Barbarians & Animals:

Barbarian Units:

* Goblin = Weaker Orc Unit. Never stop spawning.

Goblins:

- Goblin Warrior
- Goblin Swordsman
- Goblin Spearman
- Goblin Archer
- Goblin Warg Rider

Special Barbarian Units:

Hill Troll: Large Hill Troll Unit. Spawns from a Lair only located on Hill Terrain, rarely. They can move out of Hill Terrain. Much Weaker than regular Troll Units.

Cave Troll: Large Cave Troll Unit. Spawns from a Lair only located on Mountain Terrain, rarely. Cannot leave Mountain/Hill Terrain. Much Weaker than regular Troll Units.

Lesser Dragon: Large Dragon Unit. Weaker than Cold Dragons. High Attack & Defence. Spawns from a Lair located in Mountain Terrain only, very rarely. Can enter Cultural Borders.

Animals:

- Wolf
- Warg
- Spider
- Boar
- Bear
- Polar Bear
- Panther
- Kraken (Very Rare)

Special Animal Units:

Huorn: Large Huorn (Ent) Unit. Spawns in Forest Terrain only, very rarely. Can leave Forest Terrain. Can enter Cultural Borders. Starts at peace with all Civs except Shadow Civs. High Attack & Defence. Special Promotion: +100% vs. Goblin, Orc & Uruk-Hai Units (Including Mounted versions).

Unique Animal Hero Units:

Shelob: Large Spider Unit. Has a Lair in Mountain Terrain with Cultural Borders of 1 Tile in all Directions. This cannot be removed except by destroying Shelob & Destorying her Lair. If her Lair is not destroyed she respawns at beginning Strength 5 Turns later. Shelob cannot move beyond her Cultural Borders. Her Lair appears no closer than 10 Tiles to Mordor Starting Location and no further than 20 Tiles from Mordor Starting Location. High Attack & Defence. Gains XP like a Hero Unit (Max 50 + Combat XP). Destorying Shelob grants the Special Promotion: Spider Hunter I, +50% vs. Spider Units.

Ungoliant: Huge Spider Unit. Can move anywhere on the Map. Much Higher Attack & Defence than Shelob. Will not enter Cultural Borders. Gains XP like a Hero Unit (Max 100 + Combat XP). Destorying Ungoliant grants the Special Promotions: Spider Hunter II, +100% vs. Spider Units.

Carcharoth: Huge Warg Unit. Can move anywhere on the Map. Permanent Peace with Angband. Can enter Angbands Cultural Borders, but not others. High Attack & Defence. Has a Special Promotion: Silmaril Hunter: +25% Attack vs. Unit Equipped with a Silmaril. Gains XP like a Hero Unit (Max 75 + Combat XP). Destroying Carcharoth grants the Special Promotion: Warg Hunter, +100% vs. Warg & Wolf Units.

Smaug: Large Dragon Unit. Can move anywhere on the Map. Spawns in a Northern Mountain Range, after the THIRD AGE OF THE SUN is first researched. Not at peace with anyone. Can enter Cultural Borders. High Attack & Defence. Gains XP like a Hero Unit (Max 75 + Combat XP). Destroying Smaug grants the Special Promotion: Dragon Hunter: +100% vs. Dragons, +600 Gold (Hoard).

Pirates:

Pirate Ship
Priate War Ship

* Angband & Mordor start at Peace with all types of Barbarians, Shelob, Ungoliant & Carcharoth.

* Haradrim start at Peace with Pirates.

I like the idea. I'm not sure about Giants (AFAIK they're nowhere in Tolkien), we can just have some normal troll units as rare barbarians.

For the animals, again good, IDK about the kraken (again AFAIK it's not in Tolkien) - and why are pirates considered Animals?

Fixed the Pirates issues.

Giants are mentioned in The Hobbit when Bilbo is going over the High Pass. Krakens are mentioned by Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Rings, though not by name. That is the Watcher in the Water.

Ah. Kraken is good, though I seem to remember that passage about Giants as being a metaphor. He could easily be metaphoring with a real thing though.

True. Giants are not something that needs to be in. They can be easily removed.

I thing goblins, Dragons ect musnt attack to Shadow civs. Can we use that with alignments? Like; Ents cant attack "Good" Align. Civs, Goblins, Trolls ect can't attack "Evil" Align. Civs?

