Occasionally, you will meet a skeleton, with an axe and shield. Sadly, if you kill it, it will come back to life eventually. However, they usually carry oil bottles with them, and you have a little while to get them before they regenerate. Although normal weapons don't kill skeletons permanently, oil bottles do. Light some oil bottles and throw them at the skeleton, when it dies, it will stay dead. At least until you leave the map, which brings us to our second trick.

If you go two or three screens away from something, it will either reappear when you return, or vanish completely. From my experience, dead things will vanish, but if it was already gone (in water or your backpack) another of whatever it was will appear. This means that if you are low on reagents and you find some, collect them all, walk a ways away, and come back. They should have reappeared, and you can repeat until you have as much as you need.

If you find a gate which closes when you approach it, use the above trick. They will not go back to normal, but they will forget that you came near it before. Then when you approach it again, it will open, and you can go through.

You can also make live monsters dissapear by walking far enough away and returning, in some cases. There is an easier way in some places, though. For instance, on the Slayer mini-quest, when you reach the end, you will find a small room, with two skeletons guarding the door. They will not attack until you approach them, but you probably won't have enough time to reach Slayer before they attack. There is a solution to this though. Run near one, then around the room (with the door closed so they don't wander in there). It goes all the way around Slayer's small room, so just run around. When you get back to the door, one or both of the skeletons will have vanished. If one's still there, run around again. He should vanish. Then you can enter the room safely. Note that Slayer is on TOP of the door. Climb up there before you open the door, or you will have to do it all over again.

With the patch, most of the rocks that float up and down in the water will just sit there, the sliding platforms won't slide, etc. Also, you can direct your jumps to anywhere. It is much easier than before. The small arrow still lets you climb things though. And when you're running, jumping works like it always did. It is only with the medium arrow that you will notice a difference.

Warcraft II

I prefer Orcs, but you can play humans as well. These will work for either. These tips are mostly for multiplayer mode, but if you use them against the computer, they work okay except on certain levels where you need to attack immediatly, etc.

Most of them should work without the patch to v1.4 or 1.5, but I had V1.5 (The Expansion, plus the patch). All this means is that the trick for finding invisible units may or may not work if you use a different version.. But it probably should.

Building Up

Usually, you should grab a load of gold or lumber before building your first town hall. When the peon finishes building, you will get that load without having to walk back and forwards. This is actually up to you. If you are in a hurry, build first.

You should build peons until they start to get in each other's way. It doesn't take too much gold, and if you are sure to build other stuff, like barracks and lumber mills and farms, you should be able to build enough troops to defend yourself if your opponent attacks. I had about 20 peons going to a gold mine (placed as close as i could build my town hall), and I was getting more gold every 10 seconds than you could get from typing glittering prizes.

Cheaters

Some people like to cheat. It's sad, but you have to be prepared to defend against their monster hordes. They tend to be able to develop troops quickly and deploy them just as quick, so you may have a little trouble with them at first. Cheaters tend to use glittering prizes alot, and it affects you as well. So, build troops and upgrade like there's no tommorrow. Formations of grunts with berzerkers behind them work well in this manner. Upgrade your berzerkers so they can hit whatever they see immediatly. Dragons and most short range units are pathetic when It is a Good day to Die is on, because one hit by either player will kill any unit. Magic does work normally though, so have your Ogres put lots of runes in front of your city, to kill off their troops. Sappers and Dwarven Bombers work wonders against cheaters' armies and buildings, just build a ton of them, and order each one (seperatly, or they'll all explode at once) to different buildings. The enemy will be dead very quickly. To defend against that, build tons of archers and arrow towers. Stick some catapaults in there in case the enemy decides to attack them with ballistas.

Best Spells

Ogre-mages' runes are undoubtably the best spell in the game. Drain life is also a good spell, as it heals your death knights while hurting the enemy. Death Knights and Wizards can cast spells (sometimes) beyond their sight, if you suspect an enemy bldg off in the darkness, do a blizzard there. Use sight or eyes to see enemy land. Sight (Paladins) works better because, although the enemy hears the sound for it, they don't know where you saw. On the other hand, the eye (Ogres) is silent, and unless they are looking where the eye is, they won't see it either.

Taking Care of Mischevious Allies, Or Being One.

If you are allied to someone, build cannon and arrow towers in their city. If they betray you the towers will flash red on your screen the instant they decide to cancel the alliance. Plus when you cancel the alliance, the towers will open fire on all your former ally's troops and buildings in sight. If you think they might want to destroy your towers, tell them it's in case the computer tries to attack them. If you're lucky, they might thank you. If they're smart, they'll figure it out anyways.

