Been pondering this since 2002 actually. The taxing of gold for larger armies has always puzzled me. I’ve actually seen better players stomping my noob butt quite efficiently while avoiding the upkeep. Seems like a huge waste of gold. Seems likes low apm players like me are not good enough to avoid the upkeep. What do you guys think about the upkeep? Are you avoiding it on purpose while trying to make up for the smaller army with better micro and superior units? Please educate me on the subject.
Yes. Avoid upkeep.
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A socialist agenda.
/s
I think upkeep + expensive units + low food max were made to limit the maximum number of units to focus on micro and ‘smaller’ battles compared to Starcraft where you have none of these 3 aspects and you have bigger macro, weaker units, and bigger armies.
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The Higher Upkeep you have the more tax penalty you get. so you get less gold per peon etc.
Yes I understand that. But how to pros get around it?
They stay in lower upkeep unless they’re forced to or want to perform some sort of aggression.
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You have better watch streamers (first of all Grubby) and ask questions… chat is helpful too 
Ideally you want to stay at no upkeep as long as you possibly can to avoid losing the game.
Pros usually start breaking the point of 51+ by incresing production when they are planning aggression and fight (it mean they will lose some units and get low in terms of supply and no upkeep again, but reinforcement will come).
If you have an expansion in midgame, you can afford to stay at low upkeep, you will still have a lot of resources. In that case, pros balance to 79-80 supply to still stay lower than high upkeep, breaking it again before fights and so on (the same rule).
And sometimes in ultra late game on some maps, players can have 3 bases and break even high upkeep, but usually they still want to stay below 81 as long as possible, tax is too high.
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Upkeep comes with management…
Manage: If you can micro-manage your units efficiently/strategically, chances are you’ll win. Since huge armies are harder to control (body blocking, time, effort), most people stick to small armies and play the attrition war.
Attrition: Upkeep gives you less income, so if you lose a unit you’re at a disadvantage, as everyone states above. So you need to focus on winning against the attrition, deplete the enemy’s resource from units/building more than you depleting yourself 30-60% income.
Units: Once the enemy sees your army composition, they can counter your army, as you’re already no longer able to change your style. The enemy can easily just create counter units, through counter plays from defense and distractions.
Quality over quantity. Unless you can manage a huge army efficiently, it’s better to focus on powering your hero which can decimate units.
While having 2 gold mines its the real time for increasing upkeep.
Mechanic implemented due to technical limitations and concerns that’s kind of become mainline gameplay. You shift into the higher upkeeps if you’re gearing up for a fight and don’t see yourself needing the gold for a little while.
Upkeep is to help limit steamrolling by giving the underdog player a resource income advantage which can translate into more troops per minute that the top-dog player. This problem is best seen in StarCraft II.
Fundamentally StarCraft II is a battle of resources. With perfect build orders resource gain rate is well determined and near identical between players. As such one wins the game by losing significantly less resource value of troops than the opponents.
If a Zerg player pulls a decisive play such as some perfect Baneling hits against a Terran bio ball then there is nothing the Terran opponent player can do to recover since by the time they build an army of Y amount of resources, the Zerg player will have an army of X + Y where X was the value of army they had left over from after making their play. Since more value of troops deal more DPS they will kill more value of troops per unit time. This causes the less valuable army to last shorter which in turn means they can deal less value of units in damage resulting in larger value army player having more value of units left over. The end result is an unrecoverable steamroll, only limited by the 200 supply cap.
Warcraft III prevents this by penalizing resource income when a player controls a large army. If a Human player lands a lucky hit of Blizzard/Flamestrike on an Orc player killing most of their army, the Orc player is not out the game yet. The human player now has more value of troops, however he is either limited to very few of them (no tax level) or has to take a resource income penalty (past tax level). If they do not take the resource penalty then their army is limited to such a small resource size that they will end up hoarding resources while the enemy quickly rebuilds a similar sized army. If they do take the resource income penalty then their army growth rate slows drastically minimizing the army value advantage they can get on their enemy.
This allows Warcraft III matches to not be decided by a single early play. Instead they are decided by the long play of either running out of resources or inflicting enough damage to the enemy resource income.
Upkeep was designed becaused the original devs thought that maxed armies would be too taxing on the systems at the time. This turnd out not to be the case, as Warcraft 3 graphics were already outdated when it released.
It stuck around, and was changed in the expansion, being excused by the community because the game is Hero based, and no Upkeep would shift the focus of the game towards large armies and mass expansions.
Personally, I would love for the Upkeep system to go away, as it would break certain Hero units that are always first picked, massively, and force the game to play more like a RTS.
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Since this game is heavily based around Hero levels, the Upkeep system actually hurts the underdog more than it helps.
What role? What role does it have in your opinion. It adds some more possibilities and decision making, rather than spamming the recruit button and racing to who has the bigger army. Yes it’s something that belongs to decent+ players, no noobs allowed.
Also, upkeep being a tax, the peon actually collects 10 gold from the mine but you only receive 7 or 4. Which means that the gold mine will deplete as fast as the player in front of you having a no upkeep army. So going high upkeep is a commitment to ending the game before this happens.
One thing that can be done is bank lots of money, then stop mining, get that pop up, and go back to mining once pop is lower. Pros and cons.
If I understand correctly it also helps discourage turtling, as sitting in your base with a large army will mean you get very little income and cannot hold an expansion to offset the upkeep. A more aggresive player can take expansions and win a war of attrition even against a player with a tactical defensive advantage.
Either their enemy keeps a small army or they have superior resource income to them when at a lower upkeep level. I do not understand how this would hurt them because of heroes.
The expansion mechanic itself, as well as finite gold in a mine and hero levels from creeping all help to discourage turtling too, but I think upkeep does play a part.
Better micro with fewer units and using items to keep them alive rather than break upkeep and try to overwhelm the opponent with pure numbers.
Factor that with every unit death providing EXP, and you start to understand why a numbers limit is put in place. Its so that all fights are optimally geared between army clashes rather than macro RTS strategies. Games like SC prpmote strategies like split attacks on different bases and avoiding any direct fights with the enemy armies. Most of the action in those games involves hitting your enemys resource line and defending expansions and territory. WC3 focuses on having an army with your hero and making big sieges, with the occasional solo hero harass to keep the opponent on their toes.