I like the list as it looks now. Maybe as heroes for the barbarians you can also put Smaug the Dragon.
I agree that kraken and giants can be in. Also, the idea of not attacking a certain allignment is really cool though we have to see how to implement that. One way is to use the trait of FFH2 called "Barbarian". You start at peace with the barbarians but only hidden nationality units like animals could attack you. That was how they solved it in FFH2. Also, once you became too powerfull the barbarians would break their peace with you but we can also just tweak the trait until we have it how we want.

Sounds good. I have added Smaug to the list.

Huorns and Smaug should probably be animals (Ungoliant as well), (or can they be beasts as well? not too sure) to make it work with the barbarian trait. Otherwise is should also not be too hard to modify the barbarian trait slightly to include another unittype. For Shelob's lair I think we might be able to use the Kuriotates settlements as a starting point. Should probably wait until second release though and have Shelob as regular barb hero in the first release.

Wouldn't add giants personnaly.

I'll take Giants out right now, that isn't a problem. 2 of you have had reservations now, so that is good enough for me. I will also rename the Barbarian Hero Units to Animal Hero Units.

What about hill and cave trolls both as barb units? One more in and around hills, the other more in the mountains.

Two different types of trolls should be good for barbs IMHO.

Sounds good to me. Smaug is also good (something like Acheron in FFH?).

I really like the idea; it is important for Mods to give the 'feel' of playing in that world, that is, that the mod isn't just BtS or FfH with different names and art-work attached to the units.

For some of the killer tough units (especially Ungoliant) you probably need to ensure that the game is far enough along before they can spawn or else they can take down whole civilizations by themselves; both BtS and FfH have such rules so they should be easy to copy, like the rules on spawning Gurid in FfH. I know there is some controversy as to how tough Ungoliant was, weather she was a one-spider army because she was a powerhouse or if the bulk of her power came from absorbing the light of the Trees. Especially for Ungoliant, you may want to consider if she is a 'hero' for Morgoth or Sauron or if whe is better as a barbarian. I like her as a barbarian for immersion but as a hero for more strategy options.

So, I really like the idea, but I think you may want to go futher with some of the super flavor units (Smaug, Ungolant, Carchoroth). The proposed ability of Carcharoth to be more powerful around the silmarils is right on point, this is what makes mods like this 'neat'; indeed maybe it should be more than 25% to be a feature worth using. For Ungoliant we could have that she gets extra HP for destroying good things, however, defined. For example, maybe Carcharoth and or Ungoliant are allowed to get MUCH tougher if a player sacrifices a Silmaril, giveng the player a tough choice between keeping the silmaril or sacrificing it for a hero (this idea only 'works' if the choice is tough, and it doesn't work if they are barbarians unless there is some way to get barbarians on your side like the Clan of Embers world spell in FfH). One neat feature in FfH is that ability to build certain heroes (Halfmorn), maybe Ungoliant is buildable by Morgoth, etc. Smaug maybe should spawn once dragons beome available, etc.

My view is that there could even be an Ungoliant 'strategy' for the Morgoth or other shadow players, in the early aprt of the Silmarillion it appeared that she was a major part of Morgoth's power. And if you play that strategy, the chance she turns can also be a neat feature.

Indeed, I recommend going as far with this as possible. Sorry, I don't remember if you have Umbar, but if you do, maybe the pirates don't attack Umbar, and Umbar can use a tech or a project that increases the pirates. If you have Beorn, then maybe you are immune to bear attacks, etc.

What about humans as barbarians? Even in the third age we have the Woses, I think there would be some justification.

Maybe add werewolves? I think they were in the Silmarillion (iirc in the fight between Sauron and Finrod) and they could also be useful as tough barbarains.

Finally, what about creatures like Old Man Willow and other nasty forest thingies?

Best wishes,

Breunor

Good ideas all around.

Updated the list with the Cave Troll.

@Breunor: Werewolves are a Unique Unit available to Morgoth/Melkor. We don't have Umbar as its own Civ but included with Harad. I agree with the Pirates starting at Peace with Harad and will reflect that in this update. Old Man Willow would be considered a "Huorn" or an Ent. I would say he is more "Huorn", but that is debateable. He also didn't move persay. A lot of other good possibilities for futher on in the releases.

