Although Warcraft I didn't spawn the community or following that it's sequel did, it was still important for several reasons. Firstly, it brought the Blizzard name into prominence. Secondly, it took a different angle on the RTS genre, and added new dimensions, such as hand to hand combat, random map generation and a multi-player mode.
It was the last feature that proved to be easily the most important. Although multi-player gaming was in it's infancy at the time, many developers had caught a sniff of what was to come. Few of them even dreamt of the implications online gaming would bring, however.
War1 offered two races: Orcs and Humans. Both were very similar (more so than the three houses of Westwood's Dune II), but most agreed the Orcs had a slight edge - daemons. In fact, multi-player games were often dominated by unholy armored daemons.
Despite the fact that there were several hand to hand units on both sides, ranged units - archers, spearmen, catapults - were the most powerful early on.
The computer AI was terrible by today's standards. It would attack anything it saw, and never retreat. This made it easy to lure the computer's units into traps. Unit AI was just as lacking - units managed to get stuck easily.
Even with these shortcomings, War1 was one of the coolest games of it's time.
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