In this post, I will describe the technical difficulties involving the creation of an Erebor map for the Special Extended Edition, Director’s Cut. By now you have probably seen my latest The Lonely Mountain campaign map, a spectacular map that took the very best of what I am capable of right now, and it was nearly lost on the way. If you haven’t seen it yet, which is strange because I also plastered it on T3A:Online’s Facebook community, I will link my Youtube trailer at the end of this post.
The first challenge was gathering the required materials for such a map as Erebor. I was not going to do a botched job of hundreds of badly arranged objects, the worst kind of map in my opinion, and probably the worst because I would certainly love to do things the easy way. No, everything had to be carefully and purposely planned and laid out. Which is why I waited for a gate set. I had a gate in the oven but it was clunky and inaccurate, I’m only developing my skills with Blender. NewErr created had a gate and the great giant statues that stand in front, and this is from the days of An Unexpected Mod campaign mod, but he had recently completed it and was scouting for maps for his next release, Battle Under Trees.
I had been working on various things for the Dwarves in Director’s Cut, and part of that is creating the new maps that would go along with the next release with the Erebor faction and The Misty Mountains faction. Whenever I would plan out a possible map for Erebor I was always stumped. Such a map, one that would bring the Greatest Kingdom of Middle-earth to skirmish play, would be impossible in the game. Therefore, I would create multiple maps.
The possible map list for skirmish play includes:
- An Erebor tournament map, mirrored and I am hoping to get some play-testers on board, nothing too fancy that would detract from the map
- A Halls of Erebor map, set deep inside, with the mausoleum and treasure rooms, there would be a lot of height differences and tight corridors in this map, like my Goblin Town map.
- The Mines of Erebor, just because of the vastness of Erebor, I don’t want to squeeze the many features of the place into one map. This map might have the forge.
- Erebor, just as Erebor, with players outside and a player inside, the gate would be to scale, although the top part would be translucent for gameplay. This would be the fortress map and would not include any large part of Dale or Ravenhill, it would be focused on being a good fortress map.
- The Lonely Mountain, a modified version of the campaign map. The campaign map does not require the building of structures, so I did not sculpt the terrain with large open and flat spaces as a priority, in fact I avoided anything not naturally sloped.
These are my concepts that take form as partial maps or sketches in my notepads. They are up for discussion and I would love to hear your ideas.
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