What is the oldest PC game you still play?

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Really? How so? I remember playing LOTR II a lot back in the day.

You mean, how is the Amiga version of LOTRII better than the PC version?

The Amiga version clearly benefited from its PC predecessors. First of all, the Amiga version is a LOT prettier (though not up to the standard of modern PC games of course).

Secondly, when I finally got around to the PC version, I was really annoyed at the very clumsy method of assigning peasants to different jobs. You have this little window filled with sprites in fields and you have to "rope" the sprites by drawing a square around them with the mouse and then dropping them on a different field. It's finicky, and you can never tell exactly how many sprites you picked up until you actually drop them somewhere else, meaning often multiple trips back and forth before you get the assignment just the way you want it. And because it's such an important part of the game, this aspect quickly becomes really tedius.

With the Amiga version, ALL your peasant assignments are simply done with sliders. Not only is it instant, but you can always see exactly what you're doing and how many peasants are assigned to what. Makes a huge difference to gameplay.

Third, with the PC version you just get a bunch of "pre-digested" castles to build. In the Amiga version, you can design every aspect of your castle, and go on redesigning and/or upgrading your castle right throughout the game. It's a fun part of the game, and quite an important part of strategy. For instance, you can add more grain warehouses to a castle, meaning the troops in it can hold out longer. Every addition to a castle obviously costs money and resources, though.

Fourth, the combat system is more fun and better balanced. For example, your soldiers (except the peasants) maintain a formation, even in combat. And the better the soldier type the more disciplined they are. In the PC version, they are all basically just a rabble.

Fifth, the gameplay seems to be better balanced in every aspect. I find the Amiga version just plain more exciting and challenging to play.

To give you just one example that occurs to me as I write, in the PC version you have virtually this constant stream of trader wagons visiting your provinces. So a province is almost never without access to any goodies it needs from the traders.

In the Amiga version, traders only come around once a year at most and even then they sometimes they don't get to every province. The end result is that you can be really hanging out for a trader wagon to come around so you can sell your wool for vital cash, get that critical happy boost from beer, or buy that much needed extra grain, and so on.

Also, in the Amiga version traders don't carry every type of good all the time. So even if a trader comes around, he may not have the item or items you need.

Same thing with mercenaries. In the PC version, they wander around from province to province so you always have the opportunity to pick some up. In the Amiga version, they only appear in a handful of port provinces so if you haven't conquered one of those provinces, tough cookies.

Probably the only aspect of the Amiga version that might be considered not as good as the PC version is that castle assaults are more abstracted. You have this funny little system where you assign soldiers to different activities in different parts of the castle, like you might assign some to filling in the moat by the east wall, while you assign others to bombard the eastern towers with catapults. At the end of every turn, you are just told how many soldiers got killed during these little actions and how many of the enemy etc.

But again, it's a very carefully balanced subgame and quite fun to play. I actually prefer it to the rather simple and chaotic RTS style castle battles in the PC version. You have to plan your castle taking strategy in the Amiga version, and it usually takes you several turns to implement it, with soldiers on both sides getting killed each step of the way and refinements to your strategy or suspension of proceedings sometimes necessary. So even though the combat itself is abstracted, it's made up for by the extra strategy you have to employ.

I'd like to post you some screenshots of the Amiga version but unfortunately as I said my 'miggy is out of order right now...