My Third Age: Divide and Conquer Music Submod ported to LotRTW - Has some differences!

[Mr_Nygren]

Hello, i've ported my Music submod for Third Age: Divide and Conquer to this Lord of the Rings: Total War modification.

But there are some obvious differences:

1. Rome mods cannot have faction specific music and only culture specific - this means that all the Orcs share songs, all the Elves, all the Northmen, all the Evil Men and Gondor/Numenoreans.

2. I've removed all the Third Age/Divide and Conquer original tracks.

I've done the following changes to the music submod:

1. The Mordor, Dol Guldur, Isengard, Goblins and Angmar music is now used as one single entity and all the tracks have been combined - in use by all the Orc culture factions.

2. Northmen shares the Rohan, Enedwaith (for Dunlendings), Free People's of Eriador, Dale and Ents of Fangorn music - Strat-map songs of the Ent-faction are not in use, all the original Third Age content removed and the "Vale of Anduin"-Northmen music is not in use as i thought it unfit due to the faction missing in the mod. Ents are recruitable for the Free People's so that is why their songs are in the Northmen culture. They have the Barbarian culture.

3. Evil Men have the same songs as in the other version, but the vanilla songs in use by the "Variags of Khand" has been cut. They share the Eastern culture.

4. Dwarves are only one faction here, as opposed to three factions in Divide and Conquer - I had a choice to make if i should or shouldn't use all the music of each faction or not. I did decide at the end to only use the Erebor factional songs. Most of the Ered Luin songs consisted of fan-made Third Age music, and the Khazad'Dum faction had the same songs as Erebor plus the Moria-songs from the first movie. The Erebor faction had a very nice set of songs and i didn't want the others to interfere with them. Dwarven Clans is a single faction/culture using the Egyptian culture.

5. Elves are three factions here as opposed to four in Third Age, and they are a single culture (Greek) meaning they all needed to share their songs. They do now use the Noldor/Galadhrim/Mirkwood songs in this order. And i did cut all the Third Age fan-made songs.

6. Gondor/Numenoreans are using the Carthaginian culture - sharing the Gondor and Dúnedain songs. All the fan-made Third Age songs were removed.

Based on this info the submod is using most of the songs of my Divide and Conquer Music submod, but excluding said songs - while at the same time using the songs per culture instead of per faction.

The Ered Luin, Khazad-Dúm and Vale of Anduin songs were cut completely.

The original submod took me like a month of constant work to finish as i sat like all awaken time for more than 15 hours like seven days a week. I mean, in 2016 i had nothing else to do - so i spent like two weeks working on it back in april/may of that year. Then i sat another two weeks in November 2016 - and i almost didn't sleep these two weeks and sat all awaken time when i didn't eat.

Porting the mod is far from as much work - as the really time-consuming part were to listen on all the Albums and cut all the various parts that i wanted for the mod. As such now that work was already done and i just needed to move the songs which required some coding in one file and of course moving over the songs. It still took me about 5-6 hours of coding to port the music, as i needed to structure it right and decide which songs to use and hat songs to remove. Deciding how to use them also take time.

I will link to the other Third Age thread because i have uploaded videos of each faction with music there. That will give you an idea of what to expect. Just keep in mind that there are these changes mentioned above due to the Culture-specific music in Rome Total War - and due to me not wanting to use Third Age material outside of Third Age.

I would be happy if Bardo wanted to include the submod in the official submod-addon or the official mod. Divide and Conquer sadly didn't want it so it stayed a submod there. I had hoped to have it as the official music but was let down.

This music submod does fill all the entries of the descr_sounds_music-file and does indeed fill the empty lines of the original LotRTW - causing sound to go silent from time to time. Also reduce the sound of weapons etc as certain songs could be difficult to hhear if the ambient sounds are too loud.

Link to the other thread for the Divide and Conquer version (with preview videos):

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...e-and-Conquer!

What this SUB-MOD does?

It makes the music of the mod Culture-specific for all cultures.

I did shorten down a lot of tracks in the original Divide and Conquer Music submod, i removed a lot of songs in it and i've only added shorter clips. You will get more for less. So this actually has fewer full songs, and much more short clips chosen specifically for each part they play in the mod as compared to the original Third Age: Divide and Conquer.


I did work on this sub-mod for two and a half weeks constantly all my awaken time- it's not five days but seven days each week. I have been very detailed and chosen each part very carefully for each of the specific music types. This i did back in 2016 for Thrid Age - now i've moved the submod to LotRTW for Rome Total War which took me maybe six hours to do.


Culture-specific music will be played in mobilize, tension, battle, win, loose, campaign loose, campaign win and the strat-map for most factions. All cultures got touched.


Previously the mod had the same Good and Evil songs for all cultures. Now there are different themes for Northmen, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Evil Men, Gondor/Númenor etc.

My very focus has been not only to make the music in game culture-specific, but also to create a unique movie-esque feeling for each of the cultures. This means that you will not hear full tracks or entire songs at random places anymore. Every song has been carefully chosen and each culture will not have any song that doesn't belong to that culture-group.

This means that we will not be hearing Gondor-stuff when playing as Rohan- as no Gondorian songs are used for them or the other Northmen -as well as we will not be hearing parts of songs that includes songs for other Cultures. The original LOTR-songs were made up of many different themes playing in one song, and i have made sure to cut out what i wanted and removed everything else. So no more Rohan-stuff for Isengard. As only the parts of the Uruk-Hai is still there for them. Isengard does however share the Mordor/Guldur/Angmar/Goblin music with the other Orc-culture factions. It will feel like you are playing the battles of the movies in battle.

