Nerevar42

Before I start, I want to say that I might sound frustrated, because I am.

Please just reduce the resource multiplier the AI gets. It is able to build heavy bases way too soon, and late game units way before me, even though I'm trying to harass its eco as much as I can without my own army dying to its units (which is cool that they hit units instead of buildings, but still).

I could easily stand against a Difficult AI in vanilla, and now I just have to turtle, even with MM (but maybe I am a bad MM player), against all Peasant AIs that are too aggressive and recover way too easily after a strike on their base.

Your work to improve the AI is outstanding, don't get me wrong, but you really should review the amount of difficulty encountered by average players on the lowest difficulty levels. If people want their enemy in PVE to earn 3 times more resources than them, Captain and Death March are here for them, don't rise up artificially the difficulty of the easy levels with each update just like you did with 6.0 and 7.0 ! They're meant to be easy !

I just can't attack the AI base anymore until I have T4 and siege and upgraded units. If trying a bit sooner, I get destroyed and the AI just casually rebuilds everything I took down in a single minute. So I just turtle with all factions waiting for late game stuff. This makes me feel like I can't play anymore. Yeah, they don't bring up siege too soon, so I don't get shishkebabed and I still win in the end, but do you understand what I mean ?

I'm genuinely surprised how hard it has become to play against AI. I mean, it's for the best if we're talking about high difficulty levels, that can drive pro players to approach things differently and turtle more, but for the easy ones ? Something has to be done about it. I want to attack the enemy while playing the game, maybe getting repelled a few times or failing to harass, but not just getting wrecked each time I send early game units towards the AI.

Maybe I'm just a bad player, and I'm whining about something that nobody gives a shift about. But I said what I wanted to say.

Best regards and thanks for the update regardless, it's amazing apart from this big problem to me.

Maybe you're right about Druids of the Oaken Order, but I'm not sure that your logic of choosing a specific power in a specific situation applies for Elvenking's Decree, which is simply worst than Elvenking's Feast in my opinion (fast-moving armor buff against 60s of resources per kill, I don't even know how much precisely because I never see it used). It is kind of a "deep delving" equivalent because WR is supposed to hit and run multiple times at the beginning of the game, but it needs you to do something during 60 seconds instead of waiting for your resources to arrive just like with Deep Delving or the Gondor marketplace.

The waystone, okay, it is situational but still good. But it doesn't need that much micro, it's just that it is not proactive so you merely can counter anything from your opponent thanks to this power. You can surprise them if you're already in a good position, but if you're in a good position, you want to go for the most powerful spells, such as Elvenking's Feast and the slow, in order to win the next battle and maybe the game by doing so.

I would recommend keeping these powers because they're interesting but the fact that they are not giving any direct advantage compared to a lot of other T2s makes them kind of ignored. But maybe this is simply the intrinsic purpose of spells that makes them more or less used every game, with combat abilities more frequent and others more situational.

I think it largely depends on how the game goes. If you're skilled enough that you can sneak in some multiple fortresses, and if your enemy (or enemies) is struggling just enough so you can sneak it in, that discount does actually add up. It's like with having multiple forges.

I don't see how you can "sneak in" multiple fortresses, really. If your enemy is struggling enough to be unable to see you making multiple fortresses, they should have been very dead for a while anyway, at least if we refer to the actual way of playing the game in multiplayer.

It's not like having multiple forges, fortresses are worth 5000, that's over ten times more than a forge. I understand how it's fun to play with friends to "who will build the most fortresses before killing an already suspended dead opponent", but it's not how the game is supposed to be played ! Well, I guess ?

Rohan is one of the coolest factions, and I have way too much fun charging in with dozens of riders yelling “À mooooooooort !” and all this kind of stuff. Without any surprise though, one of the black spots of this faction is the spellbook power “Muster the Rohirrim”, which is bad and this is why nobody’s using it. Again, cavalry units are expensive and making them train faster doesn’t make any sense unless you have a bazillion resources to spend in one shot, which is rare because you only save big stonks of resources to get expensive heroes or heroic units. You could replace that power, I think, with a passive buff to cavalry speed production, or an equivalent to Fully Armed and Filthy but for cavalry only, it would be in my opinion much more efficient coupled with a strategy that intends to create an army of almost only horsemen.

Rohirrim and Rohirrim archers are sadly often pointless. They are taking a long time to be recruited, and their intrinsic power isn’t as great as the one Riders of Snowbourne are taking advantage of. All of those units need a lvl 2 stables to be available, but the choice of the player often tends to be the Snowbourne instead of Rohirrim, because the first are quite stronger than the seconds without any noticeable difference in time of training, price or other weaknesses. I would say that maybe a Horde bonus on Rohirrim would make them a great choice to build a cavalry-only army. This way we could see them used more often compared to Riders of Snowbourne.

