>Did Arthas really need to purge that city?
I think it's supposed to the the tragedy of the situation, Everyone in the city is already doomed.

>>2255389
What would you do in that situation?

>>2255389
>Did Arthas really need to purge that city?
Yes.
The villagers are already turning into undead, if you do nothing Mal'Ganis just claims them and teleports all of that undead meat away for later use.

Losing Uther's and Jaina's faith was bad though, and going to Northrend was when he really fucked up.

>>2255389
Short-sighted people will say yes
The wiser will realise the short-term gain of killing the soon-to-be-undead is outweighed by the political damage of killing villagers

>>2255864
Political damager is moot when the apocalypse is right at your doorstep, fags like Uther that never compromise end up making everything worse in the end just to satisfy their ego

>>2255797
I'd argue that Arthas's only unjustifiably evil act was killing those mercenaries. He could have probably bought their silence, but he betrayed them instead. Everything else before can be justified as those people being doomed anyway and everything after as him being under magic corruption by Frostmourne.

>>2255389
>Did Arthas really need to purge that city?
Yes. Everyone was plagued on varied levels and those that gone far too far already were turning into zombies.
>>2256215
>and everything after as him being under magic corruption by Frostmourne.
And this makes it extremely jarring since Sylvanas and Ner'zhul gets a pass while Arthas gets none.
Then again I don't consider WoW and everything after TFT to be remotely canon.

If I wanted to replay the campaign after all these years, would I be better off if I got Reforged, or should I hunt down (on the high seas, obviously) a copy of the original WCIII?

>>2255389
For me, the campaigns from Age of Mythology, Total Annihilation Kingdoms and Heroes 5 were very addictive, I wanted to play to find out what would happen next.
Arthas was wrong here. His decision led to a decline in morale and a breakdown in the Alliance forces. He should have listened to the commander-in-chief, his superior commander and, maybe, sought advice from the wizards of Dalaran.

>>2255986
Arthas compromised his ideals and look where that landed him

>>2257380
I prefer the term "refined." The city was obviously guilty for being full of plebs and needed to be purged. Muradin wasn't even an Equite. Just a pleb midget.

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>>2255389
>What are some good ones?
It's far from the same level as Warcraft III, but I found that Starship Troopers: Terran Command's campaigns are a lot of fun.
Last Train Home I can also recommend. It's 50% survival and base management while looking at a cozy train go choo-choo and 50% RTS-lite.
>What makes a good RTS campaign?
Interesting story. Fun unit balance and mechanics. And different kinds of maps to fight on. I also really like dynamic OST's, soundtracks increasing in intensity depending on how much combat is happening on the screen.
>Did Arthas really need to purge that city?
Yes

One campaign that stuck with me for years is KUF heroes Walter campaign, especially having played previous game. The plot is very good and game punishes you for trying to be a good guy
Other than that classics like World in Conflict which is pure kino.
DoW 2 campaign is fun and we need more Diabloid like RTS, especially co-op.

>>2256215
>I'd argue that Arthas's only unjustifiably evil act was killing those mercenaries
Yeah I don't mean to say that going to northrend was evil, just that it was a bad idea.

I think
1. Killing and blaming the mercs
2. Burning Ships
3. Taking Frostmourne and saying he'll pay any price after Muradin's warning
Would be his 3 evil acts.

Other stuff is more being a hothead and being bad at diplomacy(explaining why the culling needs to happen), not really evil stuff.

>>2256473
The latter probably.

Mainly just because it's the difference between something like a 32gb install and a 2gb install.

Modern wc3, which is just reforged is fine to play, you can just play with old graphics and old maps, so if you happen to have wc3 and have it installed, just booting that up and playing the campaign with the correct settings is fine, but in your case just quickly downloading a 2gb of old wc3 to play the campaign is probably better.

>>2257722
>it's just being a 'hothead' to murder people
don't @ me with "but they will eventually become undead", he didn't have a right to take their last moments of humanity

Magic & Mayhem

>>2257747
Why not?

>>2255389
Lotr: The Battle for Middle-Earth. Not because the story is good, but because I liked how you could do optional battles for permanent bonuses and it was cool that your army came with you from battle to battle. It's like your whole army is made from hero units by the black gate.

