Warcraft 3 Reminiscence: Castle Defense

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While Vampirism was fun and all and messing around in the various tower defense or tower defense oriented maps was an enjoyable side activity, I wanted to try other defense maps that didn't just involve building a bunch of towers. While there were some maps that met this criteria later, the first defense map I played that was oriented towards the usage of heroes and units was Castle Defense.

Overview

In Castle Defense, the objective is to work with up to seven other players to defend the "King" of the castle, an NPC in the middle, from oncoming waves of enemies. In order to accomplish this objective, you are given some units (such as archers and footman) and the ability to create more units and heroes. In later versions, an upgradable tower was also added.

The castle you have to defend (also a splash image for one of the versions of Castle Defense, since Warcraft 3 uses the map as the splash if a custom one isn't set)

This game was essentially a basic defense game with units. There were a variety of strategies involved, such as standing ground with archers/other ranged units on the walls and melee units at the entrance. However, given that in most of the versions there wasn't too much of a constructed defense besides that gate that led to the King's room, it was easiest to have all the players gather their units in the King's room since it was easily defended with a large mass of archers and ranged heroes.

Most heroes use their basic skill sets from the standard game, though later versions featured unique heroes (or at least unique skill sets). There are also shops to gear up heroes if so desired. Summoning and healing skills are typically helpful on Castle Defense because of the limited amount of units you have, though this can be increased by hiring or building more units as the game goes on, since enemies have bounty.

Overall, the map is pretty simple. Like in any defense game, the players have to survive all the waves to win. I believe like in other defense games there were some gimmicks (such as boss waves, etc), though they were notably less prevalent on this map.

Final Words

There's not really too much to say about Castle Defense. It was a pretty simple defense map that didn't particularly change a lot of the basic Warcraft 3 unit data. In a lot of the older versions it essentially was a melee defense map. Later versions featured new castle architecture (which I wasn't particularly a fan of because it either made the map too easy or too hard to defend) and the addition of defensive structures, though for some reason barricades never really made it into the game.

While the map was fun to play, the simplicity of it eventually tired me out and I went in search of bigger and better things.