Looking for advice on new 3.1 campaign

[MikeBlack]

Greetings! First off I want to say thanks to King Kong and the whole team for making such an amazing mod! I'm constantly amazed with the amount of time and effort you folk are willing to put in to make such a high quality mod.

I've been a forum lurker for ages and finally decided to register to make this post here to ask a couple questions and of course show my appreciation to the modders. I've been waiting out on playing a new version of Third Age: Total War since probably the 1.4 or so days, so I'm really looking forward to all the new features I've missed out on, back in the day I played a ton, I think I completed the main campaign for at least half of the factions back then.

Now on to some questions. First off I haven't really used submods before, but I can see theirs some pretty awesome looking ones kicking around, so I would like to ask for recommendations on which sub mods to start off on 3.1 with this time around. I've been thinking something like Baron Samedi's compilation might be a good start, but it has a lot of options and i'm not sure where to start.

Secondly, I'm seriously considering trying to do a let's play series for my first campaign in 3.1 since I'm so stoked about getting this going, I actually haven't done a let's play before, but I've messed around with the recording software enough that I know I can pull all the technical stuff together, so I thought I might ask if anyone has some advice for let's playing a game like this, either settings for the game/mods or just tips for making a strategy game play-through interesting.

So thanks again to everyone involved in the making of this great mod, I'm really looking forward to playing the new version after my long break from it, and hopefully I can a bit of advice on starting out this time around.

[Ethien]

@MikeBlack - I'd say go with the original campaign first, just to experience the modification in it's initial state. From there, you'll be able to find out what you may want different, want to add and so forth. This will greatly assist in your decision about which sub-modification to use.

I do let's plays myself, which you can see from my channel, a thread on here or elsewhere. Essentially you should be yourself, but there should be a clear avoidance of 'dead air', when all is quiet and nothing happens. Outside from that, it's just me talking about lore, the game itself, what's happening right then, tactics, my life and so forth. Consistency is also important to creating a subscriber base. If you're just beginning out and you update once every couple of weeks, or you never finish your initial campaigns, you won't get an audience to grow or stick around. It also helps to communicate with your subscriber base, especially when you begin out small. Overall though, don't make it a job and have fun with it. You have no obligations to anything but having fun, if you're doing it for free.

I hope this has helped.

[Dwarven Berserker]

Welcome to the forums, former-forum lurking friend (to all the other lurkers (I know you're here ): follow this example and make an account )

Okay, on the questions, I'd say Baron Samedi's mod is indeed a great mod if you want go get the real "Middle-Earth" experience as it adds tons of awesome little extra's which makes the game even more fun to play. It does have many options, but don't worry, they are all pretty to-the point and you will not have much trouble chosing which ones you want to use. Keep in mind though that the large amount of scipts in Baron's mod will cause the turn times to get longer.
Some other awesome submods are in development as well, like Divide and Conquer, which will add a lot of factions to the game. So if you would like more factions, you could wait for those to come out.

If you're starting a let's play, I'd recommend Baron's submod, as you can turn off the stack spam to make the game less repititive and more fun to watch.

EDIT: dammit, got ninja'd

[MikeBlack]

Ethien - Thanks for the let's play tips, I've been planning on doing one for over a year, I was waiting for a game I was really excited to play, and I think this is it. I'll definitely have to make sure I keep talking, heh heh, but since I have played quite a bit of total war before hopefully I won't run out of things to talk about And fun is definitely the plan!

Dwarven Berserker - I was thinking that turning the stack spam off would be a great addition, and that might be enough to convince me to install Baron's submod on its own even. I'll have to check out how long end turning takes with the submods then, thats just about my only complaint about the total war series in general, I've played quite a lot of shogun 2 lately, and it's definitely a pain when it starts to feel like you spend more time waiting on the computer then actually playing.


Thanks for all the advice so far, I appreciate any input I can get as I'm sorting this out.