Suggestions

[lolIsuck]

It's retro.

[laith]

i download it about 4 days ago from www.strategyinformer.com

[Mhaedros]

Why?

[laith]

i was searching for mods for M2TW and i found it and it looked good so i downloaded it with the patches it was 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

[Mhaedros]

You only need to d/l 3.0 and patch 3.1

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

I just finished my first long campaign of this, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. (And I'll post the more positive first impressions in the other thread)

First off, on a technical matter, if the game starts in TA 2980, then neither Boromir nor Faramir should be active, Boromir being 2 and Faramir being -3 (Appendix B, towards the end)

Maybe I should just wait until the Fellowship of the Ring campaign comes out, but baking the One isn't as satisfying as it could be, to get someone down there and hold them at Mt Doom for 5 turns means that you essentially have to storm and occupy a good chunk of Mordor anyway, which lessens the impact, especially as it seems like destroying the ring has little impact on Harad and Rhun, who IMO are tougher than Mordor. (And possibly should be; I always got the impression from the books that it was the evil Men who did the heavy lifting in Sauron's army.)


Playing on VH/VH like the opening scroll recommends...... I can win, but I found myself constantly forced into a shoot and scoot army, based around lots of archers and heavy cavalry. Part of that might be Eriador, but it seemed........ unsatisfying, especially given the enormous amount of time and energy I'd have to put into each battle. Furthermore, it meant that a Hunting Lodge followed by an Archery Range were just about the only military buildings I ever made. Especially for a game with Gondor, or Rohan, I'd want to have the capacity to do a classic "infantry line holds, cavalry flanks, rout and roll up."


And..... maybe it's just me, but I think that morale for everyone, and orc units in particular, is too high. Battles in the books at any rate seemed to involve lots of people running around in panic, from the Uruk-hai assault on the Hornburg (they broke, reformed, and broke, and reformed, getting closer each time, to a mere hail of arrows) or the Nazgul screams in Minas Tirith causing the bulk of the forces to retreat to the second level before battle even joined.


Here, I can shower an orc unit with arrows, isolate it from the main group, and charge it in the back with a pair of bodyguard units, and they'll turn around and fight. It's very hard to get that rout effect before I've killed less than about 75% of them, and it makes battles more...... tough and stringy, for lack of a better word.

Also, you might want some method of improving the economy without going on a colossal conquering spree. As Eriador, I didn't really get things in motion until I had an empire that stretched from Carn Dum to Isengard.


But still, overall, an absolutely brilliant mod.

[Mhaedros]

1. True, but Gondor needs a heir

2. Don't know what to say

3. Then play H/H or M/M. No one forces you to play VH/VH

4. I don't agree with that. It's harder for the player if the enemy has higher morale, as it should be

5. I think the economy is great in 3.x. In 2.1 you owned the out of everything at turn 50. Now it's a challenge to win

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

1. True, but Gondor needs a heir

2. Don't know what to say

3. Then play H/H or M/M. No one forces you to play VH/VH

4. I don't agree with that. It's harder for the player if the enemy has higher morale, as it should be

5. I think the economy is great in 3.x. In 2.1 you owned the out of everything at turn 50. Now it's a challenge to win

1. Hmmm, good point, I didn't think about that, and this isn't Rome, where you can set a new heir.

3. The opening scroll says at the start "Remember, both game and battle are supposed to be played at very hard."

4. Of course it's harder if the enemy has higher morale, but it would also be harder if your guys had lower morale. If a good chunk of your line broke and ran because the enemy Nazgul ran up and screamed, it'd be tricky.

I don't mind it as a pure difficulty matter, I mind it because the combination of "always outnumbered by orcs" (to say nothing of the free garrisons and the flat out extra money that they get) + "Everyone has really good morale" forces you into a strategy based around running ducking, and shooting. It's not really appropriate for everyone, and I guess it fits my sense of how an epic should work by preferring to have a bunch of decisive battles, even if I lose a few, than battle after battle where I take a small group of archers, run around in circles for close to an hour, and finally whittle them down to nothing.

5. Actually, I retract what I said earlier, it's not the economy so much, (and I do think that understating trade is very appropriate for the book setting), it's that the unique units are really cool; and by the time I can afford the infrastructure to recruit them and the hiring and upkeep costs, to support that level of investment I need a big empire, and that means the core regions are too far away for them to get anywhere in less than 10 turns or so.

