Last Alliance: TW - Riders of the North Update Released! news

This is full version, you don't need previous version to play, but you don't have to remove previous version (e.g. if you want finish your started campaign). Don't run files from different version together!

If you have problems with mod, check firstly Installation Guide, Known bugs list and FAQ, links below.

Mod should be stable, but sometimes isn't. So I suggest to saving game often (and don't replace saves of course).

Rhovanion is a beautiful, but also wild and dangerous land stretching from the Misty Mountains in the west to the Sea of Rhûn in the east. Besides Elves and Dwarves, it is also home of the Northmen, relatives of the Edain who settled this part of the great steppe. However, these people didn't live in peace, as the remnants of Morgoth's servants flooded the north after the War of Wrath and the Easterlings, eager for plunder, prowled the east. However, they found friends among the Durin's Folk who colonized the Iron Hills and among the elves of the Greenwood the Great. From them they learned crafts and the basics of the art of war. They themselves tamed horses, which became their most faithful companions on the battlefield. And even though the Wilderland were many times attacked and plundered by the servants of darkness, the Golden-Haired Riders never laid down their arms and never lost their courage to fight. Let tremble any enemy who hears the sound of their hooves on the Green Steppe!

So another playable culture joins the campaign in the form of the Northmen, the people who formed the Kingdom of Rhovanion and from whom the Rohan, Dale or Dorwinion would later originate. In addition to the new faction and the expanded campaign map, a large number of changes have also been made to the mod, a large part of which focuses on strengthening Mordor and the Orcs of the North.

As always, thanks to Luiza and Jawor for their help with the planning of units, technologies and other elements of the new update ❤️ With this update, their help was especially important, as the number of changes we made was a bit overwhelming. For this reason, I highly recommend that you take a look at the Changelog, where I have tried to list the changes made as detailed as I can. If you like the update and want to support the project check out Patreon and my Ko-fi profile ^^

The Northmen in this time are not yet united under one banner, but divided into many smaller tribes, each under the leadership of their own earl. For a time there was a league formed under the leadership of Éotfolc, which for this reason adopted the rank of duchy. However, after the Easterlings were ousted, the alliance disintegrated and internal disputes arose. Tyra, daughter of Ceadda, the last formal leader of the alliance, has risen to the leadership of Éotfolc, and she faces the task of fortifying Rhovanion and preparing her people for war, for another invasion of darkness is sure to come sooner or later. So here you get the opportunity to build the future Kingdom of Rhovanion.

In addition to the Duchy of Éotfolc, you can also play as the Earldom of Cerenland, which, although it doesn't yet have unique characters, has been given its own faction effects. The Principality of Emyn Engrin (colony of Khazad-Dûm) and the Orcs of Ered Mithrin have also been added to the pool of playable factions.

The Northmen have learned a lot from the dwarves, so that their warriors can get proper equipment. However, they are still primarily herding steppe people, so the basis of their economy is horse breeding and trade with neighboring tribes. So there is no great urbanization here and only a few fort-cities stand on the great steppe, but this helps protect against orc attacks. Any army that marches out from under the Black Gate has to cross a large area before it reaches any settlement. The shepherds can then flee on horseback and the local Marshal has time to rally the warriors. And in the case of an Easterling attack, they are protected by the rivers flowing into the Sea of Rhûn.

Actually, the entire armed force of the Northmen is based on cavalry, from the Frontiersmen, who patrol the borders and hunt for marauders, through the Fyrd, who are equipped by the local villages with horses and light armor to support the Marshal's troops, to the Muster and Company, who form the heart of the army and who, alongside the Marshal, go into battle when the enemy invades the lands of Rhovanion. The infantry here are few in number and their task is primarily to guard the walls of the forts. Sometimes, however, at the Marshal's orders, they leave the walls to support the riders in the field.

In addition to the new units for the Northmen, we have prepared a number of changes to the balance of the existing factions. Also, several unnecessary units have been removed and two new spearmen units have been added for Orcs and Ered Luin. As I mentioned, the Mordor army and the Orcs of the North in particular received balance changes. We came to the conclusion that so far they were too weak and a large part of their units were almost useless. Therefore, most of their units got stat changes. It is possible that we have made them too strong, so please let us know what you think of them.

Besides, the horse archers have been reworked. Horse archers are quite a problematic unit. In the vanilla Shogun they have a useless status and making them a strong unit was problematic. However, in the case of the Northmen, it was necessary to make good units of horse archers and it seems we have achieved this. They are still more difficult to command than the foot archers, but they now have much better options for use on the battlefield. Based on the horse archers we made for the Northmen, we have also updated the stats of the horse archers of the other factions.

Moving on to the changes in the campaign. First of all, the map has been expanded to include East Rhovanion where there are 14 new provinces. The resource pool has been expanded: timber, furs, tea, porcelain and jade have been added (and Mearas have been removed). The first two can be gained from the respective buildings, while the others have been prepared for the updates focusing on eastern Middle-earth (and are partly available at trade points). Silver also finally got its own mine building. Due to the new resources and the buildings for them, some changes have been made to the placement of resources on the campaign map. Several bugs have also been corrected and the visual aspect of the map has been improved.

There have been many changes to the technologies. First of all, the Northmen got their own complex technology tree. Additionally, the technology tree of Mordor and the Orcs of the North (which they used to share) has been removed, and two new trees have been introduced instead, which are more developed and thought out than the previous one. A unique technology tree was also given to Edhellond. Luiza, as always, worked mainly on this part and in future updates she wants to do a technology rework for other factions as well.

There have been a lot of changes to the starting situations of Mordor and Orcs. We were aware that the threat from them had been diminishing in recent updates (a bit due to the number of new 'good' factions, and a bit due to the mistakes we made for them), so in this update we have tried to make them stronger. The stats of buildings such as Slave Markets have also been improved.

Besides that, we have made some improvements for the AI. Mordor and Orcs should act more sensibly and create better armies. We've also made a push for them to pursue alliances rather than wars between each other (it's hard to say how much this works). I've also started testing army composition settings (so far all factions have used the default Shogun settings) - you can see the effect in the case of the Northmen. The auto-resolve has been improved - it used to horribly favor archers, now this has been significantly reduced.

And I think that is all for now ^^' As I said - you'll find a more detailed list of changes in the Changelog. I hope you'll have fun playing Northmen ^^ Meanwhile, figuring out how to add new walls to the game is waiting for us, because in the next update - Under Siege I want to introduce custom siege maps for (most probably) Númenor.

EDIT 26.11.22: Due to technical problems (I described them on our Discord server), the Under Siege update is on hold. Work on it will continue in free time, and instead we're focusing on the v0.4.1 Remnants of Dor Daedeloth update.