Did you know that there is economics in Warcraft? For those who do not know, Warcraft is a strategy game. You are required to build a town and an army using limited resources, and then to destroy your enemy and their town. There are four races in the game: Human, Undead, Night Elf, Orc. To play, you either pick one yourself or let the computer decide for you; you can also choose your enemy’s race, or again let the computer decide for you. Although there are slight differences between the races, most of their operations are similar.
The concepts of opportunity costs and PPC are applied liberally in the game. For example, if you choose Human, you will be given a Townhall near a gold mine with some trees surrounding it (your resources), and five human Peasants (workers who obtain resources and build structures). The choice will then come down to you: Use all Peasants to obtain resources only, or to build as many structures as possible, or a balance of both? If all the Peasants are to obtain resources only, you will be rich in resources but lacking in town structures or an army. If you build as many structures as possible, you will run out of resources quickly and will not be able to build up an army. A balance of both might be your choice, but how much priority between those two will also be your dilemma. And this is just the beginning.
Throughout the game you will face more and more of such dilemmas. To build a big army, or to build a town, or a balance of both? When you build a big army, you allocate more resources to building armies than to building the town, and vice versa. And even if you have an army, would you increase its number, or build up its strength? To add to that dilemma: how many ground units do you want, how many flying units, how many mechanical units, and how many magical and magic breaker units? In the game you are limited to only a capacity of 100 food consumption units and each unit of your army consumes different amounts of food, depending on its type. How much should you diversify in your army?
As for your town, what should you build first? Building types differ slightly from race to race, but in general there would be a building for the town centre, a building for food, a building for army unit production, a building for specialised flying units, a building for defensive purposes, a building for magical units and a building to increase the strength of the army. Each building has its importance in your town and army. The question is, again, which is to be built first?
Prioritising one will cost the opportunity of another. A balance of both is always the common strategy of choice but the configuration of weightage placed on each aspect is also the dilemma. Certain types of weightage configuration work for certain types of races and might be effective to beat your enemy, but may be the complete opposite if the enemy is of a different race, or if the enemy builds an army or a town or both of a different configuration. At this point, you might think that winning this game is a matter of luck; actually it is not. Whether you win, or not, depends on how you configure the weightage between building an army and a town and how you diversify your army, and at the same time adapting your configuration against your enemies so that you can beat them. The question now is: What is the best configuration?
by Ariffin B Mohd Amir (June 08)
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