[Mhaedros]

3. It means the game is designed for hardcore players, not that you HAVE to play VH/VH.

4. The orcs already have lower stats. Any semi good general can easily win any orc army with half their size

5. I still don't agree. I know I'm a hardcore player, so me myself probably isn't a very good example but anyway; I usually can and do afford the best troops around turn 70

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

Hmmm, maybe I'm striking a bit too hard and early then. I mean, I won the game (eliminated Isengard, Orcs of Gundabad, and Orcs of the Misty Mountains, and had 40 provinces) by turn 64, but it was all with basic troops; hunters and generals bodyguards and breeland militia.


Is the AI going to sit there and tutrle with you if you don't expand as well? I do realize a lot of their troops that I ran into were those free garrison troops, but I didn't develop a good spy network until turn 40ish or so, so I didn't get a good grasp of the comp's early game play.

[Mhaedros]

Depending on faction. Some factions have allies on all sides (Eriador altho their economics and units suck) and as some you really need to pay attention and keep your borders safe all by yourself (Gondor; I havent played them in 3.1, but in old 2.1 Rohan died around turn 50 and your suddenly in a 3 front war) Personally I like turtling the first 100 turns as I like long games. Dwarves are good turtlers as they can be outnumbered 1/10 and still win with only low tier units. They have great units, great economics, not many starting enemies, basicly just OoG and OotMM from the start, maybe Rhun later if you keep it to the lore. Elves are the easiest for generals, but the SE starting position is a bit harder than Dwarves. HE is the easiest faction IMO

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

One other random complaint/suggestion, that I meant to say earlier but slipped my mind.

Would it be possible to give units banners a la the original games? Esepecially for some of the smaller units (like in a custom battle with the Nazgul), it can sometimes be hard to pick out who is where. Those high flying banners make it a lot easier to make out where units are on the field, instead of pausing and poring over things.

[lolIsuck]

Go to TATW.cfg, open it with notepad and change this:

[video]
;windowed		= true
;movies			= false
show_banners = 0

to this:

[video]
;windowed		= true
;movies			= false
show_banners = 1

That should do it

[Bobz]

3. The opening scroll says at the start "Remember, both game and battle are supposed to be played at very hard."

Looking at this, and remembering many other posters saying something similar and then struggling, perhaps this line should be removed from the opening text? It would save new players getting confused and thinking that you have to play at VH, when it's perfectly fine to play at lower levels.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

Thanks for the tip

[Ahlerich]

i found the moral critique a good point. its something that bothered me in many mods since rtw and rtr.
in vanilla balltes were short due to fast units and weak moral which is sad, especially with nice units and not the time to look at them.

however moral is a feature in rtw and mtw that most mods break. this is sad as the feature isnt bad and many battles in history have been decided by moral breaks.

question: does reducing battle difficulty change the moral? and if so for ai and player or just ai?

[Mhaedros]

Reducing battle difficulty only reduces moral. It does nothing else

[jurjeskovici]

I'll get streight to the questions:
1.Could you guys disable this thing or at least modify it so enemies won't have elite units (wich you get late on the game) in the fifth turn?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Isengard vs Gondor war.8th turn and Gondor gets SWAN KNIGHTS AND FOUNTAIN GUARD

I know this is here so you can't steamroll others,but on VH/VH it is nearly impossible to do that!
2.Could you disable that thing that makes autorosolve suicidal? Myself,i can't play big battles because my PC can't handle it!

[Oneru]

I have one question and one remark.

First the question. I have read in the FAQ about the Help Weakened Factions script. Is there any way to turn this off? I'm a casual player (played mostly H/H in 2.1, just getting started on 3.1) and this script annoys me terribly. I like to get caught up in the story, and I don't mind the garrison script (think of it as local people who didn't want to fight, but when you're besieging them, of course they'll pick up arms), but I have no way of seeing the 'fun' in full stacks spawning out of nowhere. I know, it's meant as a challenge, but I'd love to know if there's any way to turn it off.

Second, my remark. I love love love that you've added the lore books to all the cities, just makes the world so much more alive. However, I just started a Harad campaign and captured Erelond, the little island just off the shore of Umbar. This island has the "Rhun" lore book. Now I don't know if it's mentioned before, but thought I should bring it to attention, because I suppose it's not supposed to be like that.

Thanks so much for creating this fantastic mod

[Valiant Champion]

Reducing battle difficulty only reduces moral. It does nothing else

larger and more sensitive swings of morale, greater fatigue is how mtw2 battle difficulty works.

2.Could you disable that thing that makes autorosolve suicidal? Myself,i can't play big battles because my PC can't handle it!

I am thinking that has something to do with the second value in the health line of the EDU entries. You need to change the 3 value to 0. But than again I could be wrong. The value is not read in player controlled battle but is read in autoresolve.