I love this mod, along with the submod Divide and Conquer. I've played more of these mods than I have Medieval 2, and I've played more Medieval 2 than any other Total war. But first:
I dropped this mod because it had too much Bloom.
What the fuck. Turn it off.
Anyway, I've started a game of Divide and Conquer 4.5, the newest version, just released. I go through periods of about 2 months every other year where I'll spend hours every night playing Total War games. I didn't even intend to play DaC during this current period, but I noticed that the entire subforum was missing on TWC when I was looking for mods. Turns out the admins of that forum removed the mod because the latest version (4.5) includes the base Third Age mod in one single easy install. They didn't like that because of rules or something. I bet an admin felt really good about deleting/hiding that forum. So I was reminded of the mod because of that.
VH/VH. I'm playing Gondor this time. I've actually restarted 3 times. Let me show you why.
https://imgur.com/a/ZH614U8
Link to an album of images showing the bodies of this battle.
Full stack versus half stack. By virtue of numbers, their soldiers were superior because this was the early game; Mordor had not yet thrown away the scary starting units it gets at Minas Morgul, and all I had were a couple regular infantry and a bunch of militia. They came at me with some of their better units. I was sure I was about to lose this, or that Boromir would die, when they ground away a hole in the soldiers surrounding them and made their way to the capture point. The timer ran down to 10 seconds before I was able to put a soldier in it to reset the timer. Literally a soldier.
This mod is a little bit broken. Or rather, Medieval 2's base AI is bad, and this is better, but worse in other ways. For instance, here at the defense of Western Osgiliath, the AI is not quite able to maneuver their armies in the city. No custom map has been managed in an intelligent manner by the AI. For the most part, all they can do is zerg rush their units into the capture point. They generally don't form up after getting in. The more you keep them bounded by chokepoints, the harder they push. In a weird way, this is actually really compelling because it is not (not yet) easy to handle this. I'm getting better at it, but the
constant grinding away of men in these gigantic frantic moshpits is rather difficult to set up perfectly, and they have to be planned on the battlemap; you have to make sure you simply have enough units to die in the constant sieges you get as Gondor. In the battle at W. Osgiliath in the image above, there are two gates the enemy can enter through, but the AI only recognizes the one. In general, the AI won't zerg rush so hard if you just give them a tiny bit of space between the chokepoints like gateways and your troops, so you'll generally have an easier time of it. But it doesn't quite work out that way, because the sheer numbers they have can really out-attrition your units in a standing fight. It ends up being easier to maintain the moshpit near gates because you'll lose slightly fewer men by cheesing it. The enemy focuses entirely on maneuvering their units beyond the gate, so they constantly try to rush into your spears. Less of them end up fighting that way. You have to optimize the grind.
In fact, that's why I restarted 3 times. The first time I tried a strategy of basically ignoring the economy until I could push out to conquer more land with the units I had. That quickly revealed itself to be impossible, because Mordor on Very Hard is constant doomstacks after turn 7 or so. I had to devote every single unit to the two chokepoints on the campaign map keeping Mordor away from the rest of Gondor and Rohan. In the end on my first attempt I was pushed back to Minas Tirith with a little more than half a stack and -6k money, -4k a turn, which is gg. The second restart was only a test of a way of managing the economy, as was the third. This fourth time is a real attempt that I'm going to play until the end. I've figured out that you'll never have a good economy as Gondor, but it's possible to at least
have one if you use garrisons correctly and build mines. I'm having a blast because I've never lost a campaign in Total War, but it's a distinct possibility here, and the battles are difficult. The battles feel thematically perfect: just a few men saving the rest of the world from being overrun by a huge horde, but being slowly ground down by wave after wave. I can imagine late game still being incredibly difficult when I assault Mordor. If nothing else, should I get pushed back to the edge of the kingdom, I can board a boat and move elsewhere. I've actually done that before. It's rather fun.
I don't really enjoy modern Total War, even though I did start with Shogun 2. Medieval 2 is one of my favorite games. I love it a lot, and Third Age + its submods make it even more fun for me because of how they change the battles. It's not balanced, the design isn't based around minor differences in the roster like in vanilla M2. Most factions play completely differently and they all (save for bree, I've never played bree, fuck bree) have a number of super bullshit units that can win battles almost by themselves - add onto that many unique (and oft barely functional) custom battle locations, and it just becomes so fun.
DaC 4.5 is completely stable for me. You have to get it from moddb now, so here it is. RIP the TWC subforum. I'm using the thing that makes M2 use more than 2gb of RAM.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/divide-and-conquer/downloads/divide-conquer-v45-eriador-rises
