i am for the first choice. As the dwarves are pretty strong on their own and it would ruin the game if the evil factions get radiated if faster bye the dwarves. When you play as a good faction you can stop the game when you have beaten all the bad factions. Thats what i do when i play.

Thanks Purpleteaser. I will probably alter the diplomacy somewhat but still leave neutralities in. Eliminating all neutral relationships is pretty uncanonical.

I just played the Grand Campaign as Gondor. I didn't win after defeating all enemies. When I started the game, I was allied to Rohan, enemies with the evil factions and neutral with the rest. I'm unsure how neutrality works in AOM, but it didn't seem any different to being allies with them. In fact, when I went into chat and clicked the option to send a message to just allies, it selected all the neutral factions too. During the game, I changed my diplomacy with every neutral faction to allied and they immediately reciprocated. Obviously, this didn't affect the outcome.

My suggestion would be to make every faction allies or enemies with one another, though not necessarily just divided between two teams.

The only noticeable difference between neutral and allied is line of sight. You share LOS with allies but not with neutrals. If you set neutrals to enemy they will also immediately respond in kind allowing you to fight them and win the game.

Multiple teams is an interesting idea although I'm not sure how I would implement that canonically. Then there's also the issue of Gondor and Arnor. If you want to put the factions into teams and send me that list it would be awesome. Thanks for your suggestion McLerristarr!

Originally posted by Callistonian:

The only noticeable difference between neutral and allied is line of sight. You share LOS with allies but not with neutrals. If you set neutrals to enemy they will also immediately respond in kind allowing you to fight them and win the game.

Multiple teams is an interesting idea although I'm not sure how I would implement that canonically. Then there's also the issue of Gondor and Arnor. If you want to put the factions into teams and send me that list it would be awesome. Thanks for your suggestion McLerristarr!

Ah, that makes sense. Though since the AI will ally with you if you ask them anyway, having them neutral doesn't really make the game any harder, at least for the player (I have no idea if or how the AI uses allies' LOS).

I'm no expert on the lore, so I don't know what would be the best way to divide the teams. Balance-wise, I suppose it would be approximately balanced if each team had the same number of players, but I can't figure out a way of doing that without having factions fighting each other that would have been allies in the story.

I'm not sure what you're system was for working out the balance. Maybe there is a way of dividing the players into uneven teams and balancing it so that they still feel even. The starting locations of the players would also need to be taken into account.

As a general note, I noticed that the AI can't deal well with changes made to the civ's unit set and god powers (though I know there's not much you can do about that without writing a new AI, which I have no idea how to do). Mordor only seemed to train Ulfsarks and a lot of Portable Rams.
As Gondor, it was a real challenge defeating Harad. They only trained Axemen, Anubites and War Elephants. I don't know if you changed the stats on the War Elephants or if that's how they normally are, but they were so hard to kill. I think Hoplites are the only anti-cavalry Gondor has, and Harad were massing Elephants. Considering how long it takes to travel around the map, being speedy isn't really an issue (though I was playing on Moderate), so the long training time of more powerful units isn't much of a drawback; combined with the huge amount of resources available, Harad were able to make a LOT of elephants.

I think we're just going to leave the teams/neutralities as is for now since you can easily set any faction to enemy in-game. Alternatively, if you don't want to kill your neutralities, you can just end the scneario when you've defeated all your enemeis.

For my design process, I place the highest priority on canoncial accuracy with balancing applied after the fact. This was my approach to the diplomacy in this scenario. It just turns out that the diplomacy from the lore made it pretty even between the "good" and "evil" factions.

The AI definitely has variable response to the new unit rosters. The Elves don't handle it very well I've noticed but the Dwarves are almost too powerful from it. The Dwarves of the West in particular have a tendency to spam Dwarf Guards (Hero of Ragnarok) which are really hard to kill without ranged units (which the evil factions generally lack).

The unit stats for Harad's Mumakil (War Elephants) have indeed been changed. They cost significantly more and have like a 300% increase in HP and something like a double bonus against cavalry. They are definitely good units but also expensive and late age. It the Harad AI has enough resources to spam Mumakil it's probably because you let them survive for too long and build up too much. The region of Harad (the southern border of the map) is very low on resources so even when they AI does get to spamming Mumakil, they usually can't do it indefinitely. I would recommend using Gondor's hoplites (which also have boosted stats) to bring down Mumakil although at the end of the day those guys are supposed to just be really hard to kill (see third movie).

As for the train time, let me know what you think of playing as High Elves. Their train times are ridiculous but their base units are really OP. I think it definitely makes a difference when you're getting spammed by Mordor or Gundabad (or even Isengard) especially when these factions are player controlled.

Thanks for your awesome feedback!

Since it takes way much time to eliminate all neutral factions, perhaps there should be smaller victory/defeat conditions for each faction.

i.e. Gondor: defeat Mordor and Harad and secure 20 settlements.
Western Dwarves: kill Balrog and Smaug, eliminate the Sindarin elves and have 100,000 gold.
Isengard: Eliminate Rohan. Either eliminate all other 'free' factions or turn against Mordor and eliminate them instead. Instant victory when the Ring is captured and brought to Orthanc. Instant defeat if Orthanc is destroyed.

It would be nice if the AI could somehow pursue these goals themselves, but since that is much too hard to implement, I also suggest that some triggers (i.e. war between neutral factions, perhaps after either Mordor&Isengard or Gondor&Rohan are eliminated) be implemented that nudge AIs toward these directions.