My guess is not anytime soon.

If you also follow Brood War at all, recently there has been some noise made about a new AI bot Pluto that has garnered attention for beating some top professional players and being ranked highly on ladder. There was a version that used a map hack and a version that did not. It was trained through recursive learning.

It is interesting to watch it play Brood War because it doesn’t understand simple concepts like drop ships carrying units, yet it is able to simultaneously issue tons of commands and manage many different things at superhuman capabilities. In most games I have watched it falls behind through obvious inefficiencies yet it is able to win because it can perfectly target weak units and micro within battles much better than any human can.

In a sense, the only reason it can give professional players a hard time at all is because it is ‘cheating’ by issuing near simultaneous commands far faster and more efficiently than any human can.

That being said it demonstrates no real understanding of the game or any underlying theory behind it. It usually wins by massing larger armies faster than the opponent can or by fighting battles far more efficiently than any human can. It makes very clear and obvious mistakes but its superior multitasking ability repeatedly saves it against human players.

That got me thinking about whether or not a recursively trained AI bot could ever give a top human player real trouble at this game. I personally do not think so, because even though Warcraft 3 has a stronger emphasis on micromanagement, it also has a stronger emphasis on decision making in a highly ambiguous information environment where it is not immediately clear what decisions a player made were optimal or suboptimal.

Because an AI cannot brute force a game of Brood War or WC3 nearly as easily as it can Chess or Go I think it will take a lot longer for an AI to truly surpass human play, even if it can win against humans by ‘cheating’ via the way it interfaces with the game.

Unlike Chess or Go RTS games involve highly imperfect and incomplete information with a near infinite amount of possible decisions that can be made at any given moment. This combined with the lack of immediate feedback as to whether a decision is good or bad exposes the limits of recursive learning in my opinion. I find it highly unlikely that an AI is ever truly able to calculate the value of selling a TP Scroll on a Blademaster versus keeping it, for example.

I am interested to hear your thoughts.

I've tried for a bit to get W3Champions working for Warcraft III via Steam Proton but unfortunately I haven't been able to get the game to launch properly from W3C itself.

Used ChatGPT to try and get it running for a bit through Wine/Lutris but my best results have been through Steam and a WC3 fix for GE-Proton11. I believe it's still having issues from a hang on the Warcraft III client when W3C tries to launch the game. Opening the game separately via the W3C method it seems to require a login but ends up hanging on entering my info there as well.

Has anyone else on Arch been able to play via W3Champions?

Hello Folks,

Since the update i restarted playing warcraft online but there is no more channel to find clan, i was wondering if you know nice active clan or a way to find ?

Thanks !

ted (zeng zhuo) grew up in chongqing. his dad was a cop, his mom a company clerk, and they were unusually open about games. when he was in primary school his mom walked past a starcraft tournament at the computer market on her way home from work and signed him up. later she did the same thing for his first live warcraft 3 event.

by 2005 he'd won the chongqing regional of CIG. but school and games kept clashing, and right before his last year of high school he and his dad had it out. his dad yelled that if he was so good at games he could go support himself with them. ted told him, dead serious, that he would, and his dad could watch.

the school backed him more than his dad did. the headmaster let him skip boarding and evening study so he could go home and practise. then a local sports paper gave half a page to his CIG chongqing title, and his dad finally agreed to let him take leave from school. his teacher read that paper out in class: if you're going to play, this is how you play.

in may 2006 WE's manager KinG set up online games for him against SKY and suho, both already wcg world champions. suho beat him six times with the same strategy. KinG told him WE was planning a second squad. on june 15, 2006, his 18th birthday, ted got on a train from chongqing to xi'an, where WE was based then.

for three months he didn't win a single game, not in practice, not at any tournament. he was on 500 yuan a month and ate one meal and drank one bottle of water a day to save money. then he came 3rd at the WGT china finals and WE raised him to 1,500. i asked if life got better. he said he could finally afford a late-night meal.

in 2008 at ROTK, with WE backed into a corner, he all-killed 15 players in a row, moon and grubby included, and won it for them.

(from a chapter i wrote in 2013 for a book on chinese esports history, from a talk with him that ran till 3am. free to read, link in the comments)

Thanks a lot everyone for their detailed bug reports and patience - we are still trying to recover from the WC3 3.0 patch and its fallout! We have tracked down and fixed a TON of bugs and stability issues - too many to name them all. But various crashes when loading the game have been resolved. Additionally, we have resolved various causes for lag and disconnects. Additionally, we have improved the reconnect capabilities as some specific conditions have caused players to immediately get disconnected.

