Two heroes are not enough, I believe. Can I take over the foreign heroes exclusively with willpower? Or is there any other possibility?

Hi! I don't know if it is possible. Have you ever thought about limiting the size of the city like in AOW II? And to limit the individual production in each city? I find it more exciting to produce tier 3 and 4 units in only a few cities.

I meant to ask this in my previous post but does anyone know anything about Aragorn? I think I saw him once as a hero for Gondor but I'm not certain.

Does anyone know how to get Thranduil to join you when you're playing as Galadriel? I've had it happen once in a previous game but it hasn't in the current one I'm playing. I have no idea what prompted him to join me the first time.

Hi I love this scenario... I am currently trying it out with all my allies as lords and all the witch king allies as emperor and it has been a fun challenge. I'm just holding my own. There are a few things that have made the game crash for me though and the forum was 8 pages long so I figured I would just ask if you had a solution for some of these... I am subscribed by the way.

Non-traditional treasure sites (like the goldmine you can ENTER not clear... cause the program to completely crash).

Some city battles cause the game to zoom in as if to start a battle but stop right before hand and glitch the game super zoomed in. The game does not crash but I can't do anything but reload then it happens again. I have to go back several saves to avoid the problem and I can't tell when it will happen again.

Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated since I want to continue playing this scenario!

Very good news!

ah! we'd be happy thank you.

Hey, short status report. I'm willing to update this map as soon as I can. But I have indeed not played tis game for a long time, I also have to face some adversities, I've 2 jobs and I'm still a very active modder in another game. All mods together have around over 140k subs.

Yes, I like this scenario very much. Sad, that Esgaroth ist still bugged.

Yes, it works and is a very nice map. Unfortunately, the mad make has been inactive for a year and some bugs (eg Esgaroth) are known but have not been corrected. Still, playable and an enrichment of AOW3

does this work?

Sorry if this has been answered somewhere, but how it is possible to make a map of this size? I'd love to do something like this but for a personal campaign of mine inspired by my many years of playing tabletop RPGs.

I have a minidump file too but not sure how to open or share it

Don't understand why the path is d: when I have steam and Age of Wonders instllaed on disk c: and nothin on disk d

I ran the game in debug mode and loaded from autosave, then ended the turn again - the error message is
Assertion failed: "MovePoints[UCnt]> =0"
Message d:\source.aow.steam\aowc\source\ageofwonders\strategicmap\entities\Stack/StackTraversalTester.cpp(235): (click to open).

Game has repeating crash whenever i'm playing as elves and the Haradrim get knocked out of the game by a good AI player. Though it's on turn 101 so possible it could be due to number of units in game being more than the programme can handle, especially with all the underground settlements.

Is there any chance of a compatibility patch with empire building mod? I think currently starting heroes have the right race EB skills. But heroes who start independent and who you convert get a random race for racial skills.

Is it possible the crash when entering Esgaroth's domain when it's independent but not hostile is because it's a fort not a settlement? And that changing it to a settlement might fix it?

Also for some reason when i play this mod with Empire Building mod and convert Aragorn it gives him Tinkerer (i.e goblin) race upgrades instead of human ones. I reloaded the battle in which I'd converted him to make sure I hadn't accidentally clicked the goblin "cast spell" icon from Empire Building when choosing a skill for him, and i hadn't. As a neutral he starts of with goblin Tinkerer instead of the human Paragon skill options.

It'd be nice if there were ways to get Aragorn, Beorn, Radaghast , Dain and other independent heroes to join you without having to attack and kill most of their army and convert/charm them. Or are there quests I don't know about? I know Gandalf joins the hobbit faction currently if any player from the good alliance finds where he is?

Game doesn't crash if you send scouts into Esgaroth's domain if it's hostile to you. So maybe something to do with diplomacy when it's not hostile to a player causes the crash if you enter its domain and its not hostile?

Is there any way to remove seals from the map? Don't see how they fit with any of what Tolkien wrote.

I like that Beorn has a dire bear mount, but any chance of starting him with skills or items that give him Fearsome, Overwhelm and Tireless so he's more like Beorn who fought as a werebeat in The Hobbit? Also a full beard and moustache as Beorn was described in The Hobbit book would be nice. Only the film character had just the Wolverine style sideburns - and you only see him for seconds in the (terrible) Battle of the Five Armies scenes in the film. In the book he arrived as a giant black werebear and was in the thick of the fighting, rescuing a wounded Thorin (who later died of his wounds) and trying to get to the Great Goblin through his bodyguard of orcs and trolls.

I know nazgul/ ring wraiths were meant to be much more vulnerable to magic than to non-magical weapons but resistance 9 seems pathetically low. It was only very rare magic weapons and exceptional magic users like Gandalf , Elrond and Galadriel or ancient elves like Glorfindel that they were harmed much by, so should have more resistance than that or else they're just pushovers.

Thanks for the reply FirePrince! what you do (and how much you do) is of course entirely up to you. You've done work on it - i haven't - so thank you!

Laketown also should be a settlement, not just a wooden fort.

Whoa. It seems you mean it really seriously. I'll probably be at your service at earliest at the very end of the week... Best regards (your comments are saved)

Qualifying that Aglarond justifiable as underground and Thranduil's halls, plus Dain's halls and the dwarf settlement at the lonely mountain , plus Dain's underground settlement, should stay in.

