Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is a real time strategy game (RTS) where two sides fight each other across the lands of Azeroth: the Humans and the Orcs. Each must try to destroy the other by collecting resources, creating an army and crushing the enemy forces. In addition, there's a neutral faction featuring wild monsters which can be very dangerous or sometimes friendly. The game takes place in a medieval landscape with strong fantasy elements.
Game Modes
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans works in a simple manner: build base, build army, destroy enemy. This allowed the game creators to include several mission types to create a varied game experience across the campaign: conquer rebels of the player's race, limited forces missions, kill an enemy special character, much more.
Also, the same pattern allowed players to compete in multiplayer or AI skirmishes. These are not parts of campaigns and allows players to use a random map generator.
Economy and Power
Warcraft requires players to collect resources, build structures, train units and defeat the opponent in combat. The non-combat builders carry minerals from mines to the Town Center (gold from dugs and wood from forests). As both are limited resources and become exhausted using the game, players must carefully manage their economy and zones to secure future income.
Both the Humans and the Orcs have the same low-tier buildings with the same functions but different appearance:
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The Town Hall stores resources and produce units that collect more minerals and construct other buildings.
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Farms provide food for up to four units. If you have too many units, you must build more farms to supply them with the required food.
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The Barracks produces all the non-magical combat units in the game (melee, ranged, mounted, siege). However, to train more advanced units, you must build other supplementary buildings to enable their production and upgrades.
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Each faction (Humans & Orcs) can build two types of magical buildings, each of which produces one type of spellcaster and researches more advanced spells for that type. These advanced buildings require other buildings to be built before them.
User Interface
Each faction is represented by a color: Orcs are red and Humans are blue.
If a faction produces a great amount of damage on one of its enemy buildings, it will start burning. A building burned to the ground leaves a pile of remains.
The numbers across the top of the screen represent player's reserves of gold and lumber.
A unit market with a light yellow box is currently selected. Its details appear in the lower left panel.
The upper left panel is the mini-map which shows the a summary of the territory fought over, mostly not discovered in the early-game by the player. Blue dots represent the player structures and the red ones represent the enemy's. The player can click the minimap to quickly navigate across the battlefield.
