"Battle for Middle Earth" Game

[Twista]

Recently purchased this game and it's actually pretty damn good for a strategy game.

If you dont know what it is then ill do a bit of explaining....

Its like the game "Age of Empires" - everyone must of heard of that... a army controlling strategic game. You play one of several races; Gondor, Rohan, Isenguard, and Mordor.

Screenshots (http://www.eagames.com/official/lordoftherings/thebattleformiddleearth/us/screenshots.jsp)

Does anyone own the game, I'd love to play against someone.

[Elessar the Elfstone]

I've got it, it took me about a week to complete and it is great!

only one critisim the best levels are helms deep and minas tirith and you can't play them in skirmish mode

[Twista]

Well my PC cant really handle it, which is quite rediculous acually, because my computer isnt bad.

Ive just about nearly finished the good campaigns...

My critisim is how stupid the computer is sometimes... but I guess thats why they invented online play..

We should organise a game sometime.

[ItalianLegolas]

I don't have it yet but I'm thinking of getting, I just bought Half-Life 2: Silver and it comes with like 15 other games, speaking of which, does anyone play Counter Strike here?

[Twista]

oooh yeh, i do, well used too, not played in a while. But i still have steam installed so i could play at any time.

[Last Child of Ungoliant]

if it is like Age of Empires, then I have to get it,
it sounds great

[ItalianLegolas]

oooh yeh, i do, well used too, not played in a while. But i still have steam installed so i could play at any time.

whats your username/ accountname?

[Twista]

whats your username/ accountname?

pholnrat

[ItalianLegolas]

:confused: interesting...

[Telcontar_Dunedain]

I will be getting it soon, but I just spent most of my money on the first two volumes of HoME.

[ItalianLegolas]

i have decided I am getting it, its a RTS right?

[Manveru]

i was hoping to get it for xmas but no luck. my friend just got it last weekend and he says its kick a**. ill probably try to get it soon

[me9996]

Not too sure where to put this.. but its based on the films so i assume here.

So has anyone else got it?

Its acually pretty damn good dont you think? The campaigns for really cool.

If you dont know what it is then ill do a bit of explaining....

Its like the game "Age of Empires" - everyone must of heard of that... a army controllying stragity game. You play one of several races; Gondor, Rohan, Isenguard, and Morder. There is a skirmish option, where you simply play against enemys and try to win the game, or the campaigns which are based good or evil. Anyway i could go on and on put it would take ages, research it if you want to know more lol. Here are some screenshots:

Screenshots (http://www.eagames.com/official/lordoftherings/thebattleformiddleearth/us/screenshots.jsp)

So... anyone got any views on it then?

I love it.. lol

Age of Empires is an RTS (real time stratagy game)

I have desided it is neet and humungus!

If you have a very big computer and like LotR and can understand the interface (No bottom bar guys!) I'd recamend it.

I have a tiny computer (3 Gigabates todle!)
so I can't play it :(

Hope this helps! :D

[Telcontar_Dunedain]

I bpught it on the weekend an have been playing it pretty much non-stop except for sleeping and going to school. However it takes ages to load a level or the game for me. Does this happen with anyone lese?

[me9996]

I bpught it on the weekend an have been playing it pretty much non-stop except for sleeping and going to school. However it takes ages to load a level or the game for me. Does this happen with anyone lese?
How would I know? It's a gigabite bigger than my computer! :rolleyes:

[Twista]

However it takes ages to load a level or the game for me. Does this happen with anyone lese?

Yeh like 10 minutes sometimes...

You probably need to wait for a Pentium 7 to come out before it will load and run smoothly :D.

Sometimes its really jumpy in-game too. You see that?

[Telcontar_Dunedain]

10 minutes sometimes! I envy you! A few nights ago it took 45 minutes for me to load one of the Rohan levels.

[me9996]

10 minutes sometimes! I envy you! A few nights ago it took 45 minutes for me to load one of the Rohan levels.
It's to big for my computer... but the way that you go on it kind of makes me glad about that :D

[Twista]

It's to big for my computer... but the way that you go on it kind of makes me glad about that :D

What do you mean? Dont get anyone wrong, the wait is worth it lol.

The storyline is acually really well structured, even though quite a few changes have been made ( this is needed though to make the game a little more lengthy.)

[ItalianLegolas]

that happens a lot with licensed games

[Twista]

I want to play now.. when we going to organise a Entmoot deathmatch? :p

[ItalianLegolas]

hehee... we could organize an Entmoot CS deathmatch...

[Telcontar_Dunedain]

I want to play now.. when we going to organise a Entmoot deathmatch? :p
I can't. It was to big for my PC so I use my Mums laptop and we haven't got an internet connection for that yet.

[ItalianLegolas]

TD, can you go on over to Appendix Trivia? You won last round

[Butterbeer]

has anyone ever played a game called stronghold or crusader? Kinda age of empires in the middle ages ( not middle earth though)

[me9996]

Does anyone know of a demo for Battle for Middle Earth?

P.S.
I have got a better computer at this time :D

[Curubethion]

I couldn't find a demo, but...Look at this! (http://www.eagames.com/official/lordoftherings/bfme2/us/home.jsp)

[me9996]

I know, I found it while looking for a demo (I hope they put out a demo for this one :rolleyes: )

[Rconsole]

Yeah I was reading about that a few weeks ago, it looks great, I really loved the first one...:D

[The Witch-King of Angmar]

has anyone ever played a game called stronghold or crusader? Kinda age of empires in the middle ages ( not middle earth though)

yes, i used to have a demo for it, i would have bought it because it was really cool, but i didn't have the cash. :(

[Curubethion]

Walmart sells it for $10 now...yes, Walmart. I am from Kansas, you know.

[Finrod Felagund]

Absolutely loved it...!!!

What an awesome RTS game.

[oropher]

yeah i've got it its great but the battle at Minis Tirith takes so long to finish my faviorite campian would have to be the ambush of the Haradrium in Ithilien :D

[me9996]

as it turns out they do have a demo for the second one and I'm downloading it as we speek, it is takeing way to long :(

[Telcontar_Dunedain]

I saw that. I ordered the second one last week, it looks really good. Who else is getting it?

[me9996]

I'm probubly not getting becuase of the price, I'm still downloading the demo *crazy smiley*

[me9996]

Update on my demo downloading, I had to restart doing it becoulse of internet problems :( but it's moveing faster now. :D

[Curubethion]

How long is it supposed to take you? It tells me I've got to download for 24 hours... :(

[me9996]

at the moment it says 24 minets, and it's at 89%!

[Curubethion]

So it took you about 3 hours...what is your modem? DSL or T-1? I've got a low-end modem...

I gave up on it and settled for a much smaller Civ 4 demo instead. (about 400 MB as opposed to 1.3 GB :eek: )

[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! :D :cool: 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. :evil: 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? :) :cool:

[me9996]

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

(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. :D 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. :D

[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]

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]

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

(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. :D

[Nautipus]

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. :D

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