And there is far more underground than is necessary - there's even a lizardman settlement, when there were no lizardmen in Middle Earth. And lots of hobbit cities underground. Hobbits didn't live underground at all. The only underground needed is for the Paths of the Dead, the dwarf and orc and goblin settlements under the mountains, and maybe deep Dol Goludr. The rest is just slowing the game down and nothing to do with Middle Earth.

Also far too much of the map is sea, with Mordor and Gondor and Harad compressed into kingdoms with few cities as a result, and most of their cities don't grow, because there isn't space for their domain. Would be much better if more of the map was Gondor and Mordor, and much less of it was sea.

Reason being the AI is useless with forts. It just leaves them there. It doesn't know it can send a settler to them and get a city with walls. So they just make AI factions weaker.

I'd remove most of the forts on the map (especially those in Mordor, but not only them) and either just leave nothing there so AI cities can get resources from domain there, or else change them into cities (e.g Dol Amroth). Only possible exception being Cair Andros which was a fort in the book.

Dol Amroth was definitely a city in the book of The Lord of The Rings - not just a fortress.

The spell jammers at Dol Guldur and Isengard are really the opposite of what Tolkien wrote. The White Council including Galadriel, Elrond and Saruman (before he turned tratior) drove Sauron's servants out of Dol Guldur - and did it using magic. And Saruman certainly used spells at Isengard too.

There's definitely something weird with Esgaroth too. Some games entering its domain at all with a unit causes a crash every time you do it. Other games you can enter its domain without a crash.

Game crashes every time when you finish clearing the Hall of The Forefathers with the den/ eyes graphics East of Forochel.

@Thamic If you really want to play a just dwarves faction right away though, you could try Middle Earth 3 mod which does havee Dain and the dwarves as a playable faction

Also Sauron / Wittch King might be better as an orc warlord. Sauron had no armies of ghouls. zombies or skeletons. He was certainly called the necromancer, but his only undead servants seem to have been the ring wraiths and possibly the Mouth of Sauron's horse. And he had more orcs than humans fighting for him (though he should certainly have some human easterling settlements and some in his starting armies).

Can understand why you'd make Beorn a druid - he did protect animals. But i'd argue he'd be better as a warlord hero. Beorn fought on his own as a giant werebear and was deadly in combat. So maybe an ability similar to Wild Transformation, but letting him turn into a werebear (like a direbear but even bigger, tougher and more dangerous), assuming that's possible to mod.

Alternatively could leave him a druid but give him some warlord skills like martial arts and higher starting defence and melee damage.

The One Ring you have got right. The only thing I'd change about it would be that wearing it should give the hero wearing it a percentage chance of joining the Witch King's faction (which represents Mordor on your map). Though I've no idea if that's something that's moddable for an item in Age of Wonders III - probably not.

@FirePrince It's great that Smeagol/Gollum is on the map with the one ring, but he seems insanely OP. Based on the books the difficulty with him should be finding and catching him (especially with the ring allowing him to turn invisible which I guess would mean it should give the invisible on maps ability (i forget what it's called), so only people with True Sight (or whatever the skill that let's you see hidden enemies on the map) needed to find him.. He was certainly dangerous to a lone hobbit, but not capable of defeating any armies.

@Thamic Though you're right dwarves in Middle Earth are more appropriate as playable faction than hobbits, there wouldn't be any Middle Earth mods at all for anyone else to play if it wasn't for people like FirePrince putting in huge amounts of work making them. So you should give him a lot of praise too for all his work, not just criticism.

Also if you play as the hobbit faction as the mod currently is, you get Thorin as a hero with dwarf units. You can get dwarf settlements to join your empire. And since you have a leader, heroes and units that you can build that can convert other units, the chance of converting Dain Ironfoot and his army, which you'll find in the East of the map. So even as the mod currently is it's not impossible to build a hobbit and dwarf faction and reconquer Moria.

There are also a lot of very nice Middle Earth scripts and items and heroes that are on the map. You can even trigger Smaug spawning.

Meant to say also FirePrince - thanks for responding and listening and thank you for all your hard work!

Is the only way to get Radaghast and Beorn to join you to attack them and convert/charm,/seduce them? Or are there other ways?

OK then let's do it, sounds like a lot of work. let's see how that can be implemented, I have to get used to it again.

/Have to agree with Thamic that Dain's dwarf kingdom (maybe with Bard's Lakemen and Dalemen and woodmen/Beorn made part of the same faction) deserves to be in the game far more than a halfling faction. Hobbits were never a major power in Middle Earth.

And Saruman should probably be in instead of Misty Mountain goblins - could merge their settlements into his faction.

Also in some games getting a recurring crash when one of my units is the first player's unit that enters the domain of Esgaroth. Not sure why it happens in some games and not others. Though I do have a lot of other mods installed.

When i use a scouting unit to pick up the chest in the water at Lake Town/Esgaroth, the game crashes every time

If I customise all leaders, to replace the halfling leader with an orc, and change what team he's on, will that lead to the game crashing when scripted events happen?

Hey, SFLR I hope to get an update this month, and again THX for comments!