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The time has come to prepare an entire set of uniform Lord of the Ring maps. Too long has the UMS community been without a decent set of maps! I mean, all maps have their ups, but they also have their downs. Let's take some popular maps such as Sauron's Deceit and Middle Earth Vs. Pre-LotR. Sure they're "balanced" but they have no learning curve at all. You either know how to play well or you get the crap beaten out of you. In that regard no map has been exactly perfect. This is where my maps come into play.

Now, I don't expect everyone to like my maps, simply because they're LotR, but I'm hoping that people realize the quality that will define my maps. I've kept much of the excitement but I've taken out many gay things in maps, such as the countless instant ops found in Sauron's Deceit. Sure, there will be ops, but they won't be for the main spawns; they will however be difficult to manage and any that people find for the main spawns will take uber-practice beyond my imagination. And no stupid castle counters here. The old-fashioned (and what I still consider the best) castle system.

LotR Chronicles 1 - The War of the Ring
-Battles occur from 25 December 3018 - November 3 3019
-Battles contain both official and unofficial battles (such as the ones not written)
-Takes from both the movie and books to please both sides
-Heroes are about as important as they are in Last Alliance, meaning that they are powerful, but they are also kept in moderation
-Everything is moderated : )
-Orcs are powerful enough, but the vast hordes help too
-Uses one of the best spawning systems (maybe and probably the best)
-Hopefully what people find to be the most accurate map
-A Plethora of Heroes, but regular units are still amazingly varied
*Yoshi da Sniper gasps - Balanced Heroes! Every player gets good heroes, even dwarves

You may call Lord of the Ring maps whatever you wish (Terrain Suckz0rs! for example) but still many, many people play them. I suppose they like them because it combines the errmm excitement of UMS maps with the strategy of StarCraft itself. Right now I'm working on tweaking hero balancing. This map should be completed within an hour or two.

Hey Felagund, I'm quite a Tolkein fan myself and would be very interested in testing your map. BTW, I love the title of your map... I once made a LOTR map with the exact same title... good thing I never released it. Also, when you said "unofficial battles" does that include things like the Battle Under the Trees in Mirkwood or battles that you thought of yourself?

By unofficial I mean the ones not stated in the appendices. Still, some fans got whiff of some *hint* of something and came up with this huge explanation. I found some of these at the Encyclopedia of Arda.

As far as I'm concerned, this is about the best terrain to be found in any Lord of the Rings map out there. A lot of people agree with me. Of course I did not spend nearly as much time on this terrain as I did on the BoM-T (another tale, another time) terrain, but it still is accurate and sexy. I've already released some Beta versions, but they don't have all the options that will be included in the upcoming version (1.03). Should I name it Charlie 1.03? Lol. I've had Alpha 1.01 and Beta 1.02. Delta 1.04, Echo 1.05, Foxtrot 1.06, etc.

Beta 1.02
-Had some of the battles, but not all.
-The standardized spawns, worker purchases, etc.

Final 1.03
-Most battles, but some might not work, for seemingly no reason at all!
-Finer attention to detail, such as smoothing out the mountain-sides
-Putting air and ent spawns on a secondary spawner to keep them moderated
-As always balancing

Now this may not seem like much, but for this style of map it's rather tough. Notice it says "Final." This will only be the test-version of the Final. Once we work out the bugs it will go public, again. This time I'll push the advertising.

Interested? Contact me @ WoA-Felagund on USEast, or NumenorLord on AIM.

We can work something out I'm sure, though how much I'm on next week is really iffy, as I'm going back to my father's place, who only has 56k *Yoshi da Sniper shudders

NEVER NEVER NEVER name anything version "Final." It condemns your map to have one bug at least, it's the curse of the gods. If you write v.Final, then after that you'll have v.Final Fixed, and all the way up to v.Final Refixed Again for the Second Time and so on and so forth

Other than that here's my idea, for castles, have two or three castles for each player, one for melee units and one for ranged, and maybe a third for race specialist units. It'll add more strategy to the game.

Vindexus, have you ever played a LotR map? There are 4 castles, 5 options:

-No Spawn
-Spawn 1: Normal foot soldiers, archers
-Spawn 2: More units, light cavalry
-Spawn 3: More units, heavy ground troops
-Spawn 4: More units, air units

I might have had fun making a Desperate Hope style map, with spawn specific castles, but my intent here was to make the best standardized LotR map in existence.

I meant two or three different types of castles, like

1 Castle A - Lings
2 Castle As - Lings + Bats
3 Castle As - Lings + Bats + Zealots

1 Castle B - Marines
2 Castle Bs - Marines + Ghosts
3 Castle Bs - Marines + Ghosts + Dragoons

You could have those and then one specific for your race.