Seeing Invisible Units

If you play in multiplayer battles and see an enemy unit vanish, it probably turned invisible. Although most units can't shoot, or even see, an invisible unit, there is a trick to find out where they are. After they vanish, they'll probably move, so find them fast. Here's what you do:

Select a big area, like the whole screen, as big as you can get without getting critters or buildings or other units in it, and release the mouse button.

If you're lucky, the unit info panel on the left side of the screen will change to show the picture and hp of the invisible unit, just as if you had selected it while it was visible. Knowing the HP of the invisible guy isn't that impressive though. Just wait.

Now, if you click the unit picture in the upper-left corner of the screen, the map will center on that unit. Of course, the unit is invisible, so you can't actually see it, but it's at the center of the screen (at least until it moves again).

Although you know where he is, you can't shoot him with paladins, archers, footmen, ogres, etc. You can, however, use Attack (G)round on your ballista or catapault to shoot continuously at one place. Of course, we shoot the center of the screen, where the invisible guy is hiding.

Killing Invisible Units

Since you'll probably have to move around to select your unit to shoot, you'll want to remember where the invisible guy is. If you don't want to use the catapault, the death knight or wizard can blizzard or decay the area around the unit. If you're lucky, he might just charge your wizard and hit him. This is good, because once he hits something, he becomes visible. That is, assuming the blizzard didn't kill him. Just select him right after you blizzard and see if he dies or escapes.

Duke Nukem 3D

When I first started playing Duke, I was one of the worst players, and was constantly dying. But I kept at it, and steadily got better. I also experimented with different keyboard controls, and got what i thought was the best combination. I used the mouse for turning, and fire. Left click fire, right click Strafe (temporary - as long as i held it down, moving the mouse would strafe instead of turn). Dbl right was mouse aiming. Sometimes, i'd make dbl-left jump, so i would jump while firing if i repeatedly clicked (instead of holding down the button). On the keyboard, I used a and z to jump and duck, s and x to move forward and back, d for jetpack, c to open, and medkit. Also, if I used the keyboard to fire and turn, instead of the mouse, I set left Ctrl for fire, quick kick, and medkit. That way I could shoot and kick someone to death, As well as healing at the same time. Right Ctrl was the alternate for load RPG (normally 5). Thus, hitting RCtrl would pick up my rpg. hitting it again would fire it. I can't remember, but maybe it did both at once.

One of my friends used the mouse and kybd also, but used the normal cursor keys, just redefining left arrow and right arrow to strafe (slide) to the left or right. This gave him an advantage over me sometimes. Usually he could react quicker, and he chose the levels I didn't know as well, so this gave him an advantage.

I recommend using the RPG and jetpack, unless you're playing against someone who strafes and jumps alot, and you can't hit with rpgs. Then use the Chaingun, and rush them.

Turn left while strafing right to go in circles around your target.

Place tripbombs where they won't see the red line, like where they must jump up, or in a box where you can sit. Or put them in a starting location, if your opponent usually dies more often than you.

Steroids make you big again if you're shrunk. If you need to shrink, point the shrinker at your feet (look down) and fire.

Just something interesting to ponder.... When I was just learning to play duke, and I got shrunk, one of my friends joked by saying 'Try typing BIG'. It worked. And I'd only been shrunk for a half-second. I never did figure that out...... The keys were normal too. Wasn't k steroids? I dunno.. i change half the keys now.

My favorite levels are Hollywood Holocaust, LA Rumble, and Spin Cycle. I figured out a way to use user maps with the shareware version, but you need kextract and kgroup, which come with the registered version :( . I'd post them here, but that's illegal, and then you couldn't read this stuff cause the website might get shut down. So they're not here. Get them from a friend, if u must. That's probably illegal too, so I'm warning you that doing it's illegal. Though i'll tell you how to use user levels in the shareware if you want, that's not illegal. It's really quite simple. Though it'd be easier to get the registered version.

You can use modified .Cons in your shareware game. I have one which gives you nuclear pipebombs and a flamethrower, but i had a little trouble with the flamethrower. When i got it, it didn't have nuclear pipebombs, but i tried to rebalance it and added the nuclear pipebombs. I also wrote some batch files for swapping the normal and flame cons. I even added an install batch file so you can stick the whole thing on a disk and run install. Then run flame.bat to put it in flame mode, or normal.bat for normal mode. (in your duke nukem directory). Currently the installer only works if you installed to c:\duke3d so i'm not uploading it yet. Use the File Request form if you want a file.