I went through the human campaign a few years ago (but I remember very little about it) so I’m doing the orcs this time!
I definitely agree that it takes ages to get up and running – I wondered if it was just me, but chopping lumber in particular seems to take an enormous amount of time until you have a small army of workers. And in the orc campaign, it seems like you often start off using more food than you’re actually growing, so you have to spend your first resources on about four farms before you can really get started.
Comparisons to Command and Conquer are definitely inevitable – something I was surprised by in C&C was that it had a lot of varied missions beyond “destroy the enemy base”, like the one where due to budget constraints you have to clear the area using a bunch of mouldy old tanks and a repair bay. Warcraft’s missions, despite having slight variations like “destroy the castle and get to this rune stone”, seem to be fairly repetitive like Pix says. Once you’ve got your armada sorted out there’s little the enemy does to stop you beyond throw its starting units at you.
It’s interesting that “fog of war” is an option in the preferences, rather than a cheat code! I prefer to play with it off, C&C-style, but I imagine the game would be very different with it on – usually, I spend a while at the start of the mission flying a scout around to reveal most of the map, but that wouldn’t be as useful with the fog turned on.
