What troubles me about TATW

[martoto]

Hey people,
First of all I'd like to say that this is by far my favorite M2TW mod and it is simply amazing. Words can hardly describe it. But there are a few things that bother me. First and foremost, the finances. Seriously, when I play a campaign I find my self unable to lead any wars due to the fact that I have no cash. I played with Gondor a few times recently (always restarting cause it's extremely difficult) and the lack of funds really f-ed up my whole game. I managed to take East Osgiliath, Cair Andros, and that other fortress to the east of CA. Afterwards I managed to negotiate a cease-fire with Mordor and later on (miraculously) a signed a ceasefire and an alliance with Harad. So I had some time to work on my faction in peace. I had moved the capital to Tarnost to reduce corruption and had built all kinds of economic buildings and still I barely made 3500 a turn which was ok but after a short while all of a sudden the money just dropped to 1500.I had half a stack in Cair Andros, East Osgiliath, and the fortress to the east of CA. Also less than a half-stack in Pelargir and Linhir. The rest of my cities were barely defended and had no more that 2 units in them. Later on Sauron called an invasion (which imo happens way too often) on E.O. and I knew then that I was screwed. E.O. was very well fortified and they couldn't even get near it but Pelargir and Linhir were completely vulnerable and sure enough Harad soon came in with a full stack and Besieged Linhir and Perargir while most of my forces were in or near E.O. So that's my major issue with this mod. Whatever you do you just can never have enough money. And the enemy, especially the damned Haradrim always seem to have money judging by the number of troops they send my way. Is it that I am doing something wrong or does the AI really always have more funds than you. (i'm playing on m/m btw)

P.S. On a different note I have to say that I really really like Rhûn's golden armored warriors but in the movie their armor wasn't as shiny. Can anyone tell me what program to use and which files to edit in order to open the texture and make it look a bit more pale? I doubt that it would be too difficult.

[Ngugi]

TATW is made to be a hard game, and economy is one aspect of it.
To get a good economy there's a few pointers:
- Build mines, roads, port and farms; don't waste money on markets above Grain Exchange until you have much money, because they pay off only in teh long run
- Don't have to many generals, generals cost a lot and since they often can't compensate that as governors (governor effects are restricted)
- If strategic, move the capital to reduce corruption. It cost 5000 but if you reduce the overall corruption with say 1000/turn you soon have saved those money and start go earn money
- Limit your armies till your economy have grown, make good use of the forces you have and win great victories, recrute new units only when needed. In the case with Gondor you for example should need a ½-stack+ to keep Mordor locked in, while you muster a full stack to march into Harad, or even better sail down and strike at Umbar directly to get income and remove their most important recrutment center
- Keep low taxes as often as possible* > population growth > more population > both more taxes and better cities that provide income buildings

The AI get income bonuses so they are never ruined, it's a balance decision due to the AI's general inability to defeat a player in battle.


You should be able to find a tutorial for it here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forum...and-Animations


* Edit: but preferably not at the turn when a building is done if there's a governor in the settlement, because then they risk to get bad traits. At the turn there's a building done try to have High or Very High tax rate if there's a governor in the settlement

[ThaDoews]

At the very first, build roads and fields for a start and be sure to use your free upkeep or create them!

[Dutch-Balrog]

My way to get arround those problems is to get most generals together in 1 stack, including the faction leader and make a strong force with some militia units and attack minas morgul right away after you've gotten east osgiliath. Alot of players are intimidated by mordor. But i always rush them early on before they can even get decent armies. I often defeated them before the second barracks event. And because of that i've got no trouble with my money, the settlements that give you the best increased incomes are: Minas Morgul, Black Gate, Orc Camp and Barad Dur. When that is done, sail to Umbar and your troubles are completely gone and you can go start to get your economy in order.
Although i do play with Divide and Conquer, this situation should be almost no diffrent in the vanilla mod.

[paradamed]

It is useful to read a few guides. You should avoid spending money on certain buildings and favoring others. As Gondor it is always about being agressive. Try to rush some key cities early on, like Minas Morgul. DOnt try to build your army before attacking or you will get crushed.

