So I've been playing a bit of Third Age Total War. It's a giant mod for Medieval 2 for those unaware about Lord of the Rings.
Anyway, I remember playing it many years ago and it certainly felt quite unfinished and spartan back then. Now it seems a lot better but even after playing a few hours I just kept feeling like something was wrong with it. The clunky outdated Medieval 2 UI. The shitty controls.
Then after yet another battle where my horde of craptastic goblin slaves drove back the Rohirrim I figured out what was going on.
They did the same nonsense as that Darthmod garbage where they extended the battles WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too long and nobody ever routs. Why the hell are my goblin slaves not running after a single charge from horsemen? Why do these battles between peasant armies take years to resolve? Why are my Uruk-Hai archers able to shoot across the map? Who came up with this idiotic balancing? If LotR battles took this long in the books, there would be 12 books in the series just of "and the snaga archers battled against the mightiest of Gondor for 8 hours before they all died bravely to the last goblin even though they were all slaves and were archers with no armour facing off an elite regiment". If I were to guess why this is happening, it's probably because you start with all your heroes in the campaign and they all have insane stats, making units have crazy amounts of morale.
That being said there was a lot of love being poured into this mod. The models are great (for Medieval 2) and unlike modern Total Wars, here you can easily field 20,000 troops in a single battle with no lag. You also have all the trolls, treants, mumakil, Sauron himself, actually all the heroes come to think of it, etc. I had one particularly amusing moment where my entire army was stuck fighting against Saruman for about 20 minutes before he died. Just Saruman himself. And it's not like Saruman could kill multiple units at a time, so it was just 20 minutes of him slowly killing one man at a time before he fell.
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I would recommend it for people looking to recreate LotR battles though. It is quite fun, though the battles drag on forever, which is fine if that's what you want. Also the autoresolve is completely broken in this one, so don't even bother trying to do that.
Here's an example video of what it's like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzpj-sVQIWw