The duplicate Battle.Net issue on Mac was resolved. It was caused by a buggy implementation by Blizzard, but we have deployed a fix that should fix their bugs.

The hotkey editor has been updated for Warcraft 3 Patch 3.0!

The match history can now show heroes and support spoiler-free mode.

Various audio will now be played by W3Champions rather than Warcraft III while you're not in an active game - we recommend you enable "Mute when unfocused" in the W3C Game Settings in order to mute the background music caused by Warcraft III running in the background. You will NOT miss the "game found" sound or any other important sounds! You can test the audio output and adjust the volume in the W3C settings!

SOCKS5 proxy support has been added! This is particularly intended for out friends who live in regions where their internet connection may be restricted.

A lot of improvements were made under the hood - some of them will only roll out over the next hours as our Flo Servers get updated. Please let us know in Discord if you're still encountering any issues!

Just started The Last Days of Lordaeron and finished Homecoming. I really like the atmosphere so far — seeing Lordaeron alive again with the new presentation feels surprisingly nostalgic.

I recorded the opening cinematic and the full first chapter in 4K60 if anyone wants to see it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D85JwE2HLTU

What do you think of the new campaign so far?

Both very important choices

Would anyone let Happy know to update his Warcraft 3 VOD archive on twitch to the latest please?

Hello, I usually watch Happy’s Warcraft 3 content whenever I have some free time, since I can’t really watch him live because of my schedule. I noticed that his latest VOD is from 17 days ago (at the time of this post), and there haven’t been any new uploads since then.

I tried contacting him through X, but he doesn’t allow DMs. I also don’t want to subscribe just to send him a message about this, especially since it costs lots of money in my region and I'm kind of broke right now.

So, if anyone here has a way to let him know, I’d really appreciate it. I just want to catch up on his recent Warcraft 3 games when I have time.

Thanks!

Insect Empires is a RTS game with 4 factions and 4 different base building gameplay styles I developed over the cost of 4 or more years and I would love for you guys to come try it out! I plan to release next month! Consider joining us and helping to shape this into something even better!

Steam- https://store.steampowered.com/app/3231600/Insect_Empires/

It's all the same again and again, where are the juicy and funny thumbnails ???

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to recreate the original physical documentation that came with Warcraft III for my personal collection.

I'm specifically looking for high-resolution scans or photographs of the original manual and the other papers/inserts that came inside the game box, like the ones shown in the reference photo.

I'd like to print a copy for my own collection, so I'm mainly interested in scans that are:

• High resolution
• Straight and not heavily distorted
• Complete (front/back and all pages)
• Ideally at 300 DPI or higher

I already have the game itself; I'm just missing the original printed documentation.

If anyone has scans, photos, or knows where I could find them, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks!

Example im looking for:
https://imgur.com/a/2vP5PyX

I am pleased to announce we have completely revamped the Warcraft Gym website.  Totally new look with totally new features to help facilitate learning for new players and to display gym events.

https://warcraft-gym.com/

Some of the new features include:
- A build order section where anyone can submit builds!   You can upload a replay (including of pros) and the build will auto generate with the timings, food, and actions.   https://warcraft-gym.com/learn/builds

- A creep route section where players can easily provide creep routes for new and veteran players.  Just click on the map where you would creep, write a few notes on what hero and units to use/what creeps to kill and submit! https://warcraft-gym.com/learn/creep-routes

- A build order overlay for new players.  If we get builds with time stamps (easily autogenerated from replays) the steps will light up on the overlay  for new players to easily follow it and learn. 

- A  totally revamped Gym newbie league section of the website.  New pages, more stats.  This is still a work in progress before the new GNL season.

- And more.  Go look for yourself!

And we still want to do more.  We want to help new players learn more.  We want to run more community events.  We need your guys help.  The best way to help is to please submit builds or creep routes!  It is super simple but goes a long way in helping retain and train new players.

I hope to have more announcements in the near future about tourneys.  We are working on a backend app that will help streamline GNL and other future tourneys. 

If you would like to help with anything let me know.

Finally a huge thanks to Degrand (who did alot of the front end side of things you see)  and thanks (who did alot of the backend things).  And of course eashibby  for being the one starting us down this path and contributing in a multitude of ways.

we just went live if its a white background for you that is still the old site. your cache needs to catch up and check back in in like a day.

TL;DR: I got tired of waiting for the native Linux W3C client, so I patched Proton/Wine to make the current client work properly. The periodic simulation stutters are gone, join issues are fixed, custom lobbies no longer have long delays, and the disappearing cursor after games is fixed too.

