Ancient Web: Telcontar’s Warcraft Pages Kept 1990s Strategy Arguments Online

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Warcraft strategy was once the subject of lengthy personal webpages where a player could argue about individual spells as if they were conducting a military staff exercise.

Explore the surviving Warcraft strategy pages.

A fan section still hosted at Artho.com uses the name Telcontar's Warcraft II domain. Its pages describe combat mechanics, units, spell effects, and the consequences of apparently small tactical decisions. The paladin guide is a good example: it weighs healing against exorcism and holy vision, details mana costs, and explains why a bloodlusted ogre can overwhelm attempts at healing a frontline unit.

This is not a generic list of 'top ten tips.' The writer is analyzing game systems, including situations where a spell looks useful on paper but creates the wrong opportunity cost during a battle.

The pre-release future is still visible

Other sections preserve a time before the series's history had settled. An old Lord of the Clans page describes Blizzard's proposed graphic adventure featuring Thrall as an upcoming game. The article speculates on how the studio would approach puzzles and cartoons, unaware that the project would eventually be cancelled. Read today, it is a contemporary snapshot of a future that never arrived.

The archive also retains a custom desert tileset and artificial-intelligence page, credited to Cameron Vine and other contributors. It describes replacing visual elements and opponent behavior in Warcraft II, with a small custom map to demonstrate the difference. These are descriptions of historic modifications, not a claim that the files were executed in this review.

The specific queued wc0.html address was not readable during research, but the surrounding Warcraft material remains indexed on the same server. Artho's present-day homepage acknowledges the Warcraft and Age of Empires material as older work by the same author, distinct from its current open-source web-development tools.

The archive shows how deeply fans investigated and extended strategy games before guide videos and community wikis became standard.

Read the original tactics and the unfinished adventure preview.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.