The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth

[Ancalagon]

And I shall pick it up from a friend and DL it onto my CP. There after I shall play it for roughly a week, grow bored with it, place it in a dark corner, and promptly forget about it. Three months to a year shall pass, wherein I will stumble upon it, blow the dust off it's cover, grimmace at the terrible memories of time wasted, and give it back to my now estranged friend.

 

Or I may just forget about it...

 

Probably the latter.

[Zmid]

My own opinion:

 

Pros:

 

Fast, action based gameplay (if that's your kind of game).

 

Passes the time.

 

Cons:

 

Total waste of LOTR license. The Good campaign has to twist the natural flow of the game to even make a slight attempt to follow the books/films, the Evil campaign disregards the books/films entirely.

 

Not enough realism in units strengths, weaknesses and behaviour.

 

Heroes - nice idea, but unbalance the game too much. At one point, I was successfully holding off the whole of Mordor's forces using just six Heroes, Aragorn's hero healing powers, and the generic Heal power.

 

Maps are too small for that type of game.

 

Resources are too easy to come by.

 

Enemy AI too easily defeated, even with self-imposed handicap of 'no Heroes'.

 

 

 

 

Basically, if you like games like Age of Mythology, but find them too difficult, and forget this game has 'Lord of the Rings' in the title, then you might enjoy this game. Otherwise, don't touch it with a bargepole.

[loveme4whoiam]

There you go then. Peregrine and White Wolf have just raised all the points of issue which i have with BfME, and the RTS genre in general. Games like this may be fun if you wish to avoid thinking about playing games, and we all do at some point (why do you think i keep the Serious Sam 2 demo on my PC?), but for an experience that you will remember and want to come back to, BfME/C&C clone No. 52 do not provide that.

 

I have played the game, or at least the demo, and was unimpressed, for these reasons. Sorry to go off on one above Dunedain, but i would prefer to see an end to C&C clones and a rise in Total War clones - like Imperial Glory which comes out soon.

[Dunedain]

* Unit AI is pathetic at best. A mounted charge should not stop completely on reaching the first enemy in its path. But that's what they do, instead of continuing the charge and smashing the enemy formation.

 

found a way round this, instead of targeting the enemy at the front row, target it at the back and the cavalry will charge through all the ranks just to reach that back row (obviously the front row would change depending on where your cavalry is relative to the unit you want to attack).

 

I found that same problem with cavalry in medieval total war even though it got slightly improved in rome total war ts still not perfect.

[Iluventi]

I found the AI totally frustrating at time, but..

 

I just put up with it, and enjoyed looking at the pretty looking landscapes and units.

[batesmotel34]

* Unit AI is pathetic at best. A mounted charge should not stop completely on reaching the first enemy in its path. But that's what they do, instead of continuing the charge and smashing the enemy formation.

 

found a way round this, instead of targeting the enemy at the front row, target it at the back and the cavalry will charge through all the ranks just to reach that back row (obviously the front row would change depending on where your cavalry is relative to the unit you want to attack).

 

I found that same problem with cavalry in medieval total war even though it got slightly improved in rome total war ts still not perfect.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The game seems to separately distinguish intent to engage a unit by clicking on it when the cursor is red from charging through the unit. This will cause a missle unit to shoot at the target and a melee unit to close to mellee with the unit. I think that cavalry will do some charge damage to a unit when it closes to melee it but it does seem to be less than if you charge through the unit. To charge through the unit and hence disrupt it and kill some of the unit, clicking beyond the unit will cause the cavalry to charge through the unit without stopping to melee. My general expereince has been that repeatedly charging through units will cause the most cumulative damage to the targets while minimizing the damage to the cavalry but the cavalry does suffer some damage. Most effective when several units charge together so the target is hit by multiple waves. In grmrral I try to stay away from letting cavalry (or warg riders) stopping to melee a target since they seem to suffer more losses and kill fewer enemey than when they charge through the enemy unit.

 

Rohirrim Archers seems to be the most effective cavalry in my expereince since they charge through enemy as well as other mounted and will engage enemy that they are not charging through by firing at them rather than getting stuck in melee.

[Peregrine]

In theory, yes, that's how it should work. Maybe it was fixed in a patch, but countless times I've assigned a target in the back row, expecting exactly that, but my cavalry stops at the first thing they hit, and the AI forgets its previous order.

 

Rohirrim Archers seems to be the most effective cavalry in my expereince since they charge through enemy as well as other mounted and will engage enemy that they are not charging through by firing at them rather than getting stuck in melee.

 

That's now how it should work at all. Cavalry archers shouldn't be anywhere near melee range. The whole point of putting the archers on horses is to give them a speed advantage so they can stay at long range from their targets, even when those targets try to close the distance. But the AI refuses to do this. They'd rather go into melee and just sit there taking blows than use proper tactics.

[batesmotel34]

Peregrine,

 

I do not have the B4ME V1.0.1 patch that was released in late January and I don't know of any earlier ones. I'll see if I can get a version from my game this weekend to see if there were different releases shipped by EA on the install media. (I have the DVD version which I guess could be different from the CD release.)

 

The behavior I see depends on whether I click on an enemy horde/battalion (when the cursor is red) or if I click on open space. If the cursor is red, Rohirrim archers will shoot at the enemy unit, normal Rohirrim will close with the target (not sure what happens if there is an intervening enemy unit although my guess is they charge through that rather than stopping to fight it). If the cursor is green when I click and it is behind one or more enemy hordes/battalions, then both Rohirrim archers and normal Rohirrim will charge through the intervening enemy units to move to the new location.

 

One thing that the AI could do but doesn't is to have Rohirrim Archers move away from enemy that attemot to melee them although it would probably need to be a special order (like guard is now). At the moment they will shoot at enemey that are closing to melee them and stand when the enemey gets into melee with them.

[Barenziahlover]

I than a long time paper and pencil roleplaying game and computer game player that is 54 year old. In the Late 1970's to the middle 1980's EA make great games for the comoda 64, apple 2e, amiga computer and IBM computer. They distributes games from other companies like SSI and Interplay.

 

Lately since they became than public company they games arenot as good as they where once. Red Alert2 is than fun game not to be taken sercious. Is this game the one you need than window 2000 or windowXp to play as you need more than 516 meg of memony to play.

 

MERP and Rolemaster put out by ICE(out of bussien) didnot follow the Lord of the Ring book that closely. If it did it wouldnot be fun to play in middle earth it you knew what the outcome would be.

[Guest]

Battle For Middle-earth is a fun game that makes good use of the Lord of the Rings movie license. It's nothing GROUNDBREAKING or AMAZING, it's just a fun RTS game using the LOTR characters and settings.