                   THE BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH
                   Author:  Nell_Smith@msn.com
              CivII Scenario Background Information

Firstly, the need-to-know stuff...

The Serf acts as a basic Settler.
The Peasant is the equivalent of an Engineer.
The Wormtongue functions as a Diplomat.
The Gollum (who else?) has the role of a Spy.
Railroads can be built, but are called Highways.
There are 600 turns of one month (Jan. year 1 to Dec. year 50)
The research rate has been slowed by 20%.
Spaceships cannot be built.

If your leader gets killed (say, Aragorn if you're playing the
Men of Westernesse), he stays dead and can't be built again.

I've assumed that most people will play at the fourth difficulty
level (King, or Warlock in this scenario) and at levels above
this, it becomes pretty hard to win.  In fact, I've not been
able to win the scenario myself at the higher levels, and I have
the advantages of knowing what's going to happen in advance!
At any rate, playing at Deity (Ring Wielder) level should provide
quite a challenge :)

I have used only five icons to represent the five types of
advances (Military, Economic, Social, Academic and Applied), but
I have added white dots to the icons to show how far up the tree
each one is: one dot for Ancient advances, two dots for Renaissance,
three for Industrial Revolution and four for Modern (renamed to
First, Second, Third and Fourth Ages).

I have stopped the cities and their citizens from changing in
appearance as the game progresses, but there was nothing I could
do about the animated High Council advisors... but then, who
ever consults them anyway... hehe.

I wanted to change the feel and atmosphere of the game, but not
the way it plays, so the tech tree/city improvements/Wonders of
the World are mainly unchanged, although they have all been
renamed and in some cases moved around slightly or altered in
terms of prerequisites, in order to make the game more realistic.
It's more fun to play blind, as it were, and look up new advances/
improvements/Wonders in the Civilopedia as you go along, but if
it's annoying you and you want to know which advances are which,
have a look at changes.txt, which will tell you exactly what's what.
I would recommend NOT doing so, as it does tend to spoil the feel
of the game, but it's up to you.  Changes.txt is my own working file
and describes ALL the changes I've made, so reading it will
definitely give the game away... if you'd rather have a few
surprises while you play, don't read it :)

Likewise, the intervals at which units become available are
generally similar to what you're used to (with some changes), but
the units have all been renamed and changed in appearance, some have
been removed, some new ones have been added, and most of them
have been changed in ability, so you'll need to look them up in
the Civilopedia or check your Defence Advisor to see what troops
you have or can recruit.  There are some pretty powerful beasties
out there!

Secondly, an explanation of why this scenario isn't an exact
recreation of Tolkien's world of Middle Earth...

I am currently working on a scenario which attempts to recreate
as much as possible of the story of The Lord of the Rings.
However, that is a huge task and involves not only designing an
accurate map of Middle Earth, but also figuring out how to get the
various characters and events as authentic as possible.  Along the
way to finishing that project, I've created the present scenario,
which, although it is complete in itself and I like to think that
it plays well, it's a sort of halfway step... an attempt to capture
the flavour and atmosphere of Middle Earth, but not the full works.
Essentially, I've used this scenario to test out the various
units and characters before I set out to try to recreate
Middle Earth as envisaged by Tolkien, and I think it works well :)

Having said this, I wrote this scenario before I knew about the
Ultimate Civ2 website, so I didn't realise that Harlan Thompson
has already created an amazing simulation of The Lord of the Rings.
As it happens, my idea is not to create such an advanced scenario,
but rather to create something which, although it follows the story
of the book to some degree, is more of a long civilization-building
campaign than a pre-written battle scenario, so hopefully my
Lord of the Rings scenario, when it finally comes into being, will
be pretty different from his :)  Congratulations to him, though,
on creating an astonishingly complex and superb scenario!

Anyway, those of you who are familiar with The Lord of the Rings
will notice that the map used in this scenario is totally different
from the real Middle Earth.  This is to save time, as creating the
proper map is a very lengthy business.  However, I have tried to
keep the terrain types as close to the actual regions of Middle Earth
as possible, even though the map shape is not the same.

Thirdly, the technical stuff:

If you like the way this scenario plays but would rather play
on a random map, I have also posted a mod pack called TOLKIEN.ZIP
in the Mod Packs section of the Ultimate Civilization II website.
This will let you play with the tribes, units, advances etc
as in this scenario, but allow you to choose number of opponents and
so on as you can with the normal game.  You also get the option
to play as the Orcs, as I have added an extra tribe to the mod pack
to make the number up to seven, as it is in the normal game.

A small niggle is the fact that the AI seems determined
to randomise the gender of restarted players, despite my best
efforts to stop it.  Because of this, you may find that the Land
of Mordor returns with a female leader, or the Elves with a male.
There is a terrible lack of suitable female names in The Lord of
the Rings, so I had to improvise in a few cases.  (For instance,
the ONLY female Dwarf in the whole of the book is called "Dis",
which is a silly name by anyone's standards... and even she doesn't
appear in the main story, but is only mentioned in the Appendices!)

I found that the rate at which Peasants (Engineers) can transform
land into other types of land was annoyingly slow, so I have
speeded it up by a ratio of 5:3 (e.g. it now takes 3 turns to
irrigate Grassland and 6 turns to mine a Forest, as opposed to 5 and
10 turns respectively).

I also found that the AI was determined to flatten and irrigate all
its hills instead of mining them, which led to computer-controlled
tribes having hardly any shield production (and therefore not being
able to build much), so I have set the AI to mine hills at the
lowest government type and not to irrigate hills until they reach
the highest government type.  To compensate for possible disadvantages
to the AI which might be caused by this change, I have set the AI
to irrigate all other terrain types from the very start, which seems
to make their civilisations grow at a much more challenging rate :)

Apology to purists who may notice that the shield for the
Ent Chief unit is mostly hidden behind the axe head... I did try
to position the shield more clearly, but that's the best I could do!

One final note: the reason why there are so many little ocean
squares dotted around in everyone's terrain is because I could
find no way of stopping the game from randomising the number
of goody boxes on creating the map... I thought there were too many,
and the only way I could find to get rid of some of them was to
turn the terrain they were sitting on into an ocean square.

NB: Yes, I do know that Black Riders and Ringwraiths are the same
thing... but I like the names so I used them both.  And why not.

This is my first attempt at a scenario and I would very much
welcome any comments, favourable or otherwise. If you like this
scenario, if you hate it (hope not!), or if you have any ideas
that you think would improve it in any way, please do let me know:
Nell_Smith@msn.com.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have made extensive use of the icons (with some customisation)
and the sounds provided in MicroProse's CivII Fantastic Worlds
expansion pack, without which this scenario would be dull and
unrealistic to say the least.

The sound called news.wav is copyright of MicroProse Studios.
For those of you who think you've heard it before, I got it from
MicroProse's PC game Magic: The Gathering and its original name
is newsflash.wav.

