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190 of 197 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A true real-time strategy game., March 7, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
(I deduct one "overall" star because the game's launch had a lot of multiplayer tournament problems. Those appear to have been resolved in the recent v1.02 patch which you will download automatically the first time you sign on.)
Gameplay:
BFME2 is what I would call a "true real-time strategy game". In most RTS games (e.g. Starcraft, Age of Empires) you are really playing a "real-time tactical game". You must focus a lot of effort on directing your troops at a micromanagement level, telling them who, exactly, they are supposed to shoot at, one guy at a time.
The BFME series has simplified this by creating "batallions". Instead of building archers 1 at a time, you'll build them 15 at a time and they come out as an organized batallion. You cannot tell your 15 archers to focus fire on 1 enemy unit, you can only tell them to fire on another batallion. The details of how they direct their fire is up to them. The time you aren't spending directing fire can now be spent on executing a bigger plan.
Consequently, BFME2 is one of the very few RTS games that rewards multi-pronged attacks and flanking. Units get a flanking bonus for attacking enemies from behind and the fact that you don't need to babysit every single fight means you can leave one battle to go start up a second front somewhere else and not worry so much about the fight you aren't watching.
BFME2 also introduces a new resource model which greatly rewards map ownership. Rather than fighting over piles of resources and ignoring the other 90% of the map like most RTS games, BFME2 has resource collection spread across the entire map. The more you control, the more money you get. Factions have been completely re-balanced to accomodate this -- in BFME1, the human teams could not match Mordor in an open land war but in BFME2, they can. They need to, if they want any money!
Singleplayer:
BFME2 covers portions of the war that were not covered by the movies. The first mission of the Good Campaign has you fighting off Goblins around Rivendell, for example.
Single player has 4 options:
- Skirmish, the usual you-vs-computer battle mode.
- Good Campaign.
- Evil Campaign.
- War of the Ring. This is a new and improved version of the "living world map" they had in the first game. They fleshed it out and now it's more like a free-form game of LOTR Risk. You and the other players start off in various sections of middle earth and conquer the map any way you choose. Battles can be resolved RTS style or automatically (Civilization style) and this mode also has multiplayer support (one War of the Ring game could take a very long time if you resolve every battle in RTS mode!)
Playable sides:
- Dwarves. Dwarven units tend to be slow but tough. They aren't big on cavalry but their infantry is very good. They gather resources with mines and they can also use these mines for travelling -- enter one mine and pop out at any other mine, anywhere on the map! This gives dwarves a good ability to hold ground once they've taken it.
- Goblins. Similar to dwarves in that they can build mines and use them for travel. Goblins are a "spamarific" species, though, with a lot of large batallions of inexpensive but brittle troops. They do, however, have some very, very fast units and are excellent for hit-and-runs.
- Mordor. Not entirely unlike the Mordor from BFME1, but minus the free troops. Mordor has poor defenses and plays best as a very aggressive team. As Mordor, you need to push your opponet early and keep pushing while you upgrade to better units and work on more resources. Mordor lacks the mobility of the goblins and dwarves and lacks the speed of the elves but they do have a great ability to flood the map with orcs.
- Isengard. Similar to the Isengard from the first game, you rely more on strong infantry with strong upgrades. Similar to Mordor, this is a good team for someone who likes to take a strong offensive. Warg Riders give Isengard some good cavalry but it's usually the Uruks that form the real destructive force of any army.
- Elves. Elves are fast on their feet with especially good archers. They can be played offensively or defensively with pretty good effectiveness. Try to use your fast feet to keep the enemy pinned in while you build up for the kill, or play defensive and work on leveling up some of your powerful archer heroes.
- Men of the West. This team is basically Gondor + Rohan from the original game. Human infantry is pretty strong, especially in shield-wall mode and they can do a good job of soaking up damage while your archers do the real hurting. Humans also have pretty much the best cavalry in the game, making them quite lethal at either hit-and-runs, or for backing up a strong infantry army.
