Learn essential Warcraft III: Reforged gameplay mechanics including hotkeying, micro, focus fire, shift commands, and more. Enhance your strategy and dominate the battlefield.
This section of the guide covers the fundamental elements of Warcraft III: Reforged gameplay. While the prologue missions serve as a tutorial, this guide details basic concepts and suggests practice for common game techniques. Throughout the walkthrough, specific strategies will be explained and assumed knowledge for the regular campaign.
General Directions: North means up, South means down, West means left, and East means right.
Hotkey: Assigning a group of units, structures, or both to a specific number key (0-9). Select up to 12 units/structures, hold Shift, and press a number key. Pressing the assigned key later selects that group. Recommended hotkeys include: 1 for melee/heroes, 2 for ranged, 3 for casters, and 4 for siege. Hotkeying structures is useful for quick unit production, and hotkeying your defensive grid is crucial for quickly focusing fire on threats.
Each unit, structure, and command also has a letter hotkey, identified by a yellow letter when hovering over the order. Learning some of these can speed up building and issuing actions.
Micro: Pulling damaged units back to avoid death while enemies focus on higher-health units. This is more effective against AI than players, though still a key strategy. Micro units that are low on health or taking significant damage.
Attack Area: Select attacking forces, click to attack, then click the desired area on the screen or radar. Forces will move to the clicked area, attacking enemies along the way. Useful for pushing into bases.
Focus Fire: Concentrating all attacks on a specific unit. Essential when fighting heroes with powerful spells or defending against siege units. Quickly eliminating a unit negates its damage. Defense towers can also benefit from focus fire.
Shift Commands: Hold Shift before issuing an order for units to complete it after their current task. For example, build a structure, then Shift-right-click a gold mine. Workers will return to mining after building. This can be used for multiple commands, like dedicating a worker to building food structures sequentially. Shift commands are also useful for focus fire; hold Shift and right-click enemy units or buildings in the desired destruction order. Practice by moving a unit around using Shift-right-clicks to see the indicator flags.
Worker Harassment: Attacking enemy workers to hinder resource gathering. Primarily a multiplayer strategy, but may be indicated in single-player. Tech-tree harassment involves destroying base structures required for advanced units/structures to force rebuilding, buying time. Not recommended for single-player.
Training/Kiting: Training involves luring creeps into an enemy base with a disposable unit to attack it. Kiting means luring enemy units toward your base or attack force to reduce their numbers before engaging their defenses.
Creeping: (Term defined in source text but no explanation provided.)
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