Being Evil?

[taldarus]

OK, There are two parts:First, I have seen several references to things people have done to make the evil factions more easily playable as 'evil'. Mainly I am thinking about Fear and Sacking. I really don't want to spare the filthy humans, but destroying the population is painful. I saw one reference, in MoS, to how sacking might give a culture bonus; but in game I don't 'feel' like sacking is the best option.Fear seems to be useful, but I am not that familiar with vanilla Total war in the first place. I skipped two and went from medieval 1 to Empire. I only became interested in two when I heard about Third Age. So could an experienced player explain how, if any, being evil has been modded? In Third Age, MoS, or DaC (I can only download from ModDB).I have played a little MoS now, and I am downloading DaC to give it a try. I still may end up with no SubMod, but I dislike the faction layout of vanilla so I think I will end up DaC for the faction variety.Second, as an idea: I did notice, in MoS, that the Arnor faction had a building the seemed to be able to replenish troops automatically? Does that work?I would then wonder why the evil factions don't have such a thing, as it makes more sense for them to have it. Orcs are dangerous, in my limited understanding; because, once they have taken a city, you can bloody them. But rooting them out is almost impossible. Take Osgilliath, the books implied it was a big deal retaking Western Osgilliath, yes? But the place was a complete ruin, no industry or trades.Could you script the game to add an 'orc spawn pit' to any city the you Sack (Kill almost everyone). Thereby destroying the city as an industrial center, but allowing the offense driven evil factions an immediate replenishment of those 'limitless' orc hordes.To me that would feel closer to the books. As right now, my limitless orc army has to return to Isengard every five to ten turns to 're-limitless' their numbers.

[Flinn]

Hello dude, first of all, welcome to TWC

overall, the idea behind TA:TW was to make it a very hard nut to crack, so usually there is no easy faction to play if you go with a VH/VH game. Evil factions (orc ones in this specific case) receive much greater numbers than the good ones, with upkeep costs that are sensibly smaller; this has been done to simulate the swarming characteristic of orcs, while of course their overall quality results to be lower. This is valid for the majority of the Submods too, although some of them might be also "offering" more expensive and better units to orcs (for instance, in MOS 1.7 Mordor gets two/three special heavier units). Furthermore, consider that the game had to be balanced to offer a reasonable repeatability and some stability over the first 100 or so turns, in order to give time to all kind of players (turtlers included) to develop a kingdom before one of the main faction steamrolled everything. Actually the two evil factions that really get a bonus are Ruhn and Harad, in particular for their starting position and for the economy (it's not a case that Harad can spam tens of full stacks later in the game).

about the free replenishment of Arnor, I guess you refer to the houses used to retrain old Eriador units (those that remains when you reform Arnor and start to recruit arnorian troops). I personally don't know of any self-replenishment building in any case, but I might have been left behind (actually, only bodyguards replesnish automatically, no matter where they are).

[Steward Denethor II]

Don't sack cities, unless they are already very well developed, the minuscule plunder isn't worth the loss of population. Yes you will lose fear but it's better to let the places you conquer grow and become useful. Also NEVER exterminate unless you want to ruin a region. Fear is extremely useful but should've gained in other ways.

if you really don't like losing fear then you can save when you get the options and reload as needed. Another thing you can do is order a diplomat to repeatedly bribe anything. With a little patience your faction leader will gain so many points in strategydread that he can freely occupy cities. This also gives him some other great traits for authority.