>>2263652
A ruler does not kill his own innocent subjects, it is a moral line not to be crossed because that leads down the path of the butcher instead of the protector

strategy games with a good story:
warcraft 3
command and conquer
alpha centauri
epic 40k final liberation
homeworld

strategy games with good campaigns:
starcraft 2
dawn of war 2
warhammer dark omen

underrated:
heroes of annihilated empires
constructor/mob rule
deadlock
freedom force

>>2263943
BFME 1 is my guilty pleasure, it was just pure lightning in a bottle, and was such a high wall that unfortunately the second game just couldn't overcome
personally, the good campaign is kinda my fav (tho the evil campaign has some unforgettable moments)
personally, I like managing to save Boromir from his death, and seeing him making it all the way from Rohan, Gondor and finally to the Black Gates alongside the rest of the fellowship is an unforgettable experience (funny how a RTS game can make you have these kind of feelings).
The best mission from the campaign has be Helm's Deep, prove me wrong
spoiler you can't

>>2264639
So he loses all his innocent subjects by not killing them

This is why the world is fucked
Genuine idiots like you

Its the same as not excising cancer from your body
>NOOOO THAT CANCER IS LIVING!!!!

>>2264962
As soon as we start mass-killing civilians for benefit, it sets the precedent for killing innocents when the benefit is deemed sufficient
It's closer to killing those diagnosed with terminal cancer, they're going to die anyway and just waste resources so why not kill them now?

>>2264972
Arthas was the son of the king and a paladin.
he's more concerned about statecraft
all his closest "friends" were all part of the the military industrial complex.
he never made friends with the plebs.

>>2264639
>A ruler does not
yeah they do

>>2264639
>A ruler does not kill his own innocent subjects
Begging you to pick up a history book.

>>2266252
Yeah obviously there are shitty rulers in history you pedantic fuck

was no one spared at stratholme?
or did the oligarchs nobles military leaders and richfags escape unscathed?

>>2266634
we don't even know how undeath works, maybe every body he didn't burn eventually became part of the scourge

>>2266634
There are citizens there burning bodies and fixing things in the interlude where Jaina goes to the city after Arthas and his men left, so some must have survived.

>>2264780
myth 1 and 2 have great storylines.

>>2266634
Anyone who didn't eat the grain would have been ok

>>2255389
Battle realms has a nice story.

>>2266634
Where are the city guards or local alliance forces? Even during the mission before, local forces from several villages were able to organize self-defense, and Mal Ganis enters such a large metropolis with a few ghouls as if it were his own. Idiotic.

>>2267813
Hearthglen soldiers saw nearby villagers get attacked, so they were preparing a defense, Stratholme didn't and Mal'Ganis went in covertly.

>>2255389
The Black Company is an unfinished custom campaign for Warcraft 3 but it was always my favorite one, it gets pretty close towards the end of the tech tree and the first book, there's well over a dozen missions if I remember right so it's not like it's lacking and if you want more of the story it's a book series so you can just go read it.

>>2268028
There is no way to covertly sack a city, which is basically what Arthas did. Stratholme's garrison wouldn't sit it out and they probably wouldn't obey his order to slaughter their own friends, families, and neighbors either.

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>>2264972
Everyone undersands you have to kill the infected person in the zombie movie
Why does having multiple people involved change anything?

Besides if you're living in Stratholme would you rather Arthas had left you alive to experience an eternity of suffering after you're forced to kill your own family?

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>>2268326
Solutions in the micro do not necessarily apply to the macro
If one person is trapped in a room with one other person and their only means to survive is to kill someone who is about to die, that could be defensible
If a kingdom has an infected city, it is not the same immediate life-or-death situation. Stratholme was not decisive in the conflict, Lordaeron was doomed regardless. All the massacre achieved was a short-term tactical gain at the cost of a long-term strategic defeat in the splintering of Allied forces.

It only happened to inadvertently work out as a positive because, without the massacre, Arthas never becomes the lich king and he doesn't save Azeroth.

>>2268356
>Stratholme was not decisive in the conflict
Only because Arthas purged it.
It WAS a life or death situation for the entire kingdom.

>Lordaeron was doomed regardless
Yes, because of mistakes made by Arthas after that.
But if we're judging Stratholme in isolation?
It was the correct call.

