Comments - aidenpons

This was a great read XD

Unfortunately no, things were more difficult than I thought. The good news is that I have still sloooooowly managed to do things :D

Get the game to actually run first. Check out this: Moddb.com

Chances are you haven't applied the no-cd fix

Expect v0.3 soon (tm) - a general balance patch, fixing some general silliness (looking at you, Huorns and Last Alliance), adding cool stuff (Lightbearer self-shielding spell), and generally another instalment.

ETA this year :P

nah, not off the bat, you'll need to do some serious fiddly to get it to work

Your TOME review:

I like the wargs, but they would even be better as warg riders. And some soundbytes for them would be nice.
> Isengard gets Warg Riders! Whether or not they show up in the scenario editor is another matter... a lot of things for some reason have Hidden :S

A 'Heroes' overhaul? It would be nice to have all our favorite heroes and villains with behemoth stats.
> Yup, trainable at the wonder! By "behemoth" I mean... well... just play Dol Guldur or Angmar and you'll find out :P They're absolutely broken at the moment because you can train as many as you like... 1000+ HP 100+ damage Balrogs are the most broken thing in the game right now (for only 50g too :P)

Is there anyway to replace the villagers sprite for certain civilizations? It would be pretty neat to have 'orc workers' or at least 'slaves' for the evil civs.
> a valid point!

sure, catapult and ballista towers are nice... But... Nothing is as awesome as a trebuchet tower.
> Field Trebuchets! Most civs can get them - it's an upgrade from the Siege Workshop, so that might be why you missed it. They also might be hiding under Units in the Scenario Editor.

I think a grey-colored cliff to go along with the brown would be really nice.
> Game only supports one graphical cliff :(

Foot-Nazgul? I was kinda hoping there would be a mounted version *and* a foot-version.
> Editor shenanigans aside, Minas Morgul gets both foot and mounted Nazgul. They're both absolutely terrible (due to lack of balance :P), but they're there.

Spamming hordes of Balrogs and Winged Nazgul is fun :D

Standard AI is pretty terrible, although it seems to work (barely?) - the "AI" that was tossed around on HeavenGames is much better.

no HD edition yet

IT'S HAPPENING

"-with how strong balrogs and ents are compared to your heroes, they may as well be made infinite duration"
Huh? I don't get it. Balrogs and ents are much stronger, or about the same, as heroes? :S
Infinite duration seems a little... odd. I've considered allowing the AI to train them though (it's possible to allow the AI to train a unit that you can't).

-possibly try make fortresses be able to spawn workers (for balance). Many times my ally lost his goblin hovel and couldnt create more workers whereas a stronghold on the good side would be able to defend itself and can keep pumping out workers

Nah, it's not possible to get the AI to do this. Each unit can only be trained (according to the AI) from ONE building. If I make them trainable from the FOM, the AI will not train them from the Hovel. (The player can do both, but not the AI).

That said, I could just get the game to start with a Lvl 1 FOM instead of a Hovel.... but that feels a little out of kilter from the original game. Still not a bad idea though :P

Strongolds need a bit of abusing, but they're definitely killable. Usually what happens is you summon a Balrog/Ent next to the FOM/Stronghold and let THAT tank fire, then send all your units in. However, I haven't extensively tested beating up Good Side Strongholds with Evil Units, so that feedback is useful.

If you're the Good Side, you can just catapult blast it into oblivion, which requires usually the same fate as an Ent.
Evil Side, you can throw down an Obelisk and throw Eyes of Sauron (which stack up to ten BTW) on all your ranged units (or Balrog as well, cause it's a heal + armor bonus + 20% attack bonus, so you get some pretty scary stats when you've stacked it :P)

Strongholds are so powerful to deter just rushing in their and slaughtering all their villagers. ESPECIALLY with buffed heroes, you can more or less just run in, use Gimli to steal a tower / Grisnkah to torch one, get Saleme to use multihit blades to kill all their vils, use Legolas to Trueshot any spare Slavemasters they might have, and generally hero-bash the place.

Strongholds are definitely killable and I can go into more detail on the strategies I use from both sides (will send you in PM)...

Because I cannot get the AI to build more towers, and I cannot put towers on all buildings lest it breaks, the AI is absolutely atrocious at defending its base. In a classic 1v1, wait for them to slaughter their invasion on your towers then send all your units in to a more or less undefended base.

See, one more tower arrow is more or less neglegible. You can ignore the FOM and trash their Hovel and their vils. Do that and you can pick up the pieces later; you don't even need to smash the rest of their base. If I were to make it the equivalent of 3 Ballista Towers, I'd still probably ignore it because of its insane HP in favour of just smashing their Hovel.

.... that being said, with Good side you can't 'smash their hovel' because their vil train point IS their Stronghold...

.... Hmm, I will experiment with giving them a major nerf. In the meantime, lemme knock up a quick reload time reduction that should drastically lower their damage.
Dropbox.com
Shove BuildingDefenses.lqr in your Database folder. It's a slightly-lower-than-half fire rate for all Stronghold defenses (bar the FOM Stun Poison, which I quite like :P)

Hmmm... regarding your broken crashiness, you did remember to keep the f on the end of the number? That essentially tells the game that it's a decimal*. Without it I suspect everything will go pear-shaped.