One thing that still feels weird to me is the idea of keeping the BFME 2 fortress upgrades that need other fortresses to grow stronger. That seems not consistent with the dynamic core of AOTR, in which building a second fortress in a game already seems to be unlikely, but 3, almost impossible. If you don’t want to change the effects of these upgrades, I would simply implement them as a slightly better upgrade than the lvl 1 (for example, Burning Forges at 35 % or Excavations at 20 %) so the player does not read an effect that will never get to properly affect his game because they will never have more than two fortresses during a match. I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but this feels really unnecessary to me to let this kind of mechanics in AOTR, because they’ll never trigger anyway, so I don’t know why they are still here.

The power Muster the Dwarves is very bad. Dwarves are expensive, so you can’t queue a large number of them before using the power, and slow, so you can’t make them rush in to save the day after they made it out of the barracks faster than usual. You truly need to change that power into something better, in my opinion, because nobody’s ever going to use a power which is that bad, unless they are in a very very specific situation that involves an enemy army in the base and a lot of resources to spend instantaneously. I also think Fully Armed and Filthy should give additional Forged Blades with the Heavy Armor, given the very restrained radius of the power. Also, Send in the Goats is already strong in itself, but it then drives into the extremely powerful and absolutely epic Moria Reclaimed, that then gives you access to the not less insane Cave-in. I would seriously recommend changing the positioning in the tree to avoid this optimized “auto-choose” for the Erebor spellbook, but I heard it was supposed to happen in 7.0, so it’s great.

I once supported the idea of a Dol Guldur Dark Obelisk building, leading to some proper turtling strategies for DG with debuffing enemies instead of buffing allies with heroic statues. I still do. It would be some kind of a bonus aside from ruined towers and barrows that already are greatly efficient concerning this specific aspect. However, this is an additional suggestion, so it is less important than corrective suggestions.

One of the actual problems with Dol Guldur is that Risen Dead, Ravagers and Spiders are really strong, and they outvalue each other aspect of the faction. For example, Harbingers of Shadow or Unburied Wights, that are extremely fun and cool undead units : I don’t see them that much used, which is a shame because I love their designs and effects. For Risen Dead notably, I think that a nerf might be necessary to give more depth to other units. Spiders might also be a little bit too fast, you can never catch them up with pikes unless the DG player stops micro-ing them.

The speelbook has one power that seems underused for me, that is the Spell of Concealment. The Spawn of Carcharoth is so good (and the two other T2s being interesting enough) that the aforementioned power is just never played. The fact that it can stealth allied structures is truly interesting, and has the potential to give birth to very innovative strategies, but I think the positioning of the tree would need a rework to see this power played. The problem might also come from the Gift of the Necromancer tier 4 that is basically insane, but I don’t really know how to fix that one apart from reducing its damage (and maybe increasing its speed to compensate).

I don't like the idea of giving common siege machines to every faction in the game. For the sake of diversity, AOTR should keep this truly interesting idea that Revelers are. Maybe the team could rework their model so they actually look like magicians and not bards, or think about a system that is closer to WR druids or old Angmar sorcerers with purchaseable upgrades in the palantir, so you can specialize your Revelers in whether siege or support. But PLEASE do NOT give any siege machines to Rivendell, this is funny to play a faction that differs from the others and has different strategies. This makes the game much more versatile and pleasant in the long term.

I'm sorry to tell that I don't have any solution for you, my version of the game isn't bugged in that way.

However, if that can comfort you a little bit, the campaign isn't really the best part of the mod, even though it's quite creative and interesting (no offense, AOTR Team). Only the Fellowship of the Ring is implemented in 6.1, and the missions in it are almost always hero control and moving them along the map while killing some orcs or hiding under an elven cape.

To truly understand the full potential of the mod (and not only the potential, also its inherent quality), you need to play skirmishes, WOTR games or online with friends. A lot of factions are waiting for you that you'll not see in the campaign in its actual form. Give it a try, it's fun. Funnier than the vanilla game, in fact.

Hi, welcome here !

About the inn bug, I'm sad to say that I never faced this issue with my game, the hobbits can capture the inns as usual. Do you have the same type of bugs during a skirmish or a WOTR game ?

About the difficulty of the level, it's true that it is very difficult. The idea is to just stay at the Prancing Pony and hold while refreshing from time to time the troops with pikemen essentially to kill the Nazgul. I won with that specific strategy, with any other I failed miserably. Try this one and we'll see after if we can do something for the autosave.

Hi, I don't remember facing that specific issue but I also saw a bug with combined units : they were blocked in the number of units, meaning they didn't regenerate even if level 2 or above and this bug ended up by me having a combined batallion only composed of one among the two initial types of units (for example, only pikemen holding a weird formation instead of a pike-bow batallion).

But in vanilla BFMEII and in AOTR 5.1, I also face almost every ten games an issue with invincible enemy units that attack me and capture a point at the same time, ending in a bugged batallion split through the map, unable to take damage but able to deal damage. I don't think this is related, but we never know.