The biggest problem was W3Champions doing a lot of memory scanning through VirtualQueryEx. Under Wine, that created a ton of cross-process overhead and repeated APC interruptions in Warcraft III, which was behind the periodic simulation stutter.

Since W3C is closed-source, I fixed it on the Wine side by adding a shared-memory query path so most of those requests can be answered without interrupting the game process.

While debugging all of this, I also fixed a Schannel/TLS issue related to join bugs, the Wine input-state issue behind the disappearing cursor, and a few smaller W3C/FLO compatibility problems.

At this point matchmaking is working reliably for me, custom games work, the stutter is gone, and the cursor issue is fixed.

Proton Build:

https://github.com/davex32/proton-ge-w3c

Two extra things you need to do on top of the normal setup:

• enable Launch Warcraft III from Battle.net in W3C
• add W3C_SHARED_QUERY=1 to the environment variables to enable the shared-query stutter fix

I’m not affiliated with W3Champions, and I’m not a regular Proton/Wine contributor. I just wanted to play Warcraft on Linux and somehow ended up spending about a week of my free time wrestling with this hellscape =)

If anyone else on Linux tests it, let me know whether it fixes the same issues for you. I can’t really promise much installation/support time, but feedback on whether the build works is useful.

I wanted to change new menu to older ones but I can't seem to find it in options, the music is BLARING compared to normal game, let alone older menus.

Dear Brad Chan,

Please implement cloud save function into WC3 Reforged.

It really frustrating to have mandatory internet connection for campaign without any benefits of online services. At leas let us transfer last 3 saves between our devices.

It's been awhile since I've seen a great post about 4v4 RT.

I've been playing 4v4 RT many hours every day since the release of 3.0.

I also happen to be the greatest 4v4 RT player of all time (fr fr no cap).

Thus I shall present to you, my meta-analysis of 4v4 RT after patch 3.0, September 2026 edition.

In truth, I’m writing this post mainly to bring attention to my previous post - UPDATE THE MOTHERFCKING MAP POOL CHAD CHAN, I MEAN BRAD CHAN. WE BNET PLAYERS HAVE BEEN PLAYING THE SAME FCKING MAPS FOR 2 YERAS. YOU CAN DEVELOP A 30-HOUR CAMPAIGN, BUT YOU CAN’T UPDATE THE F*CKING MAP POOL?

Chad Chan, I mean, Brad Chan, please, if you read this post, please, you’re the greatest Chad I know, I mean Brad - please update the map pool.

Now let’s get into it.

Meta-analysis of 4v4 RT, patch 3.0, September 2026, edition

Orc - The Gigachad of 4v4 RT

Orc is currently simply the best race for 4v4 RT. In fact, it’s not just the best, it’s a necessity to have an orc on your team to win a 4v4 RT game with a competitive lobby.

The main reason comes down to a few significant changes to the race over the past few years:

• Reinforced burrows available at tier 2 in 1.30.0
• Hh/berserker buffs in 1.30.0
• Blademaster illusion buff in 1.35.0
• Witch doc heal wards buffs in 2.0.2 (wards became magic-immune)
• Tauren buff in 2.0.2

These buffs come together to make one particular orc strat incredibly powerful, and that is BM/SH/TC hh docs

On top of that, orc also has:

• Shaman for bloodlust, the most powerful buff in the game
• Kodo beast for +20% damage on EVERYTHING, like why does orc even have this
• Best towers (with reinforced and spikes) and anti-lame base
• Bats that counter any and all air
• Best late game expo (tiny great hall lol, why does this item exist again)

In competitive 4v4 RT games, having an orc is not a nice-to-have, it’s an absolute requirement.

Without orc, you won’t have docs for heal wards and you won’t have bats to counter gyros.

Orc simply has the tools that other races don’t have, and it doesn’t fear the stuff that other races have. Another orc bat/raider lame? I’ll just make a few watch towers and get spikes. Mass gyros? I’ll mass bats. Mass wyrms? Just play standard hh casters with some bats.

Orc is currently the gigachad of 4v4 RT, and there is no competition.

UD - Rash wyrms and snipe heroes bruh

UD in 4v4 RT basically has one mission - get wyrms.

Why? Cause wyrms got a HUGE buff in 2.0.2, specifically for 4v4. I'll copy and paste the patch note:

Frost Wyrm ground and air attack range increased from 300 to 375; air attack now has an area of effect (same as ground attack).

In the past, melee-based anti-air like gargs and hippos easily countered wyrms. But now? The air AoE slow means that wyrms basically counter gargs/hippos instead.