Sadly, I ran out of stupid locations... And units (LotR maps take up like all units possible in existence ever that you can think of ^10) ummm... nice idea... but no, sorry 'ole pal no hope there!

Here is a brief list of the ground units:

-Ghost: Longbow Archer
-Firebat: Dwarvish Axe-Warrior
-Vulture: Rider of the Mark
-Siege Tank: Battering Ram (No Siege)
-Goliath: Dunedain Knight
-Samir Duran: Easterling Archer
-Zealot: Elite Swordsman
-Dragoon: Elvish Knight
-Dark Templar: Dunedain Ranger
-Sarah Kerrigan: Elvish Archer
-Zergling: Orcish Warrior
-Hydralisk: Uruk-Hai Beserker
-Ultralisk: Armored Troll
-Hero Ultra: Oliphaunt
-Archon: Ent
-Broodling: Goblin

This is about all I can think of - there are probably some I'm missing. Note that this list does not include heroes or air units. Mind you, I only have so much lee-way when doing this stuff...

You want to make a different sort of Middle-Earth map, easy, start with the terrain, and this is where it gets, oh so much better.

Why do you have to have the terrain set with a North/South arrangement, think what difference to game play there would be if it was West/East or such, that would really change it, and make it very unique.

Spawn system? Yours or mine?

is this going to be like an RPG where you have one main man, or when u have huge armies? do you control buidling?

Large armies, it'll be like LotR - Last Alliance. You build castles and the more castles you have, the more units you spawn. You also have a few heroes at your disposal. That leads me to another question, any chance of the heroes having skills or spells?

I would like to see the Characters kept under control with upgrades, and to see Spawning points, still able to be taken out, but equal chances for each person, and not certain things that are easily destroyed!

The biggest problem I saw with Lotr maps is that the bases are too strong. You have to wait at least 30 minutes before you have a force that has any chance of taking out some buildings.

Or you have all that nice defence that waste unit counts, and they are placed all on one side, and all the enemy has to do is shuttle their hero round your static defense and your dead...I want to see more use of common units, and less usage/ or lack of usage of static defences, which are easy to take out anyhow...

I think defenses should only be strong around actually cities and such, and minor defences by other locations, maybe a limited defense with some units, and they can be left there to hold the point, or taken away, and allow it to fall, it should be so that the number gives some assisstance against a common sized army till help arrives!

I'd like to address several things in this post:
-Defenses
-Battles
-Heroes

Defenses
-There are only static border defenses, such as a few cannons along the Gondor shore of the Bay of Belfalas
-Most of the defenses are centered around cities, for example:
a) Gondor's outer defenses (the borders of Gondor) have strong-points at Minas-Tirith, Cair-Andros, Pelargir, Dol-Amroth, and Calembel
b) Calembel is a small village, so I'm thinking about perhaps using it as a building elsewhere. I already have most main things, but I'm still missing Haradwaith (though I have Khand; I'm under the assumption that Haradwaith is merely a desert) I'm using a trap (floor missile trap) as the Fords of Isen. Perhaps I should switch the 2?
c)Henneth-Annun is a small outpost with rather weak defenses, but it is inside a cave, thus its defense is greater. This is located in Ithilien, the forested land between Mordor and the River Anduin.

I have come to a problem, but I'll ask later.

Battles
-Most of the time both "sides" spawn units, but some are one-sided, like the siege of Minas-Tirith
-Spawns are anywhere from 50-hundreds of units
-Battles are spread out, but many simply don't do anything? I can't explain this; are there examples of triggers being broken? They all follow the same form, but some work and others don't

So here is the problem, I designed battles (they are optional) to a) be accurate, but now I see another addition: b) they help to get the normally boring beginning quarter-half hour rolling along. So what is the problem? Should I design units with low attack / high upgrades or high attack / low upgrades? I've designed defense to be useful the entire game, but not godly, so that a decent army (of 100+ men) can take a nice amount of defense out. So say, after 2 upgrades (out of a maximum of 6) defense becomes rather vulnerable to normal units, and by the end they will do 30-50 damage.

Here are some normal statistics:
-Photon Cannon
HP: 6250 Armor: 95
Attack: 400/475

-Sunken Colony
HP: 6750 Armor: 105
Attack: 530 (Keep in mind that sunken colonies generally do less damage)

-Hydralisk
HP: 975 Armor: 10
Attack: 95+15

-Ghost
HP: 585 Armor: 5
Attack: 90+10

Now these are just some of the unit statistics...
With the large spawns (once per every 3 minutes) Gondor spawns about 35 units I believe. I'm also designing heroes to have 130-150 armor, with 20 armor upgrades

Let's factor in the Elven Guardian (aka Dragoon)
HP: 1645 Shields: 825 Armor: 20
Attack: 125+20 (for a maximum of 245 damage)

What does this mean? That at first heroes are still pretty powerful, but near the end the stronger units (such as the Guardian) will do a minimum of 75 damage to heroes, with a maximum of 115 damage. So say you have a group of a dozen guardians together. No hero can take out a guardian in a single shot, so a hero will use at least 24 shots to take out all the guardians. So with the minimum of 75 damage x12... that is what... 900 damage on the first barrage? So with a couple of "rounds" the hero will be dead or close enough.