[Dude with the Food]

If it helps, it is easy to edit the king's purse for each faction to make money easier. I also have made forts give free upkeep to 10 units in exchange for a massive build cost. The investments pay off.

[Greymane]

It is also possible to get extra money (or reduce corruption/army upkeep) by editing the descr_settlement_mechanics file.
There are a couple of guides about the settlement_mechanics somewhere on this forum (or pm me/post here if you want to try it but can't make sense of it, or have more specific questions than the guides answer). It will feel a little more 'organic' than just editing the kings purse.
In my own games, I nerfed corruption, boosted trade slightly and nerfed taxes/farming to make up for it. I think I have slightly more money than intended, but it's balanced enough.
As with all edits, be carefull: having way too much money ruins the fun
Part of the fun in TATW is having to deal with a weak economy until later in the game.

[martoto]

I don't want to edit any game files cause to me that's kind of like cheating which is something I don't like to do. But I have to say that this mod is just ridiculous when it comes to the AI players. I played as Dale recently (got tired of getting my ass kicked with Gondor) and I managed to sign a ceasefire with Rhûn early on and then just focus on my economy. Soon enough, however, the Easterlings attacked and I had to go to war. I gathered a full stack led by King Bard which included 5 generals 5 Dale Swordsmen, 1 Dale Swordmasters, 1 Halbert (don't remember the name), 2 woods men and the rest were just some weak unprofessional units. Still this army drained my 75 k of gold extremely quickly. I ended up reaching Rhomen and taking it. Not only did it end up costing me a lot of money but a lot of lives as well because of the stupid garrison script. Finally, I had to give up Rhomen and sign trade rights with the Lôke-Khan because my gold was going negative and I saw thanks to my spy that the bastards had like 5 full stack armies south of Rhomen and 2 near the city itself. So now my king along with his generals and what's left of the army is on a long march of shame heading home to Dale. I know that this mod aims at making it very difficult but this is simply ridiculous. I'm sorry but there is a difference between difficult and impossible. I know that I'm not the best player around but I never found it this difficult in the vanilla M2TW.

[Dude with the Food]

I don't want to edit any game files cause to me that's kind of like cheating which is something I don't like to do. But...

Here is your problem and answer. If I explain your but properly, there are loads of scripts giving the AI various things - the garrison scrript being one. When they go negative with money, they get a massive amount of gold so by spending too much, they are given gold to spend further. Like I said, with editing the King's purse, I multiplied each one by around 1.2. Basically, I can have the same amount of unit per city ratio as I'm used to from vanilla while the AI has a bit more rather than me having less. The AI spams units because the scripts are still there and all I've done for them is postponed the scripts a couple of turns due to the extra income. They will still build loads, I will play the game in a way I enjoy. Free units in forts is just when I feel like blocking the world out of Mirkwood so I keep a half stack in each entrance to it as the SE.

Go into descr_strat, scroll own and next to where it says king's purse for each faction, add 1,000 and then a bit more depending on how much you play them/how likely they are to get steamrolled by Dwarves/Elves/Eriador or Mordor/harad/Isengard.

[Flinn]

give yourself time to get in confidence with the mod, it is worth of some struggles.

each of us, I believe, experienced the same problems at the beginning, but if you don't lose your confidence and start to enjoy the wonderful setting and atmospere it gives, this will easily become the best game you have ever played.

[Dutch-Balrog]

Or you could try out one of the submods, Divide and Conquer and MOS both change the economical system.

[Steward Denethor II]

Dale and Gondor are tough, try Harad Rhun or Rohan if you want an easy game, or the High Elves.