* strictly speaking, that it's 'floating point;' can be decimal. As seen elsewhere, such as SpellAndEventAndActions, the game also has Long (big number that is NOT decimal), Integer (rarely IIRC), and Boolean (on/off)

oh and have a shameless plug for my levels pack:
Moddb.com

YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND (okay it's not that bad :p )
Moddb.com

Low -> 8000
Medium -> 15000
High -> 45000 (= for all intents and purposes, infinite)

I have thought about resources yes. I've noticed some things:
- This mod must be played on High resources, anything else is madness :p
- The Hard AI cheats with its resources. It seems to get them twice as fast and depletes them at half the rate. The Medium AI only slightly cheats (estimates are 1/6th free resources and use them up 1/6th less).
- This means that the Medium AI will sometimes starve, sometimes even on T4. Usually if the map is 6 players or less I've obliterated all Medium AI before they starve. One intention of this mod was to make fighting earlier more useful :P
- The Hard AI typically starves around the 1 hour mark, or a little later, if you've been careful to smash its colonies.

Speaking of those colonies... The AI will only ever colonise something once. It might be colonised by two separate AI at different times of the game... but each AI only gets one shot at colonising one spot, ever. They also won't retrain any vils there, so you can kill all their vils and run off.

- Resource amounts need an increase for this mod, but "High" is quite usable for the most part, in the interests of preventing 3-hr long slugfests (by which time the game will typically have crashed)...

I haven't edited these values specifically, but I have edited WorldVariables.lqr . You probably want to change the LowOreObjectMult / DefaultOreObjectMult / HighFoodObjectMult values. Those should give you more resources. (They're multipliers of 4500 (I think.... Either way, they're multipliers). Eg 0.666666666667 * 4500 = 3000, the amount you get on Low.

Also, SOMEWHERE I found what looked like regenerating resources... but I can't remember where. GameResources.lqr, maybe?

My current limitation is the AI. Its treatment of resources and colonies is ABSOLUTELY AWFUL. It also doesn't like to target towers if there are any units in sight, so Aragorn can run around whilst the Stronghold does all the work (an excellent strategy when you're out of resources waiting for them to starve, but you've got just enough resources to make one or two colonies but don't want to risk your last resources).

THIS BEING SAID, I really should make "Low" the current amount of resources (maybe a little less; 7k?), Medium about 15k, and I agree that a "High" of 50k could be quite fun to play around with :p

I should do that... it's only an edit to one file...

OH MY GOSH THAT IS SO COOL

"Young Dain Ironfoot of the Iron Hills" and "King Dain of Erebor" are TWO DIFFERENT HEROES

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Those black shapes are what pops up in the map editor, lemme guess? :P

ooooooooooooooh

I'm liking this a lot! Less neccessary catapults is... a must.

Tried throwing compatibility mode on the executable and googling it?

I'm not entirely sure myself either, but they're just not ready to upload anything to moddb yet.
Certainly some things need patching in this build (massed FU, like Dol Guldur, Half-Orc Archers OP, Mangonel-line sucks hard, Mumak OP, and siege ships have 5 range).

oh and not to dissapoint you but 'next version' will be in a very long time as IRL is very busy, although I will probably release a patch to fix some glaring issues (T2 stronghold having waaaaaay too powerful defenses, no clue how that slipped through)

You're missing the point of those lategame upgrades. The point of anything that costs more than 1000 of any resource is to push through a stalemate.

In any RTS you reach a stalemate. Consider vanilla - Good side spamming Huorns, Evil side spamming Bonecleavers and Uruk-Hai. It came down to who could spam the most (& a bit of AI-abusing).

Despite owning half the map, there was nothing you could do but spam back, as your resources multiplied like rabbits (as this screenshot above shows - I have 3k of each resource and not much to spend it on).

Now, when you do own half the map, and your spam is up against their spam and you've got 3k loafing around, these upgrades come into play. You can break this lategame stalemate. You can afford these ultra-expensive upgrades (some of which are too cheap, like Elven Archer Trueshot and Wraith Armor Bonus), you can bring a quick(ish) end to the stalemate.

You also don't need all of them. Do you need OP stealthed spiders, knockback Bonecleavers (to knock the Spiders away), AND Stonehurlers with a range higher than most units' LOS? Or can you go with just one?

Evil Side does fare worse than Good, it must be said, and I'm unsure why this occurs and what I can do about it. They have a great deal of difficulty trashing a Lvl 5 FOM without Balrogs...

These upgrade are there as an ultra-lategame way to spend all your spare resources on a way to wipe the map with a steamroll. They are not neccessary, they just make the endgame quicker.

BECAUSE IT IS Aok.heavengames.com
a not well-announced release only October last year

Thank you!

Just because something hasn't had an update doesn't mean it's dead.

Why don't you take up the reins and see what poking you can do?

I do still play, yes, but not very much, because real life is just waaaaaaay too busy. Also my +12 timezone screws everything over.

Congratulations on an actually _novel_ mod name! There are a whole load of massive LoTR mods out there and yet you've still managed to come up with a unique name.

Waaaaaah, no Vault Wardens or any Erebor pike unit... they were the core of every Dwarven doomstack, ever (even more important than the catapults).

Keep up the modding work! :D