Caltrops - Reviews - LotR: Battle for Middle Earth

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by FABIO 12/07/2004, 10:35pm PST

Just started dicking around with it.

So far a basic short review would be: Dawn of War but more polished and with special powers ala C&C Generals.

So far the one aspect that I fucking LOVE is that this game basically eliminates teching as we know it in RTS games. Buildings gain experience and veterancy just like units; a barracks gains experience by pumping out infantry. You can only get the more advanced units by having those buildings gain levels. So that means you HAVE to pump out the most basic units from the start if you want to "tech". No more sitting in your base and avoiding fighting just so you can race to get the most powerful units. You fucking build those units right away and you go to fucking WAR. Dawn of War tried to do this with the concept of strategic points, but that was mostly the usual turtle tech stuff and mid to late game money really didn't even matter much anyways.

More incentives to go out and attack. You can only have about 5-6 buildings at once at your starting base. There are more buildings available than that so you can't get them all to start. If youwant more you have to go out and find "camps", capture them, then build a new base there where you can build a few more buildings. Certain buildings will give you bonuses for having multiple amounts. Having multiple blacksmiths will give you discounts on unit upgrades, multiple farms discounts on cavalry or infantry so you make a choice which approach you want to take. They handled the upgrades great. It's not teching, just a unit by unit bases. Pay money to give this unit +50% armor, or this archer unit flaming arrows. The upgrades cost quite a bit so you have to be choosy with them and only give them to experienced veteran units, when you've already hit max population (a c&c first!), or if you get jumped by gay Ents and need to SET THEM ON FIRE AND WATCH THEM RUN AROUND FLAILING THEIR ARMS SCREAMING ROTFLOL!!! I guess if you're a pussy and want to play the good guys and care about nature, the ents aren't worthless because firearrows cost a crapload of money (costs $1000 to upgrade a $400 archer unit to get them) and you don't get them until you're being attacked by ents, and even then your opponent forces you to drain your account.

The evil sides pump out so many units that you can order orcs to slaughter other orcs and the survivors get experience. Hit max population and start thinning out the weak from the strong. They also get points towards getting new powers (just like the generals powers in C&C Generals) from the deaths of both enemy AND friendly units, which is even more of an incentive to get out there and cause as much carnage as possible as soon as possible. One of the more powerful abilities allows you to cheaply and quickly start pumping out complete craploads of orcs one after another that makes the cloning building from Red Alert 2 look like population control.

They also handled heroes perfectly. I was worried that they'd turn out to be a little too Warcraft 3ish where battles were all about them and their buffers instead of actual units and tactics. Not so. They're more like the commanders in Dawn of War, except toned down. Yes they can do more and take more damage than regular units, but not to the ridiculous level DoW took it to where sending 20 guys to fight hand to hand against a force commander was suicide and that force commander taking half an hour of continuous fire to kill. Send a hero out alone against a group of infantry and he will probably get killed, and they are VERY expensive to replace unlike Warcraft 3 (where they barely cost more than a regular unit) or Dawn of War. Their abilities and exceptional (but not ridiculous) combat skills make it so you stick them in a fight, but can't send them in alone and you have to be careful not to get them killed. Perfect balance.

The only negative I can think of is that the campaign starts out boring because like all RTS campaigns it acts like this is the first game of the genre you've ever played and holds your fucking hand through the first few missions which are basically unskippable tutorials, and even then the curve advances at a snail's pace making you wait forever until you can build more powerful units. The set up for the campaign is kind of cool though. You get an animated map of middle earth that looks like the most gorgeous Heroes of Might and Magic map ever. Click on a territory to attack it, different territories give you different bonuses like +10% resources in future battles, more points for special powers, or a higher max population. This starts off very linear (and boring) as you don't really get a choice where you attack to start off (fucking hand holding), but opens up later on and you have multiple armies displayed and you attack with them and base your attacks around where the enemy armies are moving.

Thankfully, the hobbits are in the single player campaign only. So you can avoid them entirely by not playing the good campaign, which I plan on because that means moving Sam around caves killing spiders.

On a last note, the developers really made it look like in their videos that heroes and special powers would totally overshadow the importance of units. Thankfully this isn't the case. The seemingly overpowering Balrog and army of the dead are the most powerful abilities and take years to work your way up to in a game. It'd be like complaining that the fuel air bomb was too powerful in Generals. Those powerful hero abilities like Gandalf wiping out an entire army in one blast don't come until you really level him the fuck up. So with all that in mind either the developers intentionally just dicked around to show off all the powers, or their "grudge match" was a drawn out sissy slapfight by people who make RTS games for a living but aren't good at playing them.