Werewolves are part of the Angband civ, although we haven't decided yet if they will be implemented as werewolves as in FFH or not (making new werewolves 25% chance when defeating a unit).
I agree that we have to have requirements for the barbarians to be able to build certain heroes to make sure they don't completely destroy a civ in the beginning (one of the reasons the dragon in FFH cannot move, which it could in the earlier versions and wipe out numerous civs in the very beginning with 19 strength). I indeed thought that Smaug would work like Acheron (the first time I saw him in FFH I immediatly thought of Smaug :)). I like the idea of Old man willow as a barbarian hero in some form or another (maybe roaming through certain forests).
Maybe we can also do some barbarian units which are not helping evil (Mordor and Angband) but help good like Tom Bombadil (only attack evil units but will not move past a certain area). He can start at peace with the good civs (although I'm really not sure how to do this yet). Maybe we can use Treabeard in a similar fashion.
On Ungolianth, we had a discussion earlier if we wanted her as a hero and during this discussion we came to the conclusion that she wasn't really working for Morgoth but more helped him for as long as it suited her. That is I think the reason we have her here in the barbarian section and personnally I would keep her here.

I think we have ideas concerning the Ents and certain Projects.

Also, I believe I worked around the idea of the Animal/Barbarisan Heros destroying Civs by saying that they could not enter Cultural Borders.

Also, regarding how though Smaug will probably be we might want to spawn him later on and not immediatly. If he is that though I would make the promo be +100% vs dragon units. Also, we might consider not having him move into cultural borders and having to be build in a city by the barbarians were than his hord/loot spawns.

Updated Smaugs write up to say that he spawns upong the research of THE THIRD AGE OF THE SUN.

Not sure how implementing your other ideas would work for him.

No I'm also not sure, because if we make them barbarians they attack everyone, even good civs. I also don't want Treabeard of Tom buildable because that takes away the uniqueness and mysterie of these characters that they really didn't side with anyone. For now probably leave them out, I just wanted to name it to get some discussion going. Maybe people have good ideas how we could incorporate them.

There are threads devoted to the Nature Civs, meaning them. Right now, I think that the Ents will appear with the projects in the Wonders thread. We could discuss it there I suppose. They don't really feel like Barbarians or Animals however.

Yes I agree they shouldn't be barbarians but having them buildable might also not be the best idea. I'm just not sure :).

Discussion moved to the Development Forum.

Moved to development forum.

I will move this discussion to the Development Forum then and we can continue it there if we choose.

Back on Topic again! :crazyeye:

I added this little bonus to Smaug:

+1000 Gold (Hoard)

I also updated the Promo Bonus to +100% vs. Dragons.

I adjusted down the Hoard bonus to +600 based on suggestions. I also tweaked the Cave Troll write up to say that it can enter Hill Terrain as well, so it can still attack Dwarven Cities built on Hills around Mountain Terrain.

I think we're going to need to rework the barbarian trait to make this work.

Solution:
It shouldn't be coupled to a trait, but to alignment.
The barbarian units get an alignment as well.
Barbarian units are at peace with civs of the same alignment.

I'm not sure whether this can be implemented easily, a lot depends on how the barbarian trait is implemented. I don't have time to look at it now, but will try to do so in the next couple of days.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean there. Do you mean who starts out at peace with certain barbarians? A couple of Mods have that kind of thing incorporated. We could look into it.

Yeah, that's what I meant. I missed a page.

Should we have Crebain? Would we veiw them as animal/barbarians, or a Saruman type scout?

Best wishes,

Breunor

That is a possible Idea. I like the Idea as having them as a scout. Perhaps as an ivisible scout that cannot be destroyed ecept by other Flying Units and can go into any territory at will. Make them a National Unit limited to a few.

Like the Crebain idea. They should act like planes in the normal game.

Forgive me if I'm asking a stupid question because I just stopped in cause this mod looks cool, but what about the Balrog?

The Balrog will be special units for Morgoth. They maybe later on will spawn as barbarians but not sure about that yet.

Hmm, that's an interesting idea. Hadn't thought about having them spawn as barbarians.

That would be interesting. Though it shouldn't be too frequent.

Were is balchoth, the captain of the balrogs?