[martoto]

I tried Dale and is was very easy. I kicked Rhûn's ass early on and made tons of money. But I really want to play as Gondor and have a more fun game. I just gave up on my 5th campaign attempt with Gondor. This time I had managed to take Harad out of the game completely destroying the faction. But now Rhûn is slowly taking my settlements in Harad and Mordor is threatening me from the east still. I've taken Cair Andros, East Osgiliath, than fortress to the east of CA, and all of Ithilien is mine. Basically, all Mordor has apart from the lands beyond the Black Gate and Minas Morgul is that settlement in the Dead Marshes. One would think that I'm doing very well. But that is far from true. The orcs of Mordor keep pulling those gigantic armies out of their arses. And those armies have freakin Uruks and Olog-Hai in them. How am I supposed to counter that when like 95% of my forces are lame militia soldiers. That's what I hate about this game. The reason why I want to play as Gondor is cause of their awesome full-plate tree bearing armor wearing soldiers. But alas, even though I have the Master Armorer I can only place up to 6 such units without loosing tons of money. I wish there was an option to choose the AI difficulty. I don't mean the vanilla option. I mean before launching the game. Much like in the Stainless Steel mod if any of you guys have played it. I am gonna try to download some financial overhaul mod so that the game isn't such a drag. I'm tired of fighting Olog-Hai with militia. I'm sorry to say this but the fact that it's so damn difficult is gonna make me give up on this mod very soon. I wish the developers had thought of the more noobish players when they were creating this beautiful but overly difficult mod.

[Dude with the Food]

Don't give up on the mod. Do what I said and mod the game slightly. You might not like being a 'cheater' but you're only going to miss out and become a quitter if you don't. And just in case you've fallen into the trap the message at the beginning advising you to play very hard only advises you. You can play on whatever difficulty without any problems if it suits you because TATW is much harder than vanilla and most mods.

[martoto]

Don't give up on the mod. Do what I said and mod the game slightly. You might not like being a 'cheater' but you're only going to miss out and become a quitter if you don't. And just in case you've fallen into the trap the message at the beginning advising you to play very hard only advises you. You can play on whatever difficulty without any problems if it suits you because TATW is much harder than vanilla and most mods.

I actually play on Medium which is kinda the embarrassing part . But I played around with the scripts a bit and now all factions should have twice as much money in the king's purse. Also, I think I deleted the scripts that gave the AI additional money and stuff. I'll see how it goes from here on out.

[Greymane]

I actually play on Medium which is kinda the embarrassing part . But I played around with the scripts a bit and now all factions should have twice as much money in the king's purse. Also, I think I deleted the scripts that gave the AI additional money and stuff. I'll see how it goes from here on out.

I would not have recommended the last part. The AI starts with very few troops anyway and is extremely poor at managing economy, so you will find that deleting those money scripts will make the game extremely easy. Especially when playing vanilla, where the stack spam is insignificant, you will find simply walking through Mordor to be a little boring.
But by all means, try it this way. Maybe it's not that bad and you'll like it (haven't played vanilla in ages, if at all...).

[The Wandering Storyteller]

Here's what I don't get: How come in the fellowship campagin at the start you're required to have 5 units? I can't even spend on recruiting units!

[Carl Jung was right]

Stop trying to suggest him to mess with scripts, that is not helpful at all. Raise yourself up to meet the game's difficulty, rather than lower it to your level.

Gondor is the hardest faction in my opinion because you start near three very hostile and aggressive players, all of them setting their sights on you. How long you last depends on how well your allies fare, how quickly you expand in the early campaign and the kill ratio you inflict in battles. But my point is that it is meant to be beatable with the default settings, and you don't need to make the excuse of "hey the AI cheats, so I should as well" to beat it. Besides, there are plenty of ways to "game" within the mod itself by exploiting M2W's mechanics.

I'm more familiar with MoS and I highly recommend installing it, even if it takes a little pain (and several reinstalls).

Now the big question you need to ask yourself, what military tactics do you use?

Do you lose more than 1/3 of your forces when engaging Mordor stacks in battle? If so, learn to use cavalry charges effectively. Gondor's cavalry is some of the best in the game. Don't stick your cavalry in prolonged fights, withdraw them as soon as they deliver casualties from the initial charge bonus applied, and repeat, as one would with a surgical knife. Have them bypass flanks and attack the rear of an engaged blob, which is very easy to do, since Mordor has infantry armies. This will quickly ensue in a rout (especially against "captain" led stacks) allowing you to ride down a sizeable portion of the enemy army without any casualties. On "medium" battle difficulty, most orc units can be routed this way, before they take even 1/5 casualties! Cavalry charges ruin troll stacks as well, as long as the trolls are tarpitted in some trash unit first.