>>2268398
>Only because Arthas purged it.
Stratholme was just one of many infected cities, meaning it was NOT a life or death situation for the entire kingdom

Now if we were talking about the grain distribution centre of Andorhal prior to the infected grain spreading, the actual strategic core, that might be a decisive matter

>>2255389
1) Me too
2) Warcraft 3 for sure, Red Alert 2, Tiberian Dawn.
3) Engaging story
4) The AOE2 chronicle ones. They're pretty good but it got lost in the wider discussion of dlcs for dlcs.
5) Yes. The council of autists has already cleared Arthas of any and all wrong-doing until the moment he killed his father.

>>2264639
>A ruler does not kill his own innocent subjects
I struggle to think of a single ruler from ancient antiquity to modern times who has NOT killed his "innocent subjects".

>>2268439
name one US president who has killed a large number of unarmed, innocent, law-abiding US citizens

>>2268428
>Stratholme was just one of many infected cities, meaning it was NOT a life or death situation for the entire kingdom
It was the second most populous city in Lordaeron, possibly the most populous going by old rpg book canon.
If the plot went ahead as normal, but the culling didn't happen, then the extra undead meat the scourge would have meant by the time of WoW, the undead border wouldn't be at Tarren Mill, it would be at Menethil Harbor.

For Lordaeron in a conventional war against the undead it would've been disastrous if the Scourge claimed Stratholme, Arthas denied a massive powerspike for the scourge by culling it.

>>2268286
militais and military have been isloated from the plebinas since time immemiral.
their friends and family are all in the military.
civvies need to stay in line and follow orders.

>>2268286
>There is no way to covertly sack a city
Teleporting demons can covertly enter an unalerted city and cause havoc yeah

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>>2264972
A guy is rolling into town on a truck, he doesn't want to, but he's forced to.
His truck is carrying a nuke.
It's gonna explode and kill a million people if it enters the town.
You know this, but you think of him as innocent so you choose inaction, one million people die.
Everyone else in the thread would save those million people because everyone else are smarter, taller and more moral than you.

like it isn't even the trolley problem, the trolley is on the course to multi-track drift, we can pull the lever so it just kills people on one track, not both tracks, but you'd rather kill people on both tracks.

>>2268476
If you count deep state and rich families alongside Israeli plants that have been running the country for over fifty years

>>2268527
Arthas didn't shoot a man sitting on a nuke, that's a scenario in which death is immediate and guaranteed.
He shot a city that was probably going to become a nuke when other options were available. Death was neither immediate nor guaranteed. The entire setup is to demonstrate the degeneration of his morals.

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>>2268782
its not like the undead were a new threat.
necromancers and raising undead skeletons were a thing in the first warcraft.
the dude was a paladin which make trivial work of undead things.
maybe it was the first time Arthas delth with the undead lost his cool and panicked.
and just went kill em all

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>>2268782
>Death was neither immediate nor guaranteed.
Yeah it was, that's a lie I'm afraid.

>>2255389
I don't care who was in the wrong. What I wonder is this. Could Arthas and his troops (possibly other troops around, uninfected) could even contain a massive zombie outbreak in a large city?
Maybe if they managed to gain controls of city walls and gates quickly, but even then, did they "lore wise" have enough troops to do that and contain massive zombie horde? Also, are those zombies stupid mindless, or were they controlled and directed?

>>2269005
>Also, are those zombies stupid mindless, or were they controlled and directed?
Controlled and directed, eventually turned into ghouls, or their meat repurposed into abominations

>>2269005
I guess its a mix of him having more troops then ingame and killing off many civilians before they could transform.

>>2255389
Coh 1 is good. It has a mod (can't remember now) that adds a super high quality Ardennes campaign and it just werks

>>2269005
They didn't, which is why they killed everyone before they could turn.

>>2269271
CoH 1 is also quite possibly the only game ever made that has a campaign where you play as the Waffen SS, even though they never directly call them that.

>>2263943
>>2264813
I tried BFME 2 and couldn't get into it: the campaign was too contradictory to the book, and I was annoyed by the retarded wall construction system. Is BFME1 better?

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>>2267813
>Idiotic.
The most idiotic part of the whole campaign is the entire plot point of the grain being distributed *to* the villages.

>>2264780
>deadlock
Looks pretty gay.

>>2255389
>Did Arthas really need to purge that city?
Yeah, but he was a bit too eager to get purgin.
Maybe a more diplomatic approach would've swayed more to his own position.

>>2270018
BFME1 is 1:1 the movies stuff with added battles to grind your army.

