How Melee Units Fight

Myth units do NOT fight like Warcraft 2 units. If you assume they do you'll never master the game (I'm not claiming I've mastered the game). By viewing dozens and dozens of films, watching melee bloodbaths at 1/16th speed and full zoom endlessly, I've discovered some surprising and little known elements of a Myth skirmish.

In Warcraft 2, you sent two ogres at each other and if they were of equal level, and none had any special abilities (like bloodlust) the one who got the first punch in would win. The other would be left with a small sliver of life. That's because ogres have a guaranteed number of hits per minute they get in, and it's universal. Whoever throws the first punch wins, barely.

In Myth, when a thrall or warrior or whatever starts to swing its weapon, it has to follow through uninterrupted. If someone hits it with a weapon before it finishes the swing, it has to start all over. This is similar to how monsters in Marathon behaved, if you shot a Pfhor in mid-swing it would lose the swing and have to try again. If you kept hitting it it would be in a sort of paralysis. (This was not true on the hardest difficulty level, it would complete it's swing regardless then. This isn't the case in Myth though, on Total Carnage units still get interrupted in mid-swing.)

Now all things being equal, a typical thrall battle goes something like this:
-Thrall A starts to swing, a few split seconds later Thrall B starts.
-Thrall A finishes his swing first, both damaging and interrupting Thrall B's swing.
-Since Thrall B was interrupted, his delay period to his next swing is a few split second shorter than Thrall A's. 
-Thrall B starts his swing a little earlier than Thrall A's this time.
-Thrall A is now cut off by Thrall B... and the cycle continues. 
In the end, all things being equal, Thrall A will kill Thrall B, and be left with a bit of life left.

Experience

...but all things are not equal. This is where the factor of experience comes in. Experience is ignored by most players, a lot don't even know about it. Big mistake, experience wins battles.

Here's how it works, every time a unit kills an enemy unit he gets one experience point, denoted by a shield (for light units) or skull (for dark units)  in his info-bar. Experience points do different things for each unit. Archers and dwarves fire faster and more accurately as experience rises. Thrall attack a lot more frequently, and warriors attack and defend a whole lot better. What's that? You didn't know warriors could defend?

People just assume warrior's are better than thrall because they cause more damage and can take more hits. Wrong. Go put a warrior and a thrall next to each other, then throw a grenade in between them. The warrior is usually more damaged by the grenade than the thrall. And believe it or not, a thrall attack causes nearly the exact same amount of damage a warrior attack does. So why does a warrior always whoop a thrall one on one? Well they seem to attack a bit more frequently than thrall, but not enough to explain their decisive victory. Think about it; they don't carry that shield around for nothing...

A warrior will try to block shots with his shield, or side step them. He's often successful. This is why he wins battles against thrall. As experience rises he's able to block more shots, and attacks much more frequently. (A warrior with 6+ experience points is basically continuously swinging his sword.)

The implications of this are great:
¥A warrior with lots of experience just wastes thrall, and most other warriors too. Assuming he's not ganged up on (something I'll explain later) he just chops his enemies down like a peon in a forest. I've seen warriors with almost no life left waste thrall with full life 1 on 1. They just attack so much the thrall can't get a shot in edgewise. Experience is a little less pronounced with Thrall, since they can't defend themselves. But they still attack a lot more frequently, and that alone will win the fight.

¥NEVER turn and run from other warriors if they're right on your heels. They will keep taking swipes at your men's backs, and you can't block shots unless your facing the opponent.

¥If you're sniping with archers always try and hit the warriors and thrall with lots of experience. They'll usually be pretty damaged if they've got so many kills (unless the guy has a Journeyman, a very good idea), and they can be deadly if allowed to engage your melee units. Also, warriors can't block arrows.

¥If you've got a Journeyman, always heal the units with lots of experience first, even if another 'rookie' unit needs it more. The rookie will probably die in battle anyway, but a near-perfect health veteran is a killing machine.

¥Make sure all your warriors have some experience. A warrior with one experience point is a lot better than one with none. If you're archer-herding, let the rookie's get the kills. The guys with tons of experience are already kick ass, and it's better to have your experience spread out over all your men than centralized in one or two.

¥Check out your opponents men. Chances are, he doesn't even know which of his units are experienced and which aren't. Most people just don't care. Find the enemy men with lots of experience and manually put two or more of your guys on them during battle (I discuss why ganging up on units works so well in Myth below). If left to fight 1 on 1, these "professional" units will kill many of your men, but you can take them down pretty quick with a gang up. And your opponent will probably never know what a blow it was that you killed that particular unit.

The Gang Up

In Warcraft 2 putting as many ogres as you could on one single enemy ogre was how you won. Your men would take down that one guy before he could get many shots in, and then move onto the next. Myth archer battles work like this: telling all your archers to fire on one enemy archer works a lot better than letting the computer make them each fire at a single archer. But in Myth melee units, gang-ups are a little different. They work a lot better, actually.

I described earlier how a unit's attacking swing can be interrupted by their enemy. So if you've got two units on one enemy, and they aren't both attacking simultaneously, the enemy will be constantly barraged by attacks. Every time he tries to swing, someone else will hit him first. If you do this right an enemy that's being ganged up on doesn't just do less damage, he does NO damage. Also take into account that a warrior can only block shots from the enemy he's facing, so the guy hitting him from the side or back will get every single shot in. Two thrall can take a warrior of equal experience no problem. Remember, they both do nearly the same amount of damage, and a warrior can't block attacks from his side. So that thrall attacking from the flank is just as good as another warrior.

There are so many missed opportunities for gang ups. Look at films of thrall fights, half the thrall are doing the 'moon walk', just bumping into the thrall in front of them, vainly trying to reach the enemy. Take these loafers and manually have them attack any currently engaged enemy thrall that are accessible. Even on the front lines you'll find some of your men doing nothing, even though they have a bad guy right in front of them, they're "locked on" to someone else, and will keep trying to get to their target until he dies... or they do. Select them and have them attack in a logical manner.