Other new stuff:
This game adds "stances" and some new unit powers. Stances allow all units in the game to decide if they want extra damage at the expense of lower armor, or higher armor at the expense of lower damage, or a balance. Human Swordsmen in the defensive stance with shield wall activated are extremely tough. If an enemy is banging on your buildings and ignoring your units, set your units to aggressive stance and teach them a lesson.
Conclusion:
All of this adds up to become what is, I suggest, possibly the best RTS game ever made and I've played a lot of them.
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81 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Just a bit shy of five stars, March 22, 2006
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
[updated 04.02.06]: I won't recap the game's features or settings--others have done a fine job of that. As a baseline, here's what I've played so far (after several days): all 20 2-player skirmishes to victory[*], the Good Campaign to victory, the Evil Campaign to victory, and a War of the Ring game to victory. I've also done some on-line playing, and I'm currently working my way through the skirmishes again with the difficulty level set higher.
Here's why BFME-2 got a 4/4 rating (fun/overall) from me:
-- It's easy to pick up. True, I had played through BFME-1, but that was long enough ago, and BFME-2 has changed enough, that it wasn't a given. The built-in tutorials were great, and, yes, since I don't have a lot of free time, I bought the PRIMA game guide.
-- It's addictive. Not quite the electronic crack that Civ4 is, but I've spent far more time playing it during the last several days than I than I thought I would.
-- I know other reviews here have complaints about installation and system compatibility, but for me it's worked fine out of the box + the 1.01 patch on a system that I was never able to get Civ4 completely stable on.
-- I enjoy the music + graphics + voice work + cut scenes. Of course, BFME -2 has the advantage of all the LOTR movie music, art design, etc.
-- The user interface does what it needs to do and otherwise gets out of the way.
-- The difficulty in skirmishes is almost infinitely tweakable, due to the handicap system. For example, my main profile was at level 2 after finishing my first set of skirmishes, but the Medium difficulty level puts your opponent at level 4. No worries: I started out by putting my opponent's handicap at -50% and have lowered it by 5% each time I've won (my profile is now up to level 3, and I'm giving my opponent a handicap of -15%).
-- I can play through a skirmish (or a Campaign mission) on 'Easy' level in 15-30 minutes; maybe an hour, tops.
-- There's a nice balance among the six factions; each feels different, each requires slightly different tactics. I tend to favor the Good factions, but I must confess to having fun with the Evil campaign, especially using Mountain Giants to level most of Fornost.
-- I enjoyed the focus on the War in the North. It's a nice change from the classic LOTR books (and I speak as one who has been reading LOTR for nearly 40 years).
-- Having completed one War of the Ring game, I've found that I like it better than I did at first--mostly because the ability to do "real time" (skirmish) resolution allows me to win battles even when the odds are heavily against me.
Here's why BFME-2 _didn't_ get a 5 in either fun or overall:
-- The skirmish maps are too small. Or, better put, there should be larger maps available in addition to the existing ones. I'd like to see a 4x map (twice as high, twice as wide) so that each side can really establish an infrastructure and then manuever with large armies over large fields. Likewise, a lot of the movement plotting and formation capabilities of the game are largely wasted because space is too cramped and everything moves too quickly to do a whole lot with them.
-- I'd also like to zoom out farther _and_ I'd like to see support for 1280x1024. However, I suspect that these two limitations, as well as the small map sizes, are all for the same reason: system resources. I'm running BFME-2 on a 3.6 GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and a RADEON X600 graphics cards w/256MB of memory--and the game still gets sluggish when too many units are on the screen. I've had a few crashes, but very few compared to the number of hours I've played.
-- EA put all this work into the fortress building aspects of BFME-2, but you seldom get a chance to do much with them--at least, in skirmishes--because conflict starts too soon and either drains your resources in replacing destroyed units/buildings or simply ends before you can do much with your fortress(es). The main exceptions are in campaign missions where the main wave of attack is delayed for some period of time (e.g., Erebor and Rivendell in the Evil campaign).
-- Fortress walls are too easily destroyed and are too hard to repair. It takes most of the fun out of building in those cases when you have the time to do so.