If an enemy has a high star general, focus on killing him first, either with assassins, or on the battlefield. This will immediately cause a morale shock, resulting in a mass rout.

Use archers as well. They may not be as powerful as the elves, but Gondor still has access to some very good archer units, and these can wear down the vast orc numbers faster than your infantry can by itself. I'd recommend having at least 5-6 good archers per stack.

One of the basic exploits of the game is to use and abuse the "pause" key. This offers you no advantage other than being able to think things through and issue orders to multiple units at once. In the hectic pace of battle, this can make the difference between defeat and victory. Most hardcore players consider this a bad habit however, (pause-scumming) as it makes the game too much like a turn-based combat sim, and is unrealistic to boot. In reality, a general doesn't get to stop time at the crucial moments to think over his decisions! It's a terrible habit to get accustomed to fighting like this if you ever intend to play any sort of multiplayer TW game. But if you're finding yourself outmaneuvered by the AI at every step, I'd say do it and I won't think any less of you.

Whether or not you want to save scum is up to you. Personally I'd advise against it as much as against editing script files to give yourself more gold/training slots/flying mumakil with fire cannons. But I see no problem with reloading a save due to a screw-up caused by bugs, poor pathing or accidentally issuing unwanted orders. Just don't reload every time you get smashed by a hostile stack hiding in a patch of trees, because you failed to use spies to spot it beforehand!

Speaking of which, use spies. Lots of them. Have every side of your realm bordering an enemy well within your line of sight. This allows you to respond quickly to enemy movements in your territory. Have a general build watch towers everywhere as well.

Do you have trouble re-training units? There's a neat little feature in M2W, allowing you to merge depleted units of the same kind. Use it after every battle to ensure as many of your units are at full strength as possible. Take the severely depleted units, and move them back to the nearest settlement be retrained. If you did it right, you should have to spend a lot less precious turns retraining your losses. Establish a "traffic" of units going back and forth from your main campaign stacks and the training settlements of depleted units and reinforcements, in order to meet Sauronist armies at full strength at all times. If you succeed in beating stack after stack, taking only a few casualties in return, you can shift the tug of war decisively in your favor.

Mordor trains lots of catapults. This is extremely annoying, perhaps more so than trolls. Catapults can take out huge chunks out of your preciously few elite units. One way I found to deal with them, is at the start of the battle, deploy as far away from the enemy as possible. Have archers move up to fire at the enemy mass (since Mordor has no cav, you don't have to worry about them being intercepted, this is harder to do with Rhun and Harad) causing them to run towards your main force. The AI will usually leave the catapults exposed, since they move at a snail pose compared to the rest of the army. Use cavalry to mow their crews down. This exploits the AI's lack of protection of its baggage train (a real player would never leave his catapults undefended), but hey it's not like you don't have enough things to worry about.

During settlement defence, there are several ways you can tip the scales in your favor tremendously, even in 3:1 odds. Don't deploy the bulk of your force near the walls and gates, I find that to be wasteful. Only leave one or two units there to keep the gate towers firing. Put them near narrow chokepoints closer to the town center (and if there are none, AT the town center itself) and activate guard. You want to have those Mordorite trash mobs funneling into the front ranks of your vastly superior infantry. A halberd or pikeman unit can achieve an obscene kill ratio here. Enemy ranged units, such as catapults and archers CAN make your life miserable in these cases, and there's little you can do about that. Fortunately, most of the time, the AI simply can't figure out how to move those ballistas and catapults in the right position to bombard you, while the archers shoot with ineffectual overhead fire. Your own archers, on the other hand, if deployed properly, can cause huge casualties even with overhead fire, if targeted at severely bunched-up orc or harad mobs.

