A review of The Last Days of the Third Age.

My first play through of TLD has come to an end, while I wish I was victorious, I got far enough to see what I wanted and do plan to start again.

First, I'd like to give a quick shout out to the youtuber SurrealBeliefs, as without his let's play series I would never have tried the mod.

Having seen a run on the good side, I opted to do an evil campaign. In almost any mod I play, 90% of the time the main rival of my favorite faction ends up having some sort of cavalry focus. I've just kind of come to hate fighting cav factions, so I knew Rohan needed to die early in. I ended up choosing to be a man of Dunland, a faction I ended up enjoying quite a bit. Their whole thing seems to be about anti-cav. Upgrading a unit to a max tier Wolf Guard provides a side wolf unit in battle that will run about knocking people off their mounts. How does a faction with no archers deal with horse archers? Have these wolves turn them into regular archers. Dunland however is weak to archer focused factions coughELVEScough and isn't the best at siege battles, but very effective in the field.

The mod's early game is an interesting concept. Kind of a passive cold war with no actual aggression where you get yourself situated and learn the map. Evil has the rough spot of being fully divided, for the most part, good owns a center column of the map with evil owning the East and West sides. Knowing the war would begin at level 8, I was very careful to not hit that level in the wrong area of the map. I built my rep with Dunland and Isenguard, eventually affording a small army. I tried hard to keep my army nearly full Dunland units, taking other units when the barracks didn't hold enough men or if I was far away from any Dunland Camp. Not much else to say about the early game, it seems to exist only as a contrast to the war and a chance to level before things are everywhere.

So the war starts and I begin to fight against Rohan with Isenguard by my side. I was glad to see some outposts appear around the map to fill it out a bit. Though not able to take on any of Rohans lords on my own, the faction score system needs to be commended, as taking out small scouts does in fact feel like I'm contributing. It ended up being a rather 1 sided war, Rohan never managed to siege us, but we slowly took all their cities. Their score fell low enough that Isenguard attacked the capitol with 2 other cities standing. Once the capitol fell, it auto razed the remaining cities, no more time to waste on Rohan, and I looked forward to fighting another faction.

As we moved to Gondor, I was pleasantly surprised to see an advance camp appear. It was nice to not have to run all the way back to the main camp to stock up. Mordor had taken the other side of Ostogoth on it's own, but nothing else had changed hands and Umbar was weak. With Isenguard and Dunland's armies added to the area, Gondor's armies and patrols didn't seem to have a chance. It wasn't soon at all until there was siege after siege, taking city after city... that is... until game breaking bug #1.

We took Minis Tirith and we got the message that Gondor had moved to Dol Amroth, we took the remaining cities other than that... and then.... nothing.... for 3 hours, nothing. Dol Amroth sat there with all it's lords inside, not a single Gondor unit on the map, with a score nearing -300, and nothing was happening. I left a message here on reddit to little help but did eventually find some answers. There was a hidden city, Henneth Annun. It was in the game's location notes, so I checked a middle earth map and saw where it should have been. I went there, and sure enough, all my lord's armies are marching around this area, I even got the message that I had been spotted by it, but it was invisible.

I had no real option here, I had to use a dev cheat to kill Gondor, anti-climatic but I was happy to move on to the North.

Know what Dunland is not meant for? Fighting elves. Never had my army felt useless until it was time to fight the elves. I focused my attention on Beornings and helped out whenever an orc army sieged an elf settlement, because it was NOT going to happen by Dunland's hand. Gundabad would actually finish off the last of the Mirkwood elves without any help, I didn't even notice a message about that siege happening.

Evil continued north, Dale and the dwarves were a tough nut to crack, the cities so close together. The Dwarves in particular had 2 bugs that made it even more difficult, 1 of them game breaking. When attacking the Dwarf capitol (who's name I forget but it starts with E) there are 2 inaccessible rivers flowing through. In 3 different attacks, a dwarf somehow fell into the right river (from attacker's perspective) and survived, causing the bulk of my army to run into a wall trying to get to him. I thought it was a fluke and pulled back, but as I said, this happened 3 times. I thought I'd just have to let the AI take care of it without me, which led to gamebreaking bug #2. Rhun was preparing for a siege and got distracted, then left. But the city never left siege state, so no one else sieged it. I sat there in fast forward for 2 in game weeks with no change. There was nothing else to do as it was the only remaining faction. So I had to dev command the Dwarves to death too, again, very anti-climactic.

If you didn't know, that's only War 1 if you're on the evil side. Because once Good has fallen, it's time for Evil's civil war of Isenguard vs Mordor. The faction lines are drawn immediately, old allies now enemies and everyone had been patrolling around the dwarf lands. It was a tense and suspenseful run back to the homeland as all the advance camps disappeared. A lot of new camps for Mordor's side appeared by Minis Tirith, but our side didn't seem to have any advance camps aside from either Gundabad or Moria (forget which) getting one towards to Gol Badur.

I would play this war for 9 long hours, but no one took a city. I defended 7 sieges in Moria and Isenguard, but we never even sieged once. Mordor remained at 8000 score and it was tough to budge, but we managed to keep everyone else at 'average'. The issue was however, though they were average, Moria and Gundabar became weak while Isenguard fell from strong to fair. As hard as I tried to remove many enemy parties off the map, our score was slowly but surely falling faster than theirs.

The final nail in the coffin was when a Moria leader died permanently. I took stock of the various lords and learned the most damning thing about our prospects. Every Evil leader that had died permanently, was on our side, none on theirs. Just horrible rotten luck to be 5 leaders less while Mordor and friends were full strength. Add to that, trying to take out Ologs as a faction with 0 archers and orcs is like running up an icy slope. You'll get there, eventually, bruised and broken. That was when I decided to call that campaign an end.

Despite the bugs, I really enjoyed TLD. The score system is amazing and I wish I could have such things in Perisno, with no need for feasts or vassals. The battles didn't need to have armies of thousands to feel epic and the city siege maps were amazingly detailed.

I will be doing another run of it, not sure if I'll try a good faction or try evil again to win that second war, but the mod is definitely recommended.

Submitted October 28, 2018 at 06:28AM by McJigg https://ift.tt/2Sp0lwH