Introduction
Well, well! I managed to make a large amount of progress in making the Easterlings their own faction in the plain old-fashioned Battle for Middle-earth games. In addition, these fictional human super-soldiers from Lord of the Rings shall take up half the Dol Guldur faction in Age of the Ring. The idea of the latter is to expand Dol Guldur into "The Dark East" and have Dol Guldur and The Easterlings as the two factions you must choose one of before doing any gameplay.
Anyway, here are some insights into what I have accomplished, art-wise. Keep in mind, these are all screencaps of them in Blender 2.93 with version 0.6.8 of the Westwood 3d plugin, courtesy of OpenSAGE.
Buildings
(so far, so WIP)
This is the Fortress Citadel as it starts off in just plain Battle for Middle-earth II. My Easterling Citadel for Age of the Ring and for just plain Battle for Middle-earth 1 will look very different from this, indeed.
A much simpler building, and rightly so, for this second building is the Easterling Dairy Mill, which provides milk, cream, butter, cheese, yogurt, and eggs as resources while adding 50 points to your command limit. That's a limit to how many troops you can have in-game, and this extra 50 points for every new resource building built only happens in the second Battle for Middle-earth game. Yes, this is the basic resource building. In my Age of the Ring Sub-Mod, the Dairy Mill is the resource building you get to utilize if you set up a game wherein you play as "The Dark East" and choose "The Easterlings" when given the choice between either that or "Dol Guldur".
Ah, yes... the Red Viper Dojo, the basic unit-training structure for the Easterlings. At all levels, 1 through 3, this structure can train Prairie Nomad Elders, who can summon Prairie Nomad Warriors, Spearmen, Bowmen on foot, and Bowmen on horses. At level 2, this building gets that roof over the door and the ability to train Red Viper swordsmen and pikemen.
Nomad units (WIP)
Yes, I made the Prairie Nomad Elder's facial hair way too bright, But this will not be the case in the actual release of this new playable faction. Before I continue with these Nomads, the reason I title them "Prairie Nomads" is because, if I recall correctly, the Easterling homeland of Rhun consists of prairies, based on the ecosystems of the real-life countries that Rhun is a parallel of. Many of the places that Tolkien said on record he looked to for inspiration are prairies in real life.
Don't worry, swords will not be the only single-handed up-close weapons dual-wielded by Nomad Dual-Wielders like this one. Others will dual-wield hammers, maxes, even battle-axes. These early-game, swarming units come in squads of 20 when summoned by the Nomad Elder.
Oh, him? Yes. he is one of the Nomad Spearmen, who also show up as a squad of 20 when summoned.
Red Viper Legion (75% finished)
I will confess, all of these unit models are Kitbash models mixing Custom Hero meshes with newly added meshes I used Blender's "Add Mesh" feature to get. Oh, and there's a plain Battle for Middle-earth Easterling headscarf and a vertically shrunken Custom-hero Wizard cloak, too! Just the shield and the groin-guard are New Meshes, here.
What's the model of, though? It's of a Red Viper Pikeman, one of the middle-game, smarter-fighting corps within the Easterling faction, the other being the Variags of Khand, which Age of the Ring already made a very cool design for, seen here. So it's only plain, old-fashioned Battle for Middle-earths 1 and 2 I need to make my own Variag design for.
While I may have said way too much not about the Red Viper Legion in the pikeman display above, I will say all I need to here in the swordsman display. As with the Red Viper Pikemen, so too are their sword-and-shield counterparts unlocked by upgrading a Red Viper Dojo to Rank 2.
Red Viper Bowmen, like this one, get unlocked by upgrading a Red Viper Dojo to Rank 3, just like their counterparts on armored horses, the Red Viper Kataphrakts. As you can tell, the bow and arrow are original meshes with shapes and textures inspired by the Dwemer bow and Dwemer arrows Skyrim and Oblivion, respectively.
And the quiver is based on the Dwemer quivers of Oblivion, too!
What's Next? (conclusion)
More progress to be made is next! As for what that will be, I will decide that and make reportage of it to my YouTube Channel, too! So thanks for reading all of this!
--KylePerkino aka "Emperor of the East"--
