Middle-Earth campaign map?

[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 :)