BFME II: Highly Scaleable Difficulty
I bought The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II yesterday. Initial impressions? Pretty cool. The one thing I’d like to commend them on (okay, two) is the amount of control the player has over the difficulty of their NPC opponents. I would describe myself as a casual RTS player when it comes to strategy games. I prefer turn-based or anything other than real-time strategy games, because I hate frantically attempting to build my forces before everyone else.
I like to call it finesse. I treat strategy games like sim games in a way, because I like making my stronghold look pretty and I prefer to form all my troops up nicely. This generally scares me away from RTS games because I have to be quick or dead. In BFME II (I didn’t make that acronym up, they did), you can not only scale the opponent’s difficulty from Easy to Hard, but you can give them a handicap of up to 95%.
What does this do for me? It makes it so I can straight up own the AI if I feel like it, and totally focus on making my area of influence look neat. I like that. It’s something that most RTSes don’t offer, and it should probably be offered in more of them going forward. It’s strange how I’m a hardcore PvPer in MMORPGs and a total carebear when it comes to strategy games, but that’s how it works for me.
And the other bit of props I’d like to give them is simply execution. It feels like I’m the LotR world. I can create my own hero and use him in skirmishes. I can build a really badass base in a logical way. The music is awesome, the visuals are great, and watching tons of people fight at once is totally sweet (you can scale the amount of units you can have up to 10x normal, which lags the crap out of your computer but looks cool. Also an option I want to see in future RTSes. The main reason I didn’t like WarCraft III is that you can only have very few units in a battle at one time. Not epic. Weak.).
I’m with you on the turn-based thing — takes the rush factor out. I’m also a bit of an empire-builder when it comes to these games. I like the nice, organized, walled-in base of operations that is nearly impossible to achieve in many of these games — almost like: why did they even include walls as a build option?
Anyway, BFME II didn’t do it for me. I agree with you on the pluses you mention, but I guess that just isn’t enough for me. Or maybe I’m RTS’ed out. I think RTS’s, in some regard, are falling into the cookie-cutter factory. New graphics, units, skills and abilities mapped onto the same old bed of mechanics.
The problem with the game, for me, rest solely on the fact that the buidings are too weak. I too enjoy constructing pretty to look at, well defended bases. The “rush” aspect of this game is too overwhelming to make it enjoyable. Fine, after a few expensive upgrades specifically designed to demolish buildings, ok then go for it. For me, the payoff is being able to leave your base to it’s own defenses and be confident it can repel invaders. No way in BFME II could you do that, even in the early stages. It make me remember why I liked Starcraft so much.
Or Dune 2 (yes, the original). I enjoy laughing maniacally while the AI throws wave after wave of hapless gimps against my untouchable defenses. Stronghold was nicely balanced in that department – defenses were powerful, but not absolutely untouchable. I just played through BFME II (is that Biff me too?) War of the Ring and didn’t have to build a siege works once. I thought the special powers were a bit special – but that did tend to tidy up the end game in my favour.
In short, stronger buildings with more archer stationing options would have been nice. I agree with Ryan on the overall package – best so far IMHO.