For those of you who constantly scour the internet looking for answers as to why you are not as good as ellite players and trying to find the ellites' strategy, please take some time an read through my thoughts.

There is no one ultimate strategy that uber players use to attain victory time and time again. Players post all the time on boards on how they came up with a new strategy, and the body of the post usually goes like this "Be x build y units". Ellite players do not follow any template as to unit production. What i have seen from topped ranked players is the following.

1) they never mass anything, there is always a mix of melee ranged casters and air. 2) they never get just one hero. 3) they creep early and often 4) they research upgrades. usually the ranged units' attack upgrade and the melee units's armor upgrade 5) They build a shop and use it! 6) They go for an expansion as soon as they hit low upkeep and a third when they hit high upkeep. 7) They attack then run, attack then run, attack then run ... etc 8) Micro elements are all there: they use items, cast spells, focus fire, 9) They scout. Why don't they mass units? A mixed army is stronger than an army of all one unit. PERIOD.

Why do always go for three heros? Heros are the most powerful unit. Get a new one as soon as you ungrade to the next tier.

Why do they creep, so early? What if they get rushed? Creeping gives you exp. and items. If they do get rushed then they will come back to defend their town with a higher level hero with an item. Each Races base has some form of defence use it build it early!

Why upgrade armor/ attack? Stonger units. Your focus of a game should not be to get more than the other or to just win? The whole time you should be thinking how can I make better units? By upgrading just melees armor and just ranged attack you get a stronger meat sheild with a strong attack that can just sit back and focus fire away to do most of the dmg.

Why use shops? think about it. A scroll of healing can heal half the hp on a army of 20 footies or so. that is like getting an extra 10 footies for only 150 gold!! Use shops Use items, to your advantage.

Why expand? and when? Losing 3 gold for for each 10 gold mined is like lossing 150 gold per minute. Having 14 gold per tick is like gaining 200 gold per minute so if two players are in low upkeep and one has one mine and the other has two mines in one minute the one with 2 exp will have 350 more gold then then the other guy! That is two extra units! or extra items!

Why hit and run? It works! if you manage to take out one farm by the time the tp back and then run away without losing any units you have done 2 things. One Forced them to build another farm and 2 make them use a tp, so they will have to buy another or it will take them longer to get back to base the next time you attack! This is huge. Run into there base kill some peons run out. Little damge over and over again adds up and disrupts them from creeping.

Micro?? what??? Micro is not hard. A good plan is to have a hero and melee be a group one, ranged and another hero as group 2 and have the third hero and Air be group 3 and casters group 4. Use items as soon as a battle begins, wait mid battle to use healing ones though. Set any spells that can be autocasted to do so before battle. To focus fire hold shift then right click on the hero, then other units. You will automatically focus fire on the hero untill dead then they will automatically move on to the next. Hot key your base so you know what two buttons to push in battle to make more units and have rally points set to heros.

Why scout? Scouting can lead to an automatic victory. If you scout then you can see what kind of defense they have and weather or not they are teching. 9 time out of 10 if they are teching, you will win becaus you scoutted saw them teching and then attacked them. Plus you can see if they are dumb and massed one unit, you can start building the counter unit.

Practice Practice Practice. The more you practice the better you get. If you are a RT player try playing a bunch of solo games. The more you solo the less you have to really on haveing good teamates. I played 20 solo games and had a 8 -12 solo record then started a new acount and played 20 RT games and I was 16-4. Solo play really helps you learn.

Well I hope you gainned something from reading this. Oh i forgot the most important thing: It's a game just have fun ^_^