abstract
| - Your automatically spawning army is the backbone of your attack and defense. Everyone in the game starts with footmen, but it's in your best interests to upgrade your barracks as soon as possible. Each upgraded barracks improves your base defense and spawns different units, like dryads, skeleton mages, and raiders. People often forget that higher tiers also gets you more hit points on your base. It's fairly easy for an opponent to destroy your Tier One base late in the game. Footmen have no special abilities (Unit Level 2). They are not considered part of a race (Tier Zero) and do not get any race abilities or upgrades. They do get standard weapons and armor upgrades. From Tier Zero, you can choose (via the beacon next to your barracks) from any of the four races, Human, Orc, Night Elf, or Undead. The initial upgrade from footmen to Tier One is free and occurs after a seven minutes into the game. When at Tier One of a race, you can move horizontally to another race's Tier One for 100 gold, or you can upgrade the race you're currently using to Tier Two for 1400 gold. You cannot go diagonally (for example, if you have Grunts, you can get Riflemen, Ghouls, Archers, or Peons, but you cannot get Militia). When at Tier Two and upwards, the same options apply. The cost for switching races also increases as you increase your tier. Currently, you cannot return to a lower tier once you have moved up. Armies can be upgraded with a universal weapons upgrade and health upgrade up to fifteen times each. As you start changing your army, you can also take advantage of race-specific abilities. For example, starting at Tier Two, all Undead units get the Slam ability, and can be upgraded with Unholy Frenzy. Race upgrades don't carry over if you switch races -- so Level 5 Unholy Frenzy would not become Level 5 Improved Range if you switched to Night Elf. However, if you switch back to a race you had previously researched a racial with, they will still have the upgrades you paid for. Each race-specific upgrade has five levels. Weapon and Health upgrades apply to ALL units no matter which tier you learned them at, and have fifteen levels. Obtaining Tier 5 is considered a game breaker as very few heros can withstand the attacks of high upgraded Meatwagons or Kodo Beasts, although a few item-stacked heros can give a good fight. A lot of games end with a race to collect enough gold to upgrade to Tier 5 and in very rare cases end with two teams with very powerful armies.
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