>>2268476
Whoever was in charge during:
The Mexican war
WW2
Vietnam war
Korean war
Gulf war 1 and 2
Afghanistan
Iraq
They all killed innocent, law abiding US citizens for their own gain.

>>2268476
Name one that hasn't.

>>2268855
Turns out the WC3 writer was just a shitty writer. You could tell immediately when Orcs were presented as the good guys who were just victims of da demons and sheeeit.

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>>2270061
Do you prefer Edain Unchained or Age of the Ring? From what I gathered the latter is lame and cut out most monster units, while the former brought back fixed castle settlements.

>>2270344
did warcraft 3 have a different writer than the first two?

>>2268855
The plague/blight was a new threat.
Don't remember the orcs deploying necromancy biological warfare against the humans in the first two games

>>2270501
orcs had nercromancers and raised dead and the warlocks summoned demons in the first warcraft
orcs in warcraft 2 had death knights which were risen from the slain knights of lordareon
the grain wasnt infected with a virus it was something magical wasnt it?
seems like the orc would know something about it.

>>2270587
thanks for confirming what the other anon said and that the orcs didn't deploy necromantic bio warfare through food supplies do that in wc1+2

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>>2270423
Between WC2 and WC3 there was a lot of actual story produced by people blizz hired (primarily golden and knaak) or by their employees (metzen) because WC1 and 2 were not plot-heavy games. They made a few short stories and novels, namely
>Of Blood and Honor
>Day of the Dragon
>Lord of the Clans
which all predated WC3's release.
Then right after you got
>The Last Guardian
>War of the Ancients trilogy (Well of Eternity/Demon Soul/The Sundering)
which explained a bunch of integral lore that was more or less intended for WC3/TFT and was heavily foundational for vanilla WoW
They also probably made the orcs/horde separate from the demons so that the demons could instead be more closely attached to the undead as a faction for gameplay reasons.
>>2270587
as the other anon said, the orcs never used a plague to do their thing, they were far more straightforward and the only guy who wasn't straightforward (gul'dan) fucking died chasing power on an island in the middle of the sea
also the cult of the damned were humans, they could meld in wherever as long as they knew what they were doing, things would inevitably get messy
For Arthas though, I think he was both panicking a little and also trying to appear like a good prince, or a good king, and was afraid of looking bad. As the story goes on he gets more fucked in the head and when he takes Frostmourne he's essentially ended up not caring for much more other than being the King to rule them all. It's why the final cinematic is so good, because Arthas is now the Lich King, and all he rules from his spires are corpses in a wasteland.

WC3 had a nice story.

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>>2269965
>Waffen SS campaign

>>2255389
>Did Arthas really need to purge that city?
No, he could have waited to them to turn, kill the undead ones and rescue the few percent that didn't eat the grain, which is what Uther wanted to do.
Would be harder and more time consuming, so Arthas picking the edgy and easy option was what sealed his descent to evil.

>>2264780
>underrated:
>heroes of annihilated empires
Game sucks ass.

>>2294301
Mal'ganis was transporting away the ones who turned though

I'm tired of playing the same sci-fi RTS game, wanna try something more fantasy related. I remember playing some LoTR related game but forgot about it, I remember you could make treants in it. Any recs?

Almost all of the C&C games have good campaigns.

>>2270708
nice. there was this rather large online article/compendium about Warcraft lore from Blizzard around the time of vanilla WoW, and it was great, I wish I could find it. I really enjoyed Warcraft lore before it all started going off rails with various WoW expansions.

alright thanks LLM, here it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20070108050137/http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/story/#Lore

>>2255389
Mental Omega is the GOAT

>>2303790
Battle for Middle Earth? it's kinda the only one it comes to mind

>>2255389
>Did Arthas really need to purge that city?
Grand marshal Garitos would save them

>>2266634
only these who were living on dole was getting free grain from infected royal, so only poorfags get purged
richfags didn't eat grain at all and middle class need to bought their own

>>2256435
>Ah yes... EVERYBODY here to kill me, in my own castle, just as I planed.... HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
>NPC:*Has MacGuffin*
>*Deus ex machinas out of freeze*
>LICH KING: *Dies to MacGuffin Sword*
>Lich King: There must be exactly one! Lol!
<>

So fucking glad I never played WOW and only watched a fucking youtube video to "wrap up" the story

>>

Anonymous
12/30/25(Tue)19:56:11 No.2311953

Anonymous 12/30/25(Tue)19:56:11 No.2311953▶