Difficulty
first 15 turns- very easy, took helm's deep without much fight
after that- very hard, rohan launched a massive counterattack, retook helm's deep and had double the troops i did, i should have lost the campaign then but they moved all their full stacks to gineard (rohan-owned settlement) and just stayed there. it was like gineard was a black hole or something that sucked in their entire army lol. ill have to replay the campaign because this screwed up my perception of balance. anyway because of this i had time to build up my army, i took hornburg and edoras so rohan was basically done but they still had 3 settlements. i ignored them and was planning on attacking enedwaith or elves when rohan launched a full stack on edoras and almost recaptured it, thats wat i get for letting my guard down
. by the time i took the rest of their settlements, mordor had already captured minis tirith (around turn 75) so gondor was essentially finished
Global balance
-dorwinion is winning the war against rhun, they were holding them off singlehandeldly and captured the settlement west of rhun's capital and also a settlement to the SW of it, however mordor got involved late and is helping hold off dorwinion
-dol guldur started a war with rohan which helped out a little bit, if rohan only has isengard as its enemy things will get ugly
-mountain orcs got crushed by vale & both dwarf factions, only have 1 settlement left
-at one point late game, every single one of gondor's armies that werent garrisoned were up north fighting me and endewaith; this happened even though mordor and harad were attacking & they were the greater threat. gondor would last alot longer if they didnt view the northern front as such a high priority
-endewaith and dunland are fighting each other instead of bree; endewaith expanded pretty far, took some gondor settlemts and pushed north pretty far until the dunland war which stalled their progress
-angmar is very strong, captured bree, they're the superpower in the north but late in the game lost bree and are getting pushed back by the surrounding factions
-dol amroth didnt seem to be doing much, as gondors 'elite force' i thought they would be more active
-umbar does absolutely nothing expect participate in sauron's invasions
-vale of anduin is very strong
-shadow of mirkwood is turtling hard, like 95% of their troops are garrisoned, the rest are sitting in their territory doing nothing
-also woodland realm is barely active as well, arent attacking anyone
i have two lists, random things that i liked and bugs, the bug list is longer but i'd fill up two pages if i posted all the things i liked lol
random things i liked-
love the trolls of the white hand, completely contradicts lore but i love them, before trolls i had nothing to break the op elves' defenses (evil face) and now i can take on mordor if i want to (time to kik some olog-hai ass lol)
like the buffed wargs, especially the speed, they're like cheetahs or something now lol
i've never played tatw or a tatw mod with turn times as fast as dac 0.3, someone must have seriously optimized the scripts..like in mos it'll take about a minute for turns late game, in dac the turns breezed by
its nice having lurtz and ugluk (even tho they hve weak bodyguards)
actually being able to build and recruit in castles before like turn 200 is great lol, i can actually use foldburg now
the saruman ring script is the best tatw mod ever
bugs/other feedback
-there is a lot of stack spam, barracks event helps somewhat but until then the stacks are like ants
-gineard (rohan-controlled) was like a black hole/rohan magnet, they just put like 3 full stacks there and kept them there until i attacked helm's deep and edoras, they should have crushed me but didnt
-hero get negative traits, irrc they didnt in previous versions? i kno theres a mod that does this (mos has it) and it'd be nice
-i had saruman in edoras and moved in some random general but he was the governor instead of saruman, i tried but couldnt get saruman back as governor
-rohan bodyguards are crazy, they're definitely op and it took me like an hour to kill rohan generals, one general stays alive for an eternity even tho he's surrounded by 400 troops lol
-rohan axemen seem a little too strong, good stats for the price and they have AP weapons but maybe rohan needs them?
-sometimes warg riders lose their blazing fast speed and revert back to their marching speed, i cant even get them to run normally they just march slowly
-very hard to get mordor to become an ally w/ isengard, take a very long time
-governors get the "poor with taxes" trait even when they're not building anything, taxes are low but in vanilla they only got the trait when a building was completed while taxes were low
-when fighting near edoras there were very very steep inclines on the battle map, made it impossible to fight
-isengard has 3 levels of troll buildings, but they all do the same thing (trolls white hand- max available 1)
-crash 9/10 times i play moria, happens late in the battle
-black numenoreans are silver, horses arent black either
-ents siege, next turn they withdraw and siege again and all of my troops have taken slight casualties as a result; also ctd upon battle start
-CTD when attacking gynd: battle map doesnt load
-umbar didnt do anything the entire game except participate in saurons invasions
-could give rhun back nehburkha, it provides good income w/ gold mines but its a khand starting province if you think dorwinion is too strong
-dol amroth doesnt do very much, they defended a little against harad late game but they were mostly inactive