‘An in-depth analysis of the Warcraft II campaign maps’ or ‘Warcraft II Easter Eggs’

In this video, I will go through all four Warcraft II campaigns and highlight interesting facts and hidden bits of functionality similarly to Abelhawk did in his Easter Eggs series for Warcraft III but on a bit more technical level.
Even though Warcraft II is much simpler than its successor and it seems to be not very interesting in terms of secrets in the levels, there is a lot to uncover if you dig deep enough.

Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
00:36 – Map sizes
01:30 – Tile sets, and errors related to them
02:27 – Terrain similarities between maps
03:29 – Creative Unit and Building placements and hostile takeovers
04:05 – Disappearing Units
04:55 – Controllers
06:44 – Controllers – Rescueables
08:48 – AI-scripts
10:51 – AI-scripts - Irregularities
11:46 – AI-scripts - Melee AI in the Campaign
12:11 – AI-scripts - A theoretically overpowered enemy
12:53 – Pseudo-Bases
14:02 – Triggers and External Modifications – Victory conditions
14:52 – Triggers and External Modifications – Tech Trees
15:06 – Triggers and External Modifications – Cosmetic Runestone Fires
15:45 – Triggers and External Modifications – Upgrades
17:59 – Triggers and External Modifications – Invulnerability and Rescueability
19:16 – Triggers and External Modifications – Altered Players, Alliances and Rescuability
23:45 – Triggers and External Modifications – Altered Units
25:05 – Outro

The series I was inspired by:
Abelhawk:
Saving Lothar in Warcraft II without cheats:

Music used:
Intro:
Topher Mohr and Alex Elena - Garage (Recreated in Midi by MfromAzeroth, DrSwag and Thomcat)
Main part:
Warcraft II – Human Intro (edited by MfromAzeroth)
Warcraft II – Human I (edited by MfromAzeroth)
Warcraft II – Human III (edited by MfromAzeroth)
Warcraft II – Orc IV (edited by MfromAzeroth)

[dragosudrea]

Man, not every day you find such high quality Warcraft 2 content.

[kirksaintpatrick]

What an insanely indepth look at something I've never thought about.... so many great memories of WC2. Thanks man!

[danletchworth]

I love the image of well-meaning peons trying to help by repairing the flaming runestones, ruining the Horde's super-badass decoration

[KaiserMattTygore]

The Nation of Alterac is so hostile that they will literally kill eachother and commit seppuku when there's no one else left.

that's HILARIOUS

[EdmondDantes]

I always thought the reason Human04 and Orc04 were so similar was because they're literally the same battle, just from different points of view.

[jsunn]

I just want to say thank you for this awesome content! This is truly one of a kind, nowhere else but here. I love Warcraft 2 and 3 so much, also your channel. You won a new subscriber

[edwardeddie]

Thanks for the video, I appreciated the info. If I recall correctly, some of the campaign missions also have under-utilized scripts that I learned about from reading around the internal files a long time ago. Adding missing tech structures will let certain scripts run fully, as in Tides of Darkness, the AI isn't programmed to build missing structures:
Human 10: The blue team is missing multiple tech structures which would mainly let them attack your base with Ogre-Magi.
Human 12: There is a missing Ogre Mound for the red team.
Orc 10: The blue team is missing a Foundry(?) and as a result, doesn't fully research their tech as the script lays out.
Orc 13: The purple team is also missing a foundry, and this script is under the assumption that this computer is on an island from where they send transports.
Orc 14: The blue and green teams have unique scripts, but are missing their required base structures.

[RafaSheep]

Fascinating stuff. I had never imagined WC2 was capable of triggers. Until I played Human14, where the Orange orcs clearly had Ogre Mages and Bloodlust unlocked from the start (or did they?). Now that you show what's under the hood, it's evident that the technology was still quite rudimentary.

[Goodarz_man]

Sadly i never managed to play warcraft 2, however i will say that this video is greatly researched and nicely edited.well done friend.
I will subscribe.

