The Warcraft II Expansion is an extension of the standard Warcraft II game. The standard game contains the campaign "The Tides of Darkness", while the Expansion contains the campaign "Beyond the Dark Portal. "This last campaign is a sequel to the first. While the standard game is indicated with version 1.2, the Expansion is indicated with version 1.3. In America, however, other version numbers are also in use. Look here for an overview of the different versions.
In addition to another campaign, the Expansion also offers a number of other new options:
- More options when selecting a custom scenario; like the possibility to select a map/pud from a directory other than warcraft itself, the possibility to indicate how many computer opponents you want to play against, etc.
- A landscape type has been added: the swamp. "Tides of darkness" has only three landscape types: forest, snow and desert. In the swamp the trees have been replaced by giant mushrooms, the houses are overgrown with some greenish stuff and the sea is dark green...
- New special units have been added. These are much stronger in most cases. The only drawback is: you can not train them from your barracks (just like Knight Lothar).
- With a special map editor (not the one that is included with Warcraft) many special effects can be added to a pud file. How about an ogre that can fire cannonballs? Or a peasant that can deliver his wood to a tower?
In addition to the map editor that comes with Warcraft II, there are two more programs to create and edit scenarios: PudDraft and War2x Editor.
PudDraft is a map editor that looks a lot like the ordinary map editor. With this difference: all the possibilities of the Campaign "Beyond the Dark Portal" can also be used in your self-created maps / puds. The puddraft.zip file can simply be unzipped into the Warcraft directory. The program has one disadvantage: sometimes maps are not correctly saved and will not load in Warcraft ...
The War2x editor can properly save pud files and has even more options than PudDraft. However, with the War2x editor no new units can be created, only existing units can be modified. So existing units can be changed to other units. (For example archers can be changed into flying dragons.) In appearance there is also a lot of difference with PudDraft: all units are displayed with a picture of 1 x 1, even if the unit uses a space of 4 x 4 (such as a Town Hall). For War2x, do the following to install: create a WAR2X sub-directory in the Warcraft directory, copy the file war2xed.zip there and have the unzip program extract the files in that same directory you just created. ...
Play warcraft over the internet? Then try
Kali,
a tool that makes it possible to play Warcraft II via the internet.
This program is not needed with the BattleNet Edition of Warcraft II.
Who wants midi while there are so many better audio formats? Well, what can i say... Midi is nostalgia.