Hopping - getting started
Make sure you understand how units pop out of buildings before you read these. Hopping of any kind is based off of it.

'Hopping' in Warcraft 2 can be defined as any unit that appears in a position that is not immediate to it's respected building. That is, if a unit being built from a surrounded structure, the unit will have to 'hop' over the surrounding buildings or units, in order to appear in the playing field. You have probably done this without even thinking twice. Whenever you build a wall to free a trapped peon, you are actually doing a peon hop. Sometimes when you are forced to build in tight quarters, a wall will actually pop a peon 5 or 6 squares away from where he originally started. This introductory page will seem a little simple, but I just want you to have a basic understanding of how hopping works before you move on.

As you know, anything that is produced from a building will appear from the top left of the structure. If that position is blocked the unit looks for the closest spot that is available in a counter-clockwise direction.

Where will the next grunt appear?

The new grunt hops over the originals.

It is actually very easy to predict ahead of time where the new unit will appear. In the above picture, the grunts occupy every immediate square around the barracks. When any building, has no access to a position next to it, the structure will act like a building that is one size larger. The barracks is a 3x3 building, but because the grunts block those spaces, the barracks acts like a 5x5 building. If you could actually build a barracks that was 5x5 in size, the units would still appear in the same counter-clockwise sequence as any other sized building. In the second picture, I drew a box around the grunts that represents a 5x5 buiding. You can see that the grunt appeared in the first possible position because it was not blocked. Here is an even bigger example.

This hall is blocked 2 squares wide on each side.

The peon appears as if it was built from a 8x8 hall.

Again, because this hall is surrounded, you can think of an imaginary square that is drawn around the farms. The hall acts like a building that is 8x8 in size. The peon built from the hall, appears in the first position of this '8x8' building. These are probably seeming a little trivial by now, but I want you to understand this before I move on. Hopping quickly in an in-game situation can become very complicated as you will see in the following pages.

Strategy - Main | Top | Forward (Water Hopping)