SDN Battle for Middle Earth 2 thread

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-09-04 10:44pm

It seems BFME2 is one of those games that nobody talks about! Vympel and I were individually under the impression nobody else here played it. So I made a thread to get you all out of the woodwork.

I never played the first one, but I remembered people here quite liking it so I nabbed BFME2 on the cheap. It's pretty neat, although you need that 'polished' mod to iron out some of the bugs. Now that I've played it for a bit, though, all the games I play just boil down to 'rush, spam, rush, spam'. Each squad doesn't last long in combat, so you need to constantly build more (as is usual in RTSes). Things like the worthless walls, and structures with too few hitpoints make siege weapons too powerful, and many units aren't that useful. Also, the Rohirrim-wanking irritates me.

The custom hero thing is way cool, if deeply, deeply unbalanced. My evil hero 'Grand N00bian' is way, way overpowered for some random Harad guy with a bow. Also, because xp is calculated on kills, a hero without a bow or horse gets xp very slowly in big fights.

Count Dooku · Post by **Count Dooku** » 2006-09-04 11:09pm

I have it, and love it. My custom hero is an Elven Archer. He kicks serious ass. There's just nothing like having Legolas, his paps, and my custom hero all at the same time.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2006-09-04 11:40pm

My favorite custom hero is a Dwarf with a disgusting earthshaker ability. That, and invulnerability, and berserker.

I've done reasonably well with defenses, against the computer, naturally.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-09-05 12:45am

I've found that the way to defend in this game is not to rely on walls the way you did in BFME, but to use something more analogous to WW1-style defenses, with ranged weapons in towers being the primary defense rather than walls. Fortresses are only useful insofar as they contain plenty of ranged weapons, especially with the garrisonable structures available to certain teams. I don't even bother with walls at all.

The elven archers with the silverthorn blue arrows are unreal. Get a couple of guard towers up at a chokepoint with silverthorn elven archers in them and nothing gets through.

Mind you, the command-point limitation still bugs the hell out of me. I never liked the way you were restricted to puny armies in BFME, and your armies are still pretty small in this one. But I'm sure that can be modded.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-09-05 06:09pm

Yeah, there's a few mods floating around that fix some things that are considered bugs (like inappropriate damagetypes etc) and changing some things based on the useful/uselessness of structures. I was amused to note that walls are almost worthless (being so weak, they can't actuall hold up an attack) that hardly anyone ever builds one.

Has anyone played network games? The skirmish AI is pretty unimaginative (it just spits units at you as fast as it can) but I don't know anyone else with the game.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-09-05 07:09pm

I can't say I've ever bothered with walls in any RTS bar a few select instances where it was just too useful and cheap to get the tally up by making a killzone. More often than not, just arranging guard units into a decent fixed formation helps in dispatching enemies without any need for walls.

I'll have to consider getting this if it's got over some of the niggles of the original.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-09-05 07:13pm

It's funny in BFME though because there's a whole 'build and upgrade walls' thing in there... and it's basically useless.

I'm looking for a mod that relaxes command limits, puts all nine nazgul in, and balances out some of the custom hero powers, but no luck yet. The 'polished' mod I'm using at the moment reduces the 'coerce' area significantly though, so Grand N00bian can't coerce a dozen units at once anymore.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-09-06 02:08am

One thing I miss from the original is the ability to combine archer and melee units into a single unit, I thought it was quite cool. Still, the new features more than make up for it.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-09-06 02:14am

I think that the walls should be much tougher and archers should be much weaker, if they want to make this game fit the spirit of the movies more closely. What's the point of these fancy new wall-building features if the walls are basically a useless waste of resources anyway? If the movie were like the game, the trolls would have smashed down the walls of Minas Tirith in about 5 seconds. No need to go after the door when the walls themselves can be knocked down by hitting them two or three times! And garrisoned archer towers in this game are so powerful that they act almost like machine-gun nests in real-life. A few of them, particularly when layered, can mow down even large attacks without even needing any kind of infantry or cavalry support.

And the command-point limit is a real irritation that was held over from the original game and should have either been removed or greatly altered. Short of using a trainer, I imagine the most obvious solution would be to mod the game to greatly increase that limit, or to greatly decrease the command-point cost of new units. It's pretty fucking absurd to use up almost a quarter of your starting command points by building a single unit of archers.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-09-06 02:46am

That's why I found the crapditude of the walls so jarring. They even let you build hubs on your fortress, to build a massive and complex castle... but even the AI will crush it in a few minutes with little trouble. Like you say, you're better off using towers in-depth.

At least the mod I'm using changes some of the building upgrade costs: for some of the barracks structures, it can cost 1000 for an upgrade that gets you basically nothing (or a production speed bonus (for twice the cost of a new building!) and a crappy arrow tower). Some of the teams get owned on the buildings and upgrades they need to do to get their good units out.

It was a little disappointing that it's got the unit-based system of Rome without the battle endurance. Some units (most of the orcs) can get wiped out in a few seconds, and then you've got to build more - this is only made worse by the low command limit, meaning a starting orc army can be defeated very quickly by (say) a dwarf army. End result: heaps of units don't get used much.

Acidburns · Post by **Acidburns** » 2006-09-07 07:18am

I have this game, and it is fun, but suffers from some series issues. Mostly it's the extremely fragile buildings that fucks the game balance up. A common tactic is to just rush your first couple of units past the enemy and start suicidally taking out his farms. I've even seen two armies drive right past each other in order to take out the others base. The outer defenses on the fortresses are particularly useless, unless your desperate. If they upped the building toughness I think it'd be a much better game. Heroes and the army powers are maybe a bit over-powered towards the end. I suppose this is done to accelerate the late stage of the game, and avoid a stalemate. However many of the powers can be simply frustrating, rather than game winning.

Still, it can be great fun if you play with friends. The siege maps are fun multiplayer maps. Combat is fairly satisfying to watch. I can't play it for too long as the imbalance/hero powers/army powers can piss me off sometimes.

If your looking for a nice custom hero, I've seen some good ones based on human melee heroes.