I was planning on practicing the naval landing using that save), and discovered upon loading that save that it actually made the level much harder! Blue's battleships lost their AI commands, which meant they no longer moved from their spot, and as a result they blocked off my transports from the back of blue's base. The save glitched forced me to unload in the front of blue's base by the cannon towers, which made the naval landing there impossible. It's possible that the save glitch might not have impacted the hero AI if I did it right before attacking the great portal, but its also possible it would have changed the AI ever so slightly, making things easier or harder in the process! Basically, the save glitch might or might not effect things, even at the end. It changes the game in so many subtle ways and its really hard to predict what's going to change from it!

hehe P5 has such a good soundtrack! I've wanted to feature this soundtrack prominently in a video for a while, and this felt like the perfect time to do it.

lol wut?

With this spoon made of candy this soft ice cream treat is scooped onto caramel chocolate nuget indulgence@@redwings13400

Nice! Congrats! Good luck with the blood elf campaign. I think you’re going to need to make a few rule modifications there in order to make that one work, but I hope you have fun with it!

:D Interestingly, I don't think I ever mention orc heroes in this script because they just aren't very important to this campaign. In Beyond, I skipped level 2, I don't need to move Teron on level 4, I lock him up in the back of my base on level... I think 6, he can die in Dalaran with no consequences, and every hero is expendable on the last mission. Its a pretty dramatic change from the human campaign where heroes were extremely important in a ton of missions.

@@redwings13400 mentioning this actually do make a lot of sense if you read "Beyond the Dark Portal". Amazing how it's actually represented in the game somehow.

lol, that's an image :D

Yep. Those starts really make things so much harder!

GoG games. It has a ton of older games on it, and you can buy warcraft 2 there for 10 dollars.

:)

:) thank you!

:)

I though this was how you supposed to play the game not a challenge lol

New Troll Here!

Hahahahaha Well played

hehe. Very nice :D I'm curious to see how you did that. I definitely would have guessed that to be impossible.

I have my face on a couple of videos. I don’t particularly try to hide it, but also have no real reason to show it most of the time.

I wish I had thought of that while scripting, lol. That makes it so much better!

That level is truly a mystery. Every time I play it something different happens!

War 2's AI is just crazy like that sometimes, I have had some custom maps have equally baffling choices from the AI Specifically for that mission if I had to guess whites AI did a scan of the map to find an expansion point. It picks a random mine on the map to look at, It sees that there is enough room next to it to build and at the time of scan red may have had no peasants in the mine so it was considered unclaimed. Also by random luck or proximity who knows white decided to make that the new rally point for his men creating an accidental wall and cutting red off. Though honestly that's all just a guess

Many axe throwers were harmed in the making of this video :)

I have absolutely no idea how that would work, but congrats!

@@redwings13400 really? i guess you never heard of cheat codes....lol

@@Draconamus ah lol. Yes, with cheat codes obviously things would be pretty easy. I think that would make a pretty boring video though :)

@@redwings13400 well i did this in the 90s at school ...so no streaming, no videos and i was having a blast.

Aww thank you! Glad you enjoyed! :D

Thank you! I really enjoyed this run. Honestly I was a little disappointed with archers only because I didn't find it quite as interesting as my other runs, but I'm pretty proud of some of the strategies I used here.