Finished the entire Orc campaign and got a few levels into the Human campaign and thought to myself "what am I even doing?" That's not to say I didn't have a fun time with this game because I truly did but to beat this game you really have to employ the most optimal strategy at all turns. Those optimal strategies are identical between Human and Orc meaning the maps become window dressing for the next "turtle with archer spam strategy" or the "wizards at base spamming summons routine." It also doesn't help that the Humans actually have better units than the Orcs so you're effectively going from hard mode to easy mode by going from Orcs to Humans.
Every single map requires you to just sit at base and create an overwhelming force that cannot be stopped. The AI has a very strong setup right when the map starts so there is nothing you can do with individual units that won't get them immediately killed. Medium sized companies will not do you much good either as micromanaging your own units when there are more than 4 is extremely difficult while the AI controls as many units as they want instantly. This means even with an on paper higher chance at winning that engagement, you might still lose because the AI just out maneuvers you.
The biggest reason why you need to just sit at your base until you get a strong enough army to totally wipe them out is that they have infinite units to throw at you. If you are out of position or maybe doing something else there is a good chance you will lose multiple buildings and all of your grunts, forcing a restart. It also doesn't help that Humans frequently use an invisibility spell which means units will randomly just appear inside of your base and cause sometimes unrecoverable havoc in just a few moments. That is unless you have 7 archers that will instantly kill any single unit that appears, again further encouraging turtling in your base. There is also no consequence for letting your base be destroyed, many times I would leave to go attack and the enemy would totally destroy my base but it doesn't matter because I already destroyed all of their stuff and just need to pick off those last few units.
Controlling your army is to put it simply, unwieldy. You can only select 4 units at a time and only with a drag click making moving specific units is a massive hassle. This is a problem you will always be dealing with as you are forced to attack with 25+ unit armies. In these encounters you will bleed units constantly as it is impossible to control them. The only consistent way to not lose units on accident is to use one unit to bait enemies into your army of 10 archers and catapults that will instantly kill them. This will give notice to another problem and that is kiting, which is almost impossible because if a unit is attacked it will cancel whatever it is doing and run to fight whatever is attacking them. The only way to run away or kite properly is to spam the move command faster than the AI can turn around. What is funny about this though is this doesn't always happen, I had plenty of times where my ranged units were getting shot and they just didn't even bother to do anything. Another awesome thing you will be forced to deal with is your units attacking together. If your units are not right next to each other they will not help each other which makes it so you need to move units in a tight group to be effective. At the same time however, this makes any strategies far more difficult because it will pull your units out of a position because they feel compelled to help. Your final enemy of your own making is the pathfinding which is downright atrocious. Grunts will straight up stop moving if another grunt is blocking their way taking more of your attention away from the things that actually matter. All of this combined makes for a frankly annoying experience of trial and error in trying to figure out the perfect combinations of movements to be able to not have your army instantly wiped out during any engagement, further cementing the need for these optimal strategies.
There is definitely a lot to complain about with Warcraft 1 but it was weirdly a pretty fun albeit frustrating game for me. Orc L6 had me stuck for days and I genuinely thought I couldn't do it. That kind of struggle was something I did appreciate with the game. When you finally get it all to go right and your strategy pays off and you finish the map, it really did feel great. The graphics and sounds were really charming and the story/setups for maps were solid enough to make me wonder how the map would play out based on the introduction. Very excited to get around to Warcraft 2 and 3 as this is certainly a promising start that I found to be an enjoyable experience despite its large amount of issues.
Absolutely install the mouse helper mod as it will make the game actually fun to play. There is an issue where sometimes it will stop working, particularly when you press enter to save but you can just re-open the program and get it working again.
https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/954-warcraft-mouse-helper