In the strat-map i removed all the Third Age unique songs from this version of the submod, as i didn't want to use fan-made songs from Third Age in a Rome mod. For the strat-map you can say i just changed the way some of the songs were used and removed Third Age fan-songs.


Enjoy the new epic feeling specific for all the cultures in the game!


Finally you can fight those battles in-game and feel they are just as epic as in the movies- you'll even feel like you are playing the movie but changing the direction of the story!


/Mr_Nygren.

Download-link to this LotRTW version:

https://www.moddb.com/games/rome-tot...r-music-submod

[Bardo]

Thank you for this music addon, Mr_Nygren. Alhtough the download link is down, I guess due to copyright issues.
I remember we had similar troubles with lotrtw music. For some time we had 2 different files, one with the mod, and another with the music that could not be shared here.

The music of this mod was selected by one of the original members of the team, Falcons, before I joined them. I must say I always liked it, and even after many hours playing and modding the game, I'm still not tired of listening the same tracks. It is a part of the mod that I'd be reluctant to change, even if I was planning to release another version, that I'm not.

However, I appreciate your work, and I'd be interested to test it if I play another campaign. Maybe CapnDan is interested to add it to his Campaign addon, it could be a nice extra reason to play the campaigns with all the factions.

[Mr_Nygren]

Thank you for this music addon, Mr_Nygren. Alhtough the download link is down, I guess due to copyright issues.
I remember we had similar troubles with lotrtw music. For some time we had 2 different files, one with the mod, and another with the music that could not be shared here.

The music of this mod was selected by one of the original members of the team, Falcons, before I joined them. I must say I always liked it, and even after many hours playing and modding the game, I'm still not tired of listening the same tracks. It is a part of the mod that I'd be reluctant to change, even if I was planning to release another version, that I'm not.

However, I appreciate your work, and I'd be interested to test it if I play another campaign. Maybe CapnDan is interested to add it to his Campaign addon, it could be a nice extra reason to play the campaigns with all the factions.

Hello Bardo, I first read this today no joke - the thread was removed because Divide and Conquer broke the rules by going stand-alone from Third Age: Total War - so TWC deleted their entire developer's forum and all the submods.

The music-mod was originally a submod of Divide and Conquer which has 31 factions, and it's aim was faction-specific music for every single faction. I spent about two whole months on this music-mod back in 2016. I like worked on it a lot those two months.

I did however remove it from moddb in 2020 due being a bit worried of copyright.

Your mod has some songs from the movies, just like many other mods - including the submod - the music-mod is heavily cut and is using only smaller cut-out bits of songs suitable for certain roles within the game. So it's by no means likely to be copyright-struck but it's safer to have music-mods as a part of a mod than as stand-alone add-ons.

My issue with the original music was 1. it used the same music for the evil guys, and the same for the good guys - too little variation between the cultures. But I liked it. Another issue was that sometimes it went silent so I tried to fill out all the "areas" of the mod such as prebattle, win, lose, tension, strat-map, campaign-win, campaign-lose, mobilise and battle. You could say I filled out every section. The main issue with Rome Total War was that it forced the music to be shared between all the same cultures, unlike in Med2 where it was faction-specific as intended - in Rome Remastered my submod would be way better used due to the unlimited number of cultures there (in old vanilla we had too few cultures) which would enable Isengard's music to be very different from Mordors, Lorien's different from the Silvan etc. That was my original goal for Divide and Conquer.

The issue when using it in your mod was that certain songs played more often than others.. For example the hobbit-movies has specific music for Angmar, Orcs of the Misty Mountains, Gundabad and Dol'Guldur in Divide and Conquer - specifically picked for them there, while Isengard and Mordor has different tracks picked for them from the original trilogy - but in your mod Mordor got all of this stuff, Isengard got all of it and the Orc Rabbles got all of it - ending with the hobbit-music playing for Mordor and Isengard and such which was unfortunate.

In the Remaster this could be avoided. But it still brings some variety between cultures in the LotRTW for RTW:A. I just wish the hobbit-stuff wasn't shared with Mordor and Isengard. That's why this music-add-on is better used in the remaster.

Thanks for your support though Bardo. Dagovax Sirrianus is porting your mod , and he is highly skilled and created Total War:1942 but you probably know this.

[GWoodElf]

Thanks for your support though Bardo. Dagovax Sirrianus is porting your mod , and he is highly skilled and created Total War:1942 but you probably know this.

Hello Mr Nygren,

is there any forum for this project already? Because I am working on new building for this mod which could be used in the remaster, too.

Regards

[masterslay]

This "sounds" like a interesting experience, and i would like to try the mod, can someone please upload this mod again ?

[Mr_Nygren]

This "sounds" like a interesting experience, and i would like to try the mod, can someone please upload this mod again ?

The main issue with RTW: Alexander is that music is culture-specific - this forced certain factions to share their music.. As such I feel like the Hobbit-movie music plays a lot more often than I'd wanted.

In Divide & Conquer where the music is faction-specific (medieval 2) this wasn't an issue.

Well, I still like the music-mod but it isn't as good on RTW as it is on DAC.

[fate]

lol ive just downloaded Third Age TW for M2TW not for Rome TW omg