Proposal: race-specific "livable areas"
Right now, every faction can expend everywhere, and after the culture conversion, exploit every settlement just like its original owner. Gondor conquers Barad Dűr? Soon it's a thriving Numénoran city, in the middle of an ash field! Elves in Moria? No problems, just put some potted plants in those underground halls and every Silvan elf will feel at home! The dwarves are taking over the Rhűnic steppes? Well, they can always dig holes in the fresh earth or something...
Basically, and as a result of using a game engine meant for a human-only world, every faction in the game can prosper everywhere on the map. There's nothing that makes dwarves better at living in mountains, elves in Mirkwood or men in fertile plains. That just feels very wrong to me, and remove a major limitation on the expansion capacities of some races (the elves and dwarves in particular). I'm not arguing that a race couldn't hold a settlement which doesn't fit it at all, just that it shouldn't be able to proser in it: an Elven-ruled mountain settlement should see its population stagnate or decline, a human faction capturing the Lonely Mountain shouldn't be able to exploit its riches to the extent the dwarves did, and so on.
In order to change that, I propose giving each race (humans, elves, dwarves and orcs) its own "farm" buildings, which would all be AORs. The specifics would have to be worked out, but it would be something like this:
- Humans (good and evil): they still have farms, buildable throughout Middle-Earth save for the following zones: Mordor (except Minas Ithil?), the Great Forests (Mirkwood, Lothlorien, Fangorn) and the mountain cities.
- Dwarves: Not sure what to call it, probably something like "Underground Dwellings", "Underground Mansions", etc. They would only be buildable in mountain areas, a major restriction on dwarven expansion that could be compensated by having them give bigger economic benefits than the human farms.
- Orcs: they would get "pits" of various levels. I think they should be the only one able to build them in every settlements, as orcs driven by Sauron should be able to settle anywhere. The only kind of settlements where I would have spontaneously have them not develop would have been the Great Forests, but Dol Guldur is a major counter-example, so they should probably get those too. Alternatively, the OotMM would be limited to mountains like the dwarves and only Mordor and Isengard would get to build them in every city.
- Elves: I'm really not sure what to call those, as I have little ideas of what Elven economies are built on... For the AOR though, if this was in the first age it should be everywhere except Mordor and the Mountains, but by the ending of the Third Age elves had withdrawn so much that they should be limited to the Great Forests and the "greenest" and most habitable parts of Eriador, including of course the starting areas of the High Elves. Alternatively, the Sylvan Elves could be strictly limited to the Great Forests, while the High Elves would get both areas.
If possible, the importance of those farm-like buildings, both on population growth and on economics, should be boosted, though the effects of other buildings would have to be nerfed to compensate. The result would be that while factions can expend into settlements that do not suit them, those captured settlements will be drags on their economy, not boosting it.
The other issue to sort out is the capture of settlements. If doable by script, the buildings in question should be automatically destroyed when captured by an other race (based on set lists of factions). If that can't be done, second-best would be to just make them "culture buildings" (without a conversion effect), which would ensure their destruction when an other culture takes the settlement. That wouldn't be as good though, as farms would be destroyed when a city changes hands between human factions of different cultures, and farms and orcish pits wouldn't get destroyed if an Evil Men faction captures an Orcish settlement or vice-versa.
If it works though, it would allow for much more realistic faction growth and expansion, and would give the player a rational for handing back settlements to allied factions on capture. Gondor taking Moria would have a strong incentive to give it to the Dwarves, for example. And it would help make TATW a different experience from the original M2TW game.
Edit:
There has been a lot of reactions in this thread on the theme of "this limits the player too much!". Just to make it clear, yes it does, a bit, but not as much as many people seem to think:
- It doesn't affect troop recruitment at all. Those stay limited by culture like now, no more, no less
- It doesn't mean that you cannot conquer some settlements on the map. Of course you can.
- It doesn't even mean that you cannot even benefit at all from the riches of key settlements ; Moria will still have rich mines whose income you'll get, rich trading cities will still have trade
- It also doesn't mean that you'll be forced in any way to give settlements to your allies after capturing them
All it would do is make the settlements in your race's "habitable areas" more prosperous and more easily growing than those outside. Elves can still hold Moria and build troops there, Dwarves can conquer Rhűn, Gondor can rule Barad Dűr - simply those cities won't do as well under owners not suited to them than they would under owners used to living in similar places.
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Re: Proposal: race-specific "livable areas"
Originally Posted by Vaul
and I get that this mod is different, I also support every initiative that adds new and specific buildings... I'm just concerned about the long-term effects of this kind of modification, I really don't like the idea of territory claimed in advance, and I doubt that such an effect could be considered "realistic". 
