Any interest in a Third Age Total War hotseat?

[Zim]

Welcome deguerra and Rougeman! Of course there's room for more.

We'll likely be doing something similar to the CoG win conditions. I'll have it together in a new thread for the game within a day or so. In the meantime faction selection is open.

[Thanatos Eclipse]

I guess I'll go for Rhun :)

[deguerra]

Well. Isengard for me, unless someone else is very keen on Saruman.

[Nightbringer]

I'll wait and see what others have picked them just in to try to feel a gap that seems needed. Just as long as I don't have to play dwarves, they have just never really been my style. Way too slow.

[CROPrasec]

I don't know yet..but i'll go with rohan or gondor ;)

[Zim]

Before he left I checked with Myth and he wanted to take one of the Elven factions.

I've actually had some success with Human factions on Huge unit size so I'm going to drop my request to save one of the Elf factions and just fill any gap that seems to be showing up (just please don't let it be a 200+ per basic unit Orc faction ).

I apologize for any delays. Getting back into the swing of things at work since my vacation has been challenging. Turns out I missed some training while away. After tonight my weekend starts and things clear up. We should be able to start pretty much immediately after faction selection finishes, and I'll get the main thread for the game with finalized rules set up.

[Rougeman]

ill take eriador please

[Nightbringer]

ok, I'm taking Mordor!
:)

[Myth]

I might change my mind depending on the victory conditions but for now dibs on the High Elves.

[Zim]

Alright 3 vs 3 so far. I guess this puts me on team good. If noone else takes them (Loosecannon?) I'll fill in the other half of the Rohan/Gondor pair so I can be on the front lines while the Elves and a recreated Arnor build up massive empires to wipe out Mordor (of course, Rhun will be doing the same in their corner...). Do you have a preference between the two, CROPrasec?

I've got family stuff coming up, but then I'm free for my weekend. Except a final thread for the game and first save shortly after.

Victory conditions will be some variation on points for capturing and holding key provinces on each side. It would actually be a little simpler than in Clash of Gods. For team evil, for example, win requirements might be to capture and hold for 10+ turns Eriador/Arnor's capital, Edoras, Imladris, and Minas Tirith. For team good it would be Mordor's capital, Rhun's and Isengard. All three would need to be held at the same time for victory to be declared, but the ten turn requirement only has to be fulfilled once (so if Rhun takes Imladris and holds it ten turns then loses it, if they recapture the city it immediately counts towards victory conditions, rather than needing to hold it a new 10 turns.

Too easy? Too hard? Too simple?

[Myth]

Seems fine on writing, though I'd have to look at the actual map to judge the distances.

[CROPrasec]

hmm tough call..ok..i'll take rohan then

[Myth]

BTW can a rule for forced lead battles be employed? There is a warning scren when a campaign has been started, warning against AR. The Elves on paper will probably lose to some lowly orcs but in a lead battle things might be different. It would suck to have the stupid M2TW autocalc screw over great army compositions - imagine I've stacked Imladris with 10 units of HE archers and 10 units of the spearmen that have 21 defense. Assaulting the walls when stacked like that would prove difficult even for 6000-8000 orcs. Especially if I have stone walls.

But 8000 orcs in autocalc (two decent stacks) will win hands down vs the poor 121 men elven ranged units. Can autocalc be disabled (greyed out) similar to ead battles?

[Zim]

Looks like Gondor for me (unless LooseCannon wants them).

As far as distance of capitals Isengard is "easy" for good factions (in terms of being close), Imladris is close if we have an OotMM player (they're regarded as tough to play, though), Rhun and Eriador's capitals are far off from the fronts, everyone else is kind of mediumish (Edoras loses points as a common first Mordor "crusade" target, though).

Autocalc can't be greyed out but I was planning on requiring battles to be fought (with "reasonable" exceptions, like that full stack versus that single horse archer unit).

[Nightbringer]

AI attacks and sallies might be a bit of a suprise result though, so we will have to watch out for that.

[LooseCannon1]

I guess I'll take Harad. From looking over the game, it seems you can't convert cities to castles and vice-versa and the fun units only come from the larger settlements? And that growth will be very slow? So that basically we'll be playing early era SS with those funky LOTR themes. (Fantasy is about the only type of speculative fiction that I really can't stand.) It'll take forever to get those Mastodon-type beasts.

[deguerra]

In vanilla TATW, medium tier units are restricted until turn 30, and high tier until turn 60. Zim has a way around this that he mentioned though, which will be good, because for a hotseat that is just too large a commitment. If you don't really like fantasy, Harad is a good choice. Their units are almost all human and of a realistic variety (plus have very pretty skins), and they mostly tend to fight Gondor, who are the same.

That said, I'd recommend "getting into" the setting as much as you can, IMO it tends to make hotseats more fun. But to each their own of course. I'm an unashamed LOTR fanboy :D

[Myth]

Fantasy is by far the best speculative fiction in existence. It is limited only by the imagination of the author and his/her readers.

[CROPrasec]

I believe that all players have their faction...so we're ready to start :) ??

[Zim]

Yep. Got a working save and am writing up the OP for our main game thread right now.

[Myth]

Zim take a look at this massive submod. It includes a lot of stuff. Especially this thing. "On the first turn, you will be asked if you want to wait for the barracks events to unlock the advanced units. If you choose no, then all units will be available to you as long as you build sufficiently advanced barracks (thanks to TNZ for code)."

[deguerra]

MOS is a great submod. I believe we've already resolved the barracks event issues. I would love, on the one hand, to use a submod. On the other hand, MOS is about 1.5GB of extra downloads, which is quite a lot, and (at least in theory) has the potential for more compatibility issues.

[Zim]

Do we want all of the stuff that comes with mod? I can't see whether it's compatible with hotseat games and the RPG Missions, for example, could be an issue if they're heavily scripted.

[deguerra]

There is that as well. As I said, while I do like submods (and MOS especially), I'm not certain it will work with hotseats very well. Perhaps let's just go with vanilla TATW for now, and if it works out well we can always try MOS later.

[CROPrasec]

Yes...lets just play

[slysnake]

Which factions are left? I singed up earlier but didn't pick a faction ^^

[Zim]

Sylvan Elves, Dwarves, and Dale on the good side. I can also switch out from Gondor.

[LooseCannon1]

Do we want all of the stuff that comes with mod? I can't see whether it's compatible with hotseat games and the RPG Missions, for example, could be an issue if they're heavily scripted.

It turns out that scripted stuff doesn't work very well in hotseats. Esp. if they are console commands. Please see the link for the discussion.http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...4#post10198034 I think more work needs to be done on this issue but for now we should just play.

[slysnake]

Does that mean I can take Sylvan Elves then?

[Zim]

Of course.