And Glaurung and Ancalagon were MUCH MORE powerful than Smaug

Also silmaril hunter would be 50 or 100%, not just 25%

Some of those you mentioned are Heroes for the Civs. Others may not be included immediately.

Are we liking the list as it stands, or does anyone else have any suggestions for adding to or removing from the current list?

Do we wish to have Balrogs spawn as a Barbarian Unit or just limit is to Angband to begind with?

If no other suggestions are forthcoming, shall we call this list finalized?

I looked through some forums to see everything I could find that could or should be a barbarian or animal. Obviously, I may have missed afew but this is my shot:

The most likely ones to add would be undead of a few sorts, like the barrow wights. I may view we should add some.

Gandalf mentions the 'nameless things' that are powerful; I suspect that the Watcher in the Water is one of the 'nameless things'.

Do we have anything for the spirits like Caradhras?

Obscure would be Mewlips; they are apparently pretty tough (they are mentioned in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil). That poem also has the Minor-Gorcrows. Dumbledors (windged insects) are mentioned in the Hobbit poem 'Errantry'.

Best wishes,

Breunor

Some interesting ideas.

For Barrow Wights, I was thinking that those would be a good Unique Unit for Angmar. It goes along with the Coruption of the Dead Tech.

RE: Tom and Treebeard

Unplayable Civ?
That way they'd attack all the marauding orcs.
Make them permanently at war with your stated evil civs... then theyd slaughter their orcs too?
I dont know if theres a way to do that, once upon a time in civ II there was (had some good modding options that disappeared in CIV III...).
Might want to consider limiting their diplomacy options as well if possible...

Limit their research options to nil, limit their production capabilities to basically just.. building new huorns, very very slowly, in the case of fangorn.

In toms case ... i dont even know what hed make... what did tom do with all of his time other than run around singing and killing barrow wights anyways lol?


Just throwing ideas around here, I know there are LOTS of bugs to work out in the concept...

I dont know how the AI would behave either.. you wouldnt want them going out and conquering the world. In civ II you couldve just set them as an air unit so they wouldnt be able to take over cities... Would need to find another creative workaround. Mind you they did take over isengard... Either way, youd want to ensure some balance is in place so that theyd behave how you want them to. Which is only to be overly aggressive if provoked.

I got it. Develop some sort of trigger that constitutes being "sufficiently provoked".. have normal ent units limited in the same way described as toms described below... but when this trigger occurs, have it create like a dozen Huorn units or something that are not so limited... call them "enraged Huorns" or watever, as well as the treebeard hero that will presumably all march off and sack the closest evil city with whom they are at war. As far as the trigger itself, maybe have a few "ancient tree" units spread out around the forest, and if any of them get destroyed, kind of like the pieces of barnaxus idea, have them spawn mayhem instead of fragments.

In toms case too bad there wasnt a way to limit him to his own cultural borders...
actually, werent chariots and catapults in CIV4 incapable of entering swamp terrain unless it had a road? or was that civ 3? Because if it was 4, you could maybe make a similar limitation for Tom, except have him unable to enter ANY terrain that doesnt have the "road", and change the qualifier that allows him to enter from "road" to something else, some unique feature... call it "Toms Dominion" or whatever you like (cant remember how they referred to it in the books), that way you could even mark out the territory he operates in. In theory, if you had complete kills required enabled, he wouldnt even need a city (which makes more sense... but you could have him respawn in "tom's house"... basically his own lair, which you would want to make very difficult to destroy... something I'm assuming youve done for shelob anyways?).
"Events " dont exist for CivIV do they? Shame if they dont. Could do a lot of fun things otherwise.


-Granted, some huorns or things like them weren't picky about what they throttled... so having some barbarian huorns is good too.

-Call the horde in place for morder?

-Have you considered Barrow Wights as special barbarians as well? After all, they outlasted angmar... and youd need to give tom something useful to do. Oh, and consider also the dead marshes...

-Also, what have you done for Rings of Power?

-Also, what have you done to make mountains difficult to traverse except in certain passes?

-an interesting feature you might want to play with is the dangerous terrain that damages units (eg black holes, radiation) in that BTS Mod that came with the game... cant remember the name but the one in space basically. Final Frontier! Could make the passage to the holy lands most unpleasant.
Might make the northern wastes not so fun also. Maybe mountain passes as well? Same as what they did in that FFH scenario on BTS (blizzards)... with kylorin and melkorn or whatever their names were.