An old trick in the book, which I used in vanilla M2TW as well, is to have a half stack (preferably led by a general with + to campaign movement traits) move deep into the enemy territory, and attack weakly held settlements and villages. This is considerably tougher with the garrison script of course, but you can still do it to most settlements in the rear area, which don't have more a handful of trashy units defending them anyway. Don't bother holding on to these settlements, merely sack them, raze all structures for gold and move on to the next one. After a turn or two, the settlement will be taken by rebels, making it even harder for the original owner to recapture it. Since the AI, in my playthroughs at least, has difficulty ordering itself to capture formerly held settlements which have fallen to rebels, you can severely cripple the foe's economy that way and vastly reduce the amount and quality of stacks he sends your way.

If playing with MoS, enable the Tol Acharn (Gondor Invasions) script to recapture key settlements that have been taken by the enemy. This is very useful if you've found yourself hard pressed by crusading evil stacks.

If playing with MoS, you can call your allies to drop what they're doing (i.e. nothing) and invade an enemy faction with a scripted command. This will take some of the heat off of you from the neighboring hostile factions. Don't neglect diplomacy, it has a huge impact on the game.

In MoS, you can also convene a diplomatic meeting, allowing your allies to send armies to your assistance.

In short, MoS gives you in-game, lore friendly scripts which can either help or hinder you, depending on the level of challenge you want to face.

I hope these tips convince you to successfully finish the Gondor campaign without artificially changing the mod's variables in your favor. Not only will you feel better about yourself, but also earn bragging rights!

[martoto]

Thanks for the tips Carl, but I have to say that most of the things you mentioned I already knew. I always do the charging-from-the-back-of-the-enemy thing to rout the enemy's units. I already know most of the tricks in the book. I use like tons of archers. The thing is, I just can't enjoy the game fully because I can't use Gondor's better units. I am going to try and continue playing the campaign but I'm not very hopeful. The stupid Easterling scum won't accept peace and I've no armies to send to Harad to counter them. I'm barely making half a k per turn which is by far not enough. All I can do now is hide behind the (crumbling) walls of East Osgiliath, Cair Andros, and Emyn Arnen and wait for Mordor to come.

Alright guys, I can't believe it but I've actually managed to win the campaign with Gondor (at last). I have to say that I do indeed feel pretty proud of myself for beating the game (even though it was at medium). But I will admit that I glitch in the game played to my advantage. I stacked a few archer and sword militia units in that fortress east of Cair Andros and Mordor besieged it with a huge army. But due to some bug they could never reach the gate with the ram and just stood there while my archers were f-ing them up. But I don't care if this was unfair. The damn AI constantly gets help from the game so I don't give a f.

So in the end even though the game was very very hard to beat with Gondor it was not impossible. So I stand corrected

[Carl Jung was right]

Congratulations on your win, martoto. I suggested whatever I could that may be helpful to you. I just don't see what could be causing you so much trouble. Last time I played Gondor was on h/h I believe (in TaTW 3.0 without any submods), and although I admit I didn't get as far as taking Barad-dur, I didn't find it becoming particularly grueling after the early-mid period scuffles. I remember how siege battles played a decisive role, shredding one-two full Mordor stacks at Minas Tirith at a time, while the rest of my provinces were left to develop. If you're having income difficulties, that's usually a sure sign of a too high army upkeep. You should really be able to make ends meet with one full stack to attack Mordor with and another to counter invasions from the other factions. Since you have to face attacks only from the east, I don't see why it's posing such a challenge. Are you blocking off key river crossings? Another way to easily beat the AI is to meet them by a river. In the end I had a good economy, 6-8k income per turn, both Osgiliaths and was plowing through Ithilien without much trouble. The reason I didn't finish that campaign was because I stopped playing M2TW, and when I came back to it, I installed several submods which were save incompatible. Perhaps you should try giving MoS a shot, that mod has a couple of options that make it easier to call on your allies to assist you.

Paradoxically as it may sound, increasing the campaign difficulty to vh/vh may actually make the game easier. This is because the mod was designed particularly for higher difficulties. The enemy AI gets boosts, but so do the "good" faction AI's, making them more aggressive and much more likely to draw the evil factions' ire away from you. Remember that Rhun has to contend with Dwarves and Dale in the North, not to speak of Mirkwood and Lorien doing their part to whittle down Mordor stacks.