Age of the Ring mod for Battle for Middle-earth II: Rise of the Witch King

What's that? Return of the King Campaign? Never heard of it. Just kidding - we're working hard but can't tell you when it'll be released. Right now, the missions we have completed have several times the detail of the Two Towers missions, so it's going to be a while. It'll be worth the wait, however - especially if you're a Tolkien lore nerd like us.

Some of you might have seen that we won this year's Best Multiplayer Award at the Mod of the Year Awards. We're humbled by this recognition of the massive and ongoing effort made to increase Age of the Ring's competitive viability. With our 11 highly asymmetrical skirmish factions, competitive balancing is a big challenge - to that end, we're continuing to work on 8.0 patches, and are now coming up on Version 8.3. This article addresses some its core changes and additions.

To freshen up the competitive scene, we're introducing 8 new competitive maps in Version 8.3. These cover a diverse set of areas and landscapes and were made with feedback and testing performed by our balance testers.

We've taken a shovel to some of the more boring and lesser-functioning spellbook powers for Misty Mountains and Erebor, reworking or fully replacing them with powers that should hopefully be more fun and useful.

We noticed that Misty Mountains players heavily leaned towards the right side of the Spellbook, almost never using the They Are Coming spell (which temporarily increased Moria Orc production speed). In order to address this, we changed They Are Coming to now be a spell that can be cast on Orc Tunnels and Wyrm Lairs, spawning 6 permanent battalions of Moria Orc Screechers. These units respect the command limit.

Ravens of Erebor used to grant +10% movement speed to nearby friendly units and -25% movement speed to nearby enemy units. We realized that this was too inflexible, so we reworked it to be more useful in more situations. Now it instead increases the speed of everything that is nearby: movement speed and attack speed, the speed of cooldowns, and unit and resource production speed.

Rather than Heavy Armour, Fully Armed and Filthy now grants weapon upgrades (Khuzdûl Runes, Mithril-tipped Arrows, and Fire Arrows). We realized that the former implementation only reinforced a strength (Dwarves have always been tanky) rather than compensated a weakness.

We saw Undermine being used as an unhealthy and unfun option to rush the enemy fortress. To remedy this, we changed its stun effect to a buff to allied armour and a slow heal over time. It is now also protected by several Vault Wardens.

As you may noticed in the above screenshots, we have implemented House Colours (meaning player-chosen colour schemes) in Age of the Ring. To get this out of the way first and foremost: House Colours are an entirely optional and intercompatible feature, meaning that you can turn them off and on at will using our Age of the Ring Options tool, and play with and against people that have them on or off without losing compatibility. In other words - you never have to see them if you don't want to and using them is entirely up to you! So if anyone in the comments or on Discord whines about things being 'too colourful' or whatever, please point and laugh at them.

We believe that House Colours will greatly enhance gameplay clarity. Have a look!

Due to the increased popularity of competitive play (thank you to everyone that has helped promote AotR!), we've gotten great feedback on the current state of the mod - we are always paying attention and listening! This means that for 8.3 we have been able to do a lot to address the various things that have stood out. Below is a list of some of the more notable directions we've taken. This is by no means an exhaustive list, nor is it detailed - the actual changelog will remain under wraps until we release.

• Mordor was a clear leader in the 8.2 meta. As a result, the faction has received nerfs to its spam potential and its Nazgûl heroes in order to decrease the extreme effectiveness of its main strategy. It has however also received some buffs for its Easterling roster, to help it shine more during matches.
• Harad was also a particularly strong option in 8.2. While it's great to see this large and somewhat experimental faction take a leadership position, we had to implement a number of soft nerfs to its core strategy while also buffing the Cultists of Zigûr, Hasharin and Nafarati units in order to make these options more prominent.
• Woodland Realm has also done very well this patch. It showed great strength during the early game but had problems during its midgame progression. We smoothed this progression out some, making it easier for the faction to reach later stages of the game.
• Misty Mountains did well, but as mentioned above the right side of their spellbook was used almost exclusively. To further aid with a more even use of its spells, the right side received some soft nerfs.
• For Isengard, we noticed that after the Dunland dominance of 7.3.1 it was now the Uruk-hai that were completely dominating. To even things out we implemented a number of tweaks, while still keeping the Uruk-hai strategy viable.
• Gondor was seen struggling when dealing with heroes and the midgame, so it received some buffs in that direction. Easier access to Soldiers of Minas Tirith, Denethor gaining earlier access to his leadership, as well as buffs to Boromir's Knife Throw and Beregond's Defender of the White City (ranged) ability.
• Dol Guldur received some nerfs to its early game, which was too cost-efficient and allowed for some unfair (Necromancer) rushing.
• Rivendell hasn't performed well, mainly due to its early game being toned down too much. While its difficult early game is an intended weakness, it was too difficult - so we buffed it some, notably Bree-land and Hobbit units, to make them a longer-lasting investment.
• Rohan, despite its rework, was not performing as well as we anticipated. We realised that its specific economic situation (farms producing fewer resources but having more health) was the culprit, so we normalized its farms and provided some other buffs to different aspects of the faction to ensure that Rohan is a competitive faction now.