[Netherce]

I had completely different expectations when clicking on this video (thought it would be a map-by-map analysis in terms of difficulty or something). Instead I watched the whole thing with my jaw dropped, without pausing. Very interesting stuff.
Now I know why some campaign enemies are so hard to deal with (the ones with Land Attack script).
I was wondering if those custom AI scripts occuring in campaign are possible to replicate in the wc2 map editor ? (the "easier" ones, like "Human 12", "Orc 4" etc.)

[mch]

The sheer amount of work that goes into videos like this is amazing, great job!!

[Blazieth]

I actually have a detail to contribute about the Rescue(Active) controller.

I seem to recall, from my experimenting as a child, that if the Rescue(Active) player builds units or structures after the start of the game (as opposed to the units that it starts with on the map), those units/buildings cannot be directly rescued/captured by Human controlled players. The only way for a human controller to gain control of those units/buildings is to take that player's Town Hall, which automatically gives all of a Rescue(active *or* passive) player's units to the human controller immediately.

However, if a Rescue(Active) player starts with only, say, a peasant, and that peasant builds a town hall which spirals out into a full-fledged base, then the player can never take control of that player's full forces, as the Town Hall, having been built after the start of the game, cannot be captured by the player. In custom melee games, where the objective is simply "destroy all enemies", this objective simply requires all other players on the map to be eliminated... including any "Rescue" players, be they active or passive. As a result, the player must manually attack and destroy these un-capturable Rescue(Active) players to end the mission, and I don't believe they will defend themselves against this type of attack, as they view the human-controlled player as an ally. However, I'm working off of knowledge from the old MS-DOS version of the game, not Battle.net, so I suppose it's possible this quirk was changed later? I haven't experimented with it since my childhood days.

[arcturus]

Amazing, loved the warcraft 2 campaigns as a kid and I always tried to check every detail.

[stylesrj]

I remember modding Lothar in custom campaign levels to do things like have Flame Shield as an attack or to shoot arrows or move cursors... I also found that even if you upgrade your Knights to Paladins, Lothar gets the upgrades but not the mana bar so he can't cast any spells

[ReD-zcuu]

With all these cool hidden things reveal you've earned a subscription, my good sir :)

[samuelgreen]

I knew it!

I was remembering that tower in level 2 being a guard tower when I first played the game. I just recently replayed it and was weirded out by it being just a watch tower.

[dannyldd]

also to mention just as in 12:48, in my DAIFE mod i think the entirety of campaign maps now have computer set up to rebuild the necessary structures in case of being needed if they're sniped. Also, several missions where you kill some computer early on after starting the mission, those have an actual AI script that build up upgrades and units later in game, but this procedure is never seen in action because you pretty much kill them on the earliest stage of the missions.
So then, in DAIFE mod you can actually get presence of these ai scripts as close as I could set to match the original ai scripts.

Say like for example: xhuman06 where you could kill red very early on, so now you cannot kill it and you may be forced to fight their forces with proper upgrades. Same as xhuman08 where you could kill White early on and now you can see what they had to offer.

There may have been other missions like orc05 where I could apply this logic but I didn't do it when I planned such a fix for the other two previous missions. Also, there may be other missions where I fixed up this early game behavior in order to allow them to use their proper original ai script.

13:03 I think black in human14 was deliberately set to be passive or your mission would have been a whole nightmare to ever complete. Besides some problems with war2 ai pathing which would cause units to get stucked but the main issue there with an active base would be that if you run out of gold in your western base, then it would have been a big problem for casual players that played the game since 1995. Not to mention, this mission alone is very hard if you're not truly experienced as a player into the game. Basic Actions Per Minute may set you up on a huge disadvantage if also don't know this map and how it works.

[Kirmakoff]

Great video! The stuff with orange units attacking themselves is straight out of that Shyamalan horror movie. Never knew what a dirty hack implementing those peasants was :-)

[ShadoSpartan]

that was fascinating, thank you so much for this awesome video

[amihver]

Wow, amazing work to find all this. I was wondering for years why AI in behaves in some way in campaign levels.