Middle-Earth campaign map?

[Leith]

Hello, Stazi! I'm very interested in what you're doing. I am willing to help if needed but only after I'm done with my mod, which should be released in a little while. Meanwhile let me make the following comments:

1-The Rohan faction needs serious overhaul because its main strength, cavalrymen, die easily even to the lowly spear-armed goblins.
A- Solution: Increase the number of men from 40 to 60 or 80, whichever proves more effective through playtesting.
B- Solution: Decrease the anti-cavalry bonus that spear and pike-armed units have.
c- Solution: Create more infantry units for Rohan, especially an Axe or spear-armed unit (probably both) capable of holding the line while cavalrymen flank or charge from behind. Currently, the Rohan horsemen are supposed to break enemy formations headon, which they cannot do.

[Stazi]

Thanks for your offer. Let me know when you'll be ready.
And yes, you're right. Whole unit rooster needs to be tested. IMO Rohan should be like Golden Horde - 80% cavalry of all types: light, heavy,horse archers, javelineers. Infantry - only swordsmen/axemen and archers.

We are currently working on the new tech tree and campaign map pieces. As Raz said, the original tech tree was pretty boring - same buildings for all factions.
Some ideas being discussed:

• changing the factions' recruitment zones from provinces oriented to buildings oriented. Every faction has unique units' rooster. If a faction will be pushed away from their lands, this faction won't be able to build new units. I think, units should be restricted only by "faction association" and "building requirements" columns and these buildings should available everywhere around the map (at least for standard units).
  
  
• unique castles' strategic map icons. METW team made only 6 slightly different castle icons (3 good, 3 evil). We'd like to make one castle upgrades "line" for each faction. The problem is - when we make each castle line restricted to only one faction, it will be totally destroyed when province will be conquered by other faction. Building a castle from the ground every time a province changes the owner... it's not a good idea.
  The other idea is to give 3 levels of the same castle to each faction so we can have 5 factions with their own castles. There are 8 factions now so for example all 4 evil factions will have to share the same castle design.
  
  
• What you think of making a one man, kensai style, elite units for known heroes? It should be interesting to see Aragorn or Elrond fighting Nazgul.

If you know other solutions for the first two points, please, leave a comment.

[gollum]

Hello stazi,
regarding unit dependency, i would certainly make them building dependent only. It's an interesting idea to have unique tech trees for each faction, and so have to build your own infrastructure in every province to make it worthwhile in terms of recruitment to have troops from there.

As you say, i'd avoid teh area of recruitment system. It does not work well in TW because the AI is not aware of it, and that is made only worse by the fact that domination is the usual goal. I tried it for modding the medieval game, and the AI was hopeless with it. That was made worse and worse if you took its logic to the extreme.

So sticking to unique tech trees and building dependencies only is the best imo. I personally would avoid the unique tech trees because that means testing all factions with dufferent tech trees and tweak the dependencies to work - and that would be far far more difficult and time consuming with unique tech trees, even if they are culturally unique (ie you have 3-4). But its your mod and up to you - just wanted to make the point for your benefit. As a player of course, i'd love unique tech trees :)

[huth]

1-The Rohan faction needs serious overhaul because its main strength, cavalrymen, die easily even to the lowly spear-armed goblins.
A- Solution: Increase the number of men from 40 to 60 or 80, whichever proves more effective through playtesting.
B- Solution: Decrease the anti-cavalry bonus that spear and pike-armed units have.
c- Solution: Create more infantry units for Rohan, especially an Axe or spear-armed unit (probably both) capable of holding the line while cavalrymen flank or charge from behind. Currently, the Rohan horsemen are supposed to break enemy formations headon, which they cannot do.

I'm thinking A and B solutions are good. A, because as Rohan based mainly on cavalry, these units should be larger than in armies based on infantry. B - once I modded unit_prod for my campaign making cavalry stronger not by giving better stats, but by decreasing anti-cav bonus for all units other than cav, mostly to negative values. Of course it was very significant change, at last low-tier spearmen didn't hold like supermen against better cav...

[Dol Guldur]

Looks interesting. I've recently got the old metw files for RTW:BI up on TWC if they are of any use (they are open source now), but I have no knowledge as to whether the original metw files for mtw still exist. I'll ask Burns if I see him online. Encaitar disappeared some time ago...

FATW will be listing other Middle-earth mods on its site, so if you have a beta out this year I'll gladly include a link to it.

Best of luck!

[Stazi]

Thanks for your interest. I'll be very grateful if you add link to the RTW version of ME mod. I've tried to search but I found only early 0.7 beta. We can surely use some of the buildings' and units' descriptions, icons, banners, etc. Even info pics can be made from ingame units' screenshots.
I'll be even more grateful if you find someone who has the latest ME:TW files for MTW/VI. All I found is 0.71a version with beta campaign add-on.

I'll surely contact you when we'll have a beta ready. We've started few weeks ago so don't expect anything soon.

[Dol Guldur]

Sure, the RTW/BI version is on the TWC Repository here:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=355

I don't see Burns online much (as I'm not online), but I'll ask him if I do or point him to this thread. I think there is little chance there'll be files beyond what you have though.

[Aradan]

Very very interesting! If I wasn't already engaged in a (similar) project, I'd definitely help. For now, I'll just wish you good luck and hope you stick with it.

[drone]

A potential idea would be to use the ship range trick VI uses to allow Valinor to be on the map. More suited to a Silmarillion-era campaign, a way to allow the Eldar to have a play.

I love the maps, btw.