"Battle for Middle Earth" Game

[me9996]

I've finished downloading the demo (the day before yesterday) and it is fun!

And by the way, it's a cable conection but something as been slowing it down.

[me9996]

On my birthday (A few weeks ago) I got BFMEII as a birthday presant!

I've been haveing lots of fun with it and waaayyy too much fun with the custom heros.

I even made a custom hero that is ment to be like me in the first Teacup war and now in the entmoot thing in the RPG forum.
(Might post stats for it)

P.S.
I have been have problems with useing similarly spelled words rather than the word I've been after lately so if I missed one of those in my text here that is why it is that way.

[tolkienfan]

I got the Battle for Middle Earth complete set a while ago (The Battle for Middle Earth, the Battle for Middle Earth II, and The Battle for Middle Earth II expansion pack Rise of the Witch King.) So far I've only played the first one, (My computer is smallish.) Is the second one way better and I'm wasting my time? Should I play them both together? I think it's really fun so far by the way.

[Noble Elf Lord]

I have all of them, and they just get better. You´re not wasting your time, in the second and the expansion pack you can build virtually anywhere - no building plots! I´d recommend you play just the campaigns from the second one and then move to the Rise of the Withcking. The skirmish has been updated. I love the Noldor Warriors and the Dwarven Zealots. One of the best games ever IMO.

[tolkienfan]

Thanks Noble Elf Lord! I also think it is an awesome game.

[Noble Elf Lord]

And guess what? I can moderate the first one! For example, make the Elves shoot more swiftly or add Orcs to battalions. Wanna learn?

[me9996]

Heh, if I don't need any programs more advanced than notepad I'm game

(Or maybe MsPaint or Word, wordpad)

[Ingwe]

I've been playing this game online since it came out. I started with the first one in July of 2005. Those were the "good old days" when I'd have more than two people to play online with. BFME2 came out in March 2006, and I got that, started playing it a lot, though still played BFME1.

I started getting into modifying the game a little as well. Initially I started out with just making Tom Bombadil nearly invincible, since he's Tom Bombadil ya know. He only appears on the map for so long anyway.

I helped make a few models and textures for it quite recently because some friends of mine and myself started a modding team for Battle for Middle Earth 2 and use my site as a central hub for storing the materials for the mod.

I got Rise of the Witch-King right when it came out and I liked it a lot, but my computer then wasn't good at anything over medium graphics, and I usually had to use lower texture quality, which wasn't too good.

That game suffered balance issues to the extreme. Jokingly, I called the Dwarven Axe Throwers "Hax throwers" since they could take out 3 units of equivalent archers easily and still survive in the choosing. EA Games actually released a patch this past April to give the game better balance, so that was good. Before that though, someone could play as Dwarves against another player who didn't know better, build nothing but Dwarven axe throwers, and finish the game in record time with relatively few losses of their own.

One thing that's quite interesting is the Shade of Wolf power that Angmar has. It's relatively annoying as it's harder to take down than a Balrog and it moves way faster than any of your units can run!

On both BFME2 and ROTWK, the summon dragon power of Isengard was quite destructive. If you don't have a huge base and redundant buildings for production, you could be in some serious trouble. The summoned dragon is also nearly invincible. You have to shoot everything you can at it, but it will usually disappear and run out of time before you can bring it down. Very few heroes are a match for even a couple of its fire-breath rampages.

On a map the other day I was playing against someone who played as Men of the West. I played as Elves. I got all my heroes up quite early while my opponent had few units of their own after being owned by Elrond's tornado power. I had them down to the last, and all of the sudden the Army of the Dead showed up, killing all of my heroes except for Elrond and Haldir. I had made the mistake of underestimating how many action points my opponent had, along with forgetting that they had in fact used Army of the Dead before and I generally ignored it as it only took out a couple of my battle towers, and the major mistake was of course putting all of my heroes in one place! I won the match, but had a terrible tactical skill score in the result.

But yeah, I love these games, besides the obvious fact that you shouldn't be able to summon Tom Bombadil anywhere outside the area near the Barrow Downs. Balrogs also die too easily. If you have upgraded archers (whether they're Men of Dale, upgraded Dark Rangers of Angmar, Noldor Warriors, upgraded Axe Throwers, upgraded MotW rangers, or upgraded Lorien Warriors, you have a pretty good chance of taking it down. You have the speed and agility advantage over the 'rog as well as having upgraded Silverthorn arrows and such. The dragon of Isengard is basically a crush your enemy weapon that takes a long time to die out and will destroy half of your base unless you have walls and fortresses everywhere!

A few months ago, just to get better at modding, we made an Elven-Dwarven Alliance mini-faction that actually has Silverthorn Axes, a new builder so that you can build a heavier fortress for a price of 10,000 resources, etc.

It's a fun game to play, and to mod. But modding it is certainly complicated if you want to go beyond modifying the ini files.

[orithil]

I have the game its really awesome, i have saves for Minas Tirith and Helms deep just uncase i want to go back and play it lol because i think those are the best levels.