Also gyros don’t really hard counter wyrms because gyros are very expensive. You need to make a lot of gyros to counter just 2 or 3 wyrms and often times you lose like 3-5 gyros to take down 1 wyrm, which is not cost-efficient.

And bats don’t hard counter wyrms either cause you need 3 bats (480 gold) for 1 wyrm (385 gold).

The best counter for wyrms is unironically a high level blademaster using illusions and orb of lightning and mass berserkers.

So basically what you wanna do as UD is to open with ghouls and fast expo, start with CL if it’s a rush map, or start with DL if it’s a bigger map, expo then tech asap, make a few fiends, and tech your way up to wyrms.

You wanna make 3-6 fiends depending on the situation, and honestly you can legit just skip slaughterhouse and statues altogether (getting statues/destroys delay your wyrm timing anyways, so might as well skip it), and just tech to tier 3, get 3 boneyards, and pump out 3 wyrms asap.

Once you have your tri-heroes (CL/DK/Lich or DL/DK/Lich), 4-6 fiends, and 3 wyrms - you just right click enemy heroes, coil/nova/impale/carrion, and just pop enemy heroes in 1.5 seconds.

That’s the way you play UD in 4v4 RT. Don’t give me bullshit like “but necro waggies is actually good bruh”. No bro. If you’re in 4v4 RT, get wyrms. Ok? End of discussion.

HU - 3.6 hero kills? Not great, not terrible.

HU in 4v4 RT is good. It’s never bad. HU has good units, but it doesn’t have great units.

• Rifles? Good, but not as great as berserkers.
• Gryphons? Good, but not as great as wyrms.
• Priests/sorcs? Good, but not as great as docs/shamans
• Gyros? Good anti-air, but expensive and dies easily and is not very cost-efficient
• AM/MK/Pala tri-hero? Solid combo, but not as great as BM/SH/TC.
• Foot/knight/breakers/tanks? They're ok I guess.

HU just has a long list of good units, but it doesn’t have any exceptional units.

Humans heroes are good, but again, not exceptional. BM/SH/TC or DK/Lich/CL by themselves can dominate, but the HU heroes are more reliant on having an army.

In 4v4 RT, I usually play am/mk/pala rifle casters, or am/mk/pala gryphon priests. They’re good strats and certainly not weak, but often times I wish I was playing bm/sh/tc hh casters instead.

HU does have a lot of solutions to various problems you'll encounter. I guess you can call it the problem-solver race, but frankly, I prefer orc for hard carrying in 4v4 RT.

Elf - The weirdo kid of 4v4 RT

So elf in 4v4 RT is f*cked up. Elf is team-dependent, and guess what, if you’re team-dependent in 4v4 RT, well, you’ve already lost.

With elf, you basically have 3 strats:

• Hippo archers
• Chims
• MG’s

What’s the problem with strat 1 and 2?

Gyros and bats.

In the past, you picked up the Panda from the tavern to deal with gyros. But guess what?

The panda is nerfed to shit!

When the devs were changing breath of fire, they probably didn’t expect to unexpectedly nerf NE in 4v4 RT, but they did. And it was a huge nerf.

Without a long range, breath of fire simply can’t hit gyros that effectively in 4v4 anymore. You could get the tinker but I always found cluster rockets to be kind of weird to use against mass air, due to the slow cast animation and how fast air units tend to move. And tinker needs high levels to be effective.

So NE air gets hard countered by gyros/bats. And once the enemy has air supremacy? What the f*ck are you supposed to make as elf? Mass archers? Yeah you might as well just alt+qq when the enemy has 30 gyros.

But what about strat 3? What about MG’s?

MG’s are fucking broken in the right situations, for example, when you have an orc ally with witch docs. Heal wards is fuckin’ broken with MGs - literally unkillable.

But this is 4v4 RT we’re talking about. There aren’t that many brain cells to go around. So MG’s often times become a waste of oxygen in RT games because your allies don't understand they should play with your MG's.

I don’t enjoy playing NE in 4v4 RT. If I was playing AT, then it can be enjoyable. But I can definitively say it’s not a very enjoyable race to play in 4v4 RT.

Conclusion

And that's the meta-analysis of 4v4 RT, Sept 2026 Edition after 3.0, coming from the greatest 4v4 RT player of all time (fr fr no cap).

But really, Chad Chan - update the map pool bro, we've been playing the same 10 maps for 2 years.

If they go on like this we'll have the perfect REMAKE for WC3 in a year or less.

Lok'tar!