Finally and most importantly:

WHATS LEFt TO DO, WHO STILL WANTS TO WORK ON IT (ACTIVELY RIGHT NOW), AND WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP?

Well, most of the programmers unfortunately have had life get in the way. Not much has really been done except for ideas to be honest. We were building it as a Mod of FFH really. Not really sure what else to say. I think that the CiV upcoming release helped to stall this as well.

Contact me if you would like to help or more though. Even my time is extremely limited due to work, but I am willing to still discuss as I can.

I might be able to help with more than just ideas... although I imagine things are much more complex now than modding CivII in days of old (if you havent seen the age of numenor or dagor bragollach especially... you dont know what youre missing). But I'm sure I could figure some things out given enough time and inclination, and I do have more recent experience modding Rome and Medieval II Total War to some extent...

To be honest I stumbled across this project accidentally because I've been thinking about using FFH myself as a base for a new Dagor Bragollach mod... and I figured, why not jump on the bandwagon thats already running? I'd probably learn alot more that way. Honestly I just can't comprehend why no one else has done this project that you guys are working on yet.

Msn work for you?

PS, had a look at the xml... it really doesnt look that complex compared to what I've worked with in the past, and I think I can definitely figure out how to do the more menial tasks with some proficiency, savings our programmers for the really big challenges.

The only thing that really strikes me is the sheer quantity of the files... it'll either take me a bit of time or advice before I can really "orient" myself and know my way around like I used to with the civ games... fortunately they seem to be fairly logically organized, and theres a wealth of material posted on this site as far as modding info goes!

I daresay, xmen510, that we might even be able to get you to help out with the simpler aspects of xml with me, if you can find the time to learn with me (and if thats something that might interest you). Then we can save the cavalry for when we truly need them.

Python... I'm not going to volunteer myself for. I haven't seen it nor have I looked at it yet, so for now I think I'd better not play junior mechanic and should leave that for the professionals.

Also... I've just thought of another way I could potentially help out. When you start into the Eldar-o-pedia, I'm more than willing to be an editor... honestly, I almost offered to correct the entries on FFH. Amazing game... but grammar was their downfall lol. No pun intended.

Regarding Ents, maybe make them a Summonable civ a la FFH's Mercurians and Infernal? After a certain tech is researched you could have a project (March of the Trees?) that summons the Ent civ, with Treebeard as their hero? The dead army that Aragorn called to his aid in the Return of the King could also be summoned (can't for the life of me remember their name atm).

The only Tolkien I read was Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, so my knowledge is limited to the Third Age, but if this mod uses FFH as a base then there is already a Barrows lair, why not have Barbarian Barrow Wights spawn from them?

Those are also some good ideas.

I can't really help with the actual modding per se, but I'd like to help with ideas and mechanics if possible for this mod. I'm about to start reading the Silmarillion, and learning HTML and CSS, and will probably look at XML from there

To be honest. Things have really stalled on the Mod front. Filivs Terrae is looking into things as well now, but I can't say with any honesty that this is going to get made.

I might pick up the slack in the project... but I think what I want to do is make a smaller dagor bragollach 'scenario' (if you havent read the silmarillion, now's the time, lotr does not compare) just to fully familiarize myself with civ4 modding first, because as it is most of my experience is with the total war series and I havent made a civmod since civ2... Call it a test run.

That said hopefully by then some of the other project team members will have at least some time again, or hopefully some fresh recruits come along willing to help me finish things up.

I really want to see this project completed. In the meantime I could use some help with graphics/art for dagor, and I'll be posting up a list soon of exactly what I'll need. I don't know if I should post that up in here or in its own forum, but I'll figure out the details of what's most appropriate with xmen soon.

If there's a standstill on this, I'll probably know enough coding languages by the time I actually get Civ5 to actually be of use if people want to try again on that platform.

Cool to see that there has been some activity here. I myself have been quite busy so not a lot of progress. Most of the stuff that still needed to be done is XML stuff (very boring work if you are doing it all by yourself I can tell you :) ) so with just XML coding you should be able to get quite far. I hope to get some more time to be able to continue with adding some civs. Although I would like someone with more Art knowledge to actually do the flags, because I've tried a little but it has not really been a success :(

I'll probably be started learning XML by the summer at least