[Ingwe]

They have some really awesome maps on filefront's LOTR Files. Some of the maps there don't have screenshots for them, and I almost never download a map that doesn't show screenshots of it before hand, unless it sounds canon or awesome, or both, or just not some ****ty map that, I don't know, has bugs and stuff. But sometimes it's trial and error. Even some of those custom maps that look like they're big stuff end up being badly-scripted or not pathed well so that when you try to move somewhere you have to go, you can't. Argh! Oh well, that's my rant on maps

It's a pretty awesome game - present and (hopefully) future tense that is. Of course that must mean that in the past things weren't so hot...

...And indeed they weren't. Back a month or two ago I wouldn't have been saying the same thing. I had the biggest piece of junk for a graphics card that seemed to make BFME 2 and ROTWK crash to desktop (CTD) after 20 to 40 minutes of gameplay. Well that was just great - about to destroy my enemy and all of the sudden I crash out of game. I've had about 10 instances where I was about to destroy an opponent online, but I end up crashing. When I get back in, they thought I left the game because they thought that I thought I was losing. Well that starts to look bad after a while. Play a good game, almost win, and then out of nowhere that "almost win" doesn't count because to win you actually, well, have to win. And unfortunately I liked to torture my opponents at the end of the game by launching small but effective attacks against the stuff I didn't care about just so I can get as much rank as I could before I won. Not a good idea if you have a GeForce 6200TC (Turbo Cache) 256MB card. For some reason that card performed well, that is until the game crashed.

So, logic finally set in and I finally decided to get rid of that so-called video card of doom and got myself a GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB. It's not the best one, as the GTX and Ultra are better, but it's close enough and for a far better price. And what games am I going to play that needs anything more than this? So yeah, the game doesn't crash anymore and I can now get through games that are 20, 40, 60, 120, and God-forbid, even 240 minutes long! If I ever have enough time to do a 4-hour-long game, someone please admit me to the funny farm. So I'm only assuming it will last 4 hours, or however long it needs to last. So essentially any game can now have a possibly successful outcome. It definitely isn't about who wins the game anymore - it's about not crashing anymore. It's definitely a lot more convenient now when I don't have to worry about crashing just two seconds before taking out my opponent's last building (which happened, I'm not even kidding, 4 times). The crashing just got way too depressing to deal with after a while and it was time for a major change.

WorldBuilder actually works now too, that's an added bonus.

[Nautipus]

I've beaten both games at least once, but really loved them. I heard that there was an expansion pack out that would either a) Let you be a race of dragons (dont really know how that applies to LotR) or b) Be able to summon the dragon indefinately. I dont know if they are true or not, but it would be cool if they were.

[Ingwe]

Originally Posted by Nautipus

I've beaten both games at least once, but really loved them. I heard that there was an expansion pack out that would either a) Let you be a race of dragons (dont really know how that applies to LotR) or b) Be able to summon the dragon indefinately. I dont know if they are true or not, but it would be cool if they were.

Affirmative. I've heard about it as well. If I could find the link I would post it. Consider this as a hint to a possible sequel expansion pack:

The CD label for BFME2: Rise of the Witch-King looks like this:

"LOTRBFME2EP1"

The above means explicitly: "Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2: Expansion Pack 1 aka Rise of the Witch-King". Apparently the next one will be "LOTRBFME2EP2".

So it seems highly likely that the rumor could indeed be true, and perhaps not all too misleading.

One thing that's not (as) certain is the possibility for BFME 3, which probably won't happen.

[Noble Elf Lord]

Originally Posted by me9996

Heh, if I don't need any programs more advanced than notepad I'm game

(Or maybe MsPaint or Word, wordpad)

It´s just about modding the ini. Perhaps I shouldn´t try to explain, you find the instructions in http://mevault.ign.com/View.php?view=Tutorials.List&category_select_id=2. It´s fun.

[Ingwe]

Search for TextPad - good alternative for Notepad. TextPad 4 to me is the best version though. It color codes script and all that for file types such as php, c++, asp, html, ini files, etc. Quite useful for just about everything that requires any programming or modding or web developing. It doesn't have a file limit either like notepad does and it doesn't make funky alterations to your stuff like wordpad does (formatting).

A really fun thing to do in BFME 2 or Rise of the Witch-King is to go into the playertemplate.ini file using FinalBig editor and adding heroes to a race. For instance you can add two or more instances of the same hero. Elrond is a good one. Get two Elronds to rank 10 and they can restore each other and when you get Galadriel or if you have a custom hero archer who can spawn a tornado - you have 4 heroes who can already use tornado. Using restore after using the tornadoes will restore all your heroes. Use the other Elrond to restore again and back and forth, as long as you keep restoring the other Elrond along with the other tornado-spawning heroes of doom. Tons of tornadoes on the screen that way.

Of course you could just edit the reload time, which is easier, but doing this way is another way of doing it.

There's a lot of Command and Conquer stuff in BFME 2 so if you wanted you could add models, textures, and ini files for tanks and planes and stuff. Imagine having tanks running over orcs.

[Nautipus]

Originally Posted by Ingwe

There's a lot of Command and Conquer stuff in BFME 2 so if you wanted you could add models, textures, and ini files for tanks and planes and stuff. Imagine having tanks running over orcs.

If there's Comand and Conquer stuff in it I'd like to see some Annihilator Tripods walking over orcs, blasting them to bits!