Ah, I've forgotten to post the problem with the battles. Since the defense is designed to retain some usefulness throughout the length of the game (it is expensive to rebuild) how should I make units to balance battles? I think how I have them (low attack / high upgrades) is rather nice, because the battles are simply designed to, as I noted, get the game rolling. And they're spaced out enough to give you a battle once every few minutes for nearly an hour. Well, in truth, I've posted what I was going to about heroes too. And no, this is in no way an RPG. I'm glad that some people enjoy Lord of the Ring maps here on StarEdit.net. This rocks!

*Edit* Do you notice I'm posting a LOT of crap about this game?

*Edit Again* Coko, I thought up of this spawn system, so to me it's mine. I did not learn of it from anybody else; perhaps you have something similar. Anyways, I've been using this particular one for quite a while...

Felagund's Basic Spawning Technique
Cond: Always
Action: Add 1 death for Current Player of Unused Unit
-Preserve Trigger

Cond: Current Player has 78 deaths of Unused Unit
Action: Set Switch "Spawn 1"
-Preserve Trigger

Cond: Switch "Spawn 1" is set
Action: Add 1000 minerals for Current Player
-Wait 5 milliseconds
-Set to 0 Deaths of Unused Unit for Current Player
-Clear Switch "Spawn 1"
-Preserve Trigger

I'm sure you can figure out the rest from here...

On a last note... crap! I just forgot what I was going to say! Oh yeah, should I use death counters instead of Elapsed Game Time for the Battles triggers? I don't see why the Game Time wouldn't work...

i dont think that you should use in game upgrades, just make the number of men and the quality of the unit win, that way some early kills will effect the game, but not give too large of a swing

Blasphemy. Obviously you're not a LotR player : P

i just think that from experience, the large unit battles are better, and w/out ups it comes down to numbering and unit placement, not $$$ in the bank

Personally, your idea has some potential in the SEN category of gamers, but this is a map for the masses. And there will be plenty of huge battles, i mean, like every ten minutes, else you'll stop spawning from the anti-hoard. And everyone spawns the exact same amount of money; it adds strategy to see how they spend it!

well ive briefly skimmed over this thread about decent lotr maps, balanced. well i have a lotr map of mine... not released. terrain is very good, spawns r ok, but i suck with balancing, so the spawns would be messed if some1 did them. Im going to PM you the map felagund.. think you can fix it up... units names, terrain everything but spawns and balancing is done... spawns are done but need fixing.

hopefully this will count as one of those "decent" maps..

Yeah sure, don't really care about the spawner triggers, it was just how similar mine and yours were...Anyhow, i think you should maybe make use of the ability to give shields to your Photon Cannon, and set it to a level, therefore creating a useful effect! I think if you remove shields from most other units, and only have it on a select few it will enable you to set shields to high upgrade starting level.

Sunken Colonies, thats a little harder, but you've just got to accept it, hell, maybe just remove them and use only Photon Cannons, and have Sunkens as a set defence for main buildings, and therefore be able to increase it slightly.

Turrets and Spore, well spore is faster, while turret i believe can get the longer range...

DAMNIT FELAGUND! THAT WAS MY IDEA FOR A SERIES OF UNIFORM MAPS>!!!! AHHHHHHHHHH !! Rofl. It was to be,

The Elder Days / Dagor Bragollach
The Dark Days / Last Alliance
The Third Age / . Bleh oh well. I will go on! I got back form italy 20 minutes ago as of this posting, and I have alot of funny stuff to tell everyone. I will post it all later somewhere else.

Back on topic...your map sounds awesome....and im sorry i couldnt pm you, but can you post/mesaage me PotN plez?

I just got one thing to say:
LotR is too damned popular.
There are so many LotR maps that they EASILY surpassed Sunken D 9845960496890 Way V.RIGEGD $$$$ EASY CHOOSE TEH D plethora in just a few months.
I think so, atleast.
So damn many LotR maps!

Man thats one thing i hate about lotr maps... the units are so cliche... but nothing can be done about it because theres just not much to work with... still this map sounds royally awesome and I look forward to playing it.

i think that if done well this could be the best LoTR map out there. gl

Fel , how are you going to fit all the stuff of the three ages in the terrain , and your probably going to end up with like 2000 triggers , are you really going to do it full details or an abriged V. , if you dont wanna awnser here you can tell me in chan .