-- Neither the manual nor the PRIMA game guide explains exactly (or even generally) what changes as the different difficulty levels, nor what the numeric level(s) mean for a given profile and how that affects gameplay. For that matter, some of the summary values after skirmishes/missions (e.g., 'tactical rating') are likewise unexplained.
-- In fact, there's a fair amount that the manual never really explains--and it's not the most readable manual in the world, either in content or in presentation.
In sum, I've just had a lot of fun building armies, defending (or conquering) territory, and trying out different tactics, all within a slighly mutated version of Tolkien's world with great music in the background. My complaints with BFME-2 mostly have to do with it been a bit too cramped, fast moving, obscure and self-limiting--though that may just reflect why I don't like real-time strategy (RTS) games quite as much as 4X games such as Civ4.
All said, I consider myself as having gotten my money's worth for having bought BFME-2 ([*]the collector's edition, no less, which is why I had a few more skirmish maps than the regular release) plus the PRIMA game guiide. My enjoyment of (and semi-addiction to) BFME-2 has been a stark contrast to my experience with Star Wars: Empire at War (see my review here on Amazon).
Your mileage may vary. ..bruce..
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A few random tips for those of you just starting out:
-- Your (computer) opponents will rush you, that is, starting sending battalions at you as fast as it can generate them. The best defenses is often a good offense--build up several battalions as fast as you can, chew up the forces that come at you, then send your forces at the enemy's fortress while building replacements.
-- If you are playing a Good faction (Elves, Men, Dwarves), Battle Towers are your friends. A close set of three to five Battle Towers can render a given approach impassible--at least, until your opponent starts bringing up siege engines and/or Mountain Giants. And a few strategically placed Battle Towers back by your barracks/stables can take care of those pesky units that make it past your main forces. I frankly prefer Battle Towers to walls.
-- Geography matters. Look for choke points where you can block enemy advances. On one skirmish map, I found such a narrow choke point much closer to the enemy fortress than to my own. I rushed my first three (Elven) archer battalions into the trees there, then built a 'Mirror of Galadriel' to heal them. The enemy kept trying to send forces through that point, but they all got ground up--not a single enemy unit ever got past, and I never had to replace any of my three archer battalions. In the meantime, I was able to take my time to build up for my own invasion.
-- Technology advances also matter. Elven archers with Silverthorn arrows and Elven armor are incredibly deadly; a few such battalions can take down anything very quickly.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great game = heavy sys reqs, April 22, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
The game is an awesome game except for a very few quirks. Firsly, my system is as follows: AMD 64 3500+, 2GB DDR RAM, SATAII WD HDD, 7800GTX and i play @1600x1200 on an LCD so i need the games to be playable at this native reso.
The problem is if you crank up the command unit factor more than the default, the map quikcly gets flooded with troops, this seriously Slows things to a crawl (kinda helpful in micro managing battles but seriously annoying otherwise). I don;t think it's due to graphics coz i reduced the resolution and i had the same problems, the issue is CPU bound. Again, don't get me wrong, in the default settings of skirmishes i have no slow down, this happens only when u have way more than 1000 command points and your playing on large a$$ maps.
I seriously wonder what kinda system is needed to play the game smoothly with so many units? maybe an AMD 64FX? Anywasy the game is awesome, i always play against the comp in Brutal difficulty, or else the AI is not too challenging. However, i know a lot of people who beg to differ.
The AI is overall pretty good at one thign - Rushing you, they simply intend to win on the sole concept of rushing rushing and rushing. I have held Morodor, Goblins and Isengard all at Brutal difficulty at bay for over 3 hours on the maps of Helm's Deep and in Gondor ultimately beating each faction one by one with a unit kill to death ratio of 300 something (i only lost 20 units). This seriously proves that the AI needs a lot of work, they kept coming like lamb to the slaughter towards the gates where ive placed my upgraded Ranger batalions picking them off so easily. After ive place around 7-8 ranger batalions on the walls, nothing even came close to touching the gates. I had breakfast, cofee and took a bathroom break all the time while the game was going on.. it was sad ha ha
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