Finally won a domination victory after 330 hours of gameplay as Angmar on High King level (not sure if Regent or Monarch, but it was fairly challenging until the last 15% of land area, though I'd bump up next go-roung. Spawned the dragon, but will keep playing until I can see the Balrog - should only be
one more turn... Overall was a lot of fun, not much learning curve from regular Civ, but more competitive. A great mod. May post some short game report with pics (though not sure if this is the place). Besides the bug reported above, which never recurred there were only very few issues:
A) Armies don't retain the abilities of component unit, which kinda sucks as now trolls can't move over mountains, snufflers can't snuffle, etc. Poor dragon had to be armied to be able to survive but now he can't breathe fire.
B) Snufflers are supposed to have stealth attack but do not (i'm not sure if stealth attack in regular civ even works since I can't remember ever getting that far along the tech tree)
Other thoughts - gosh I wish there were railroads esp on a huge map, brb moving units 10-20 turns to make it to the front. I can see how this would be a little asynchronous (this isn't the right word). I was surprised by the 1 unit armies, but they were better balanced than vanilla. I was disappointed that I started a massive war to get mithril but couldn't make mithril troops. At least the elves couldn't either. I think mountains should be traversable earlier. I don't know if this would affect the dwarves punitively though since I eliminated them first. The mountain thing kind of made a pangea map into continents. If I'd done it over, I'd have checked the geography or played one of the pre-made maps so that didn't happen & Mordor and Isengard weren't on islands. I was dismayed to find that some other civs had amphibious units that they used to take out my cities (but was pleased to storm the beaches of Dunland with orc archers). Loved my 1 defense orc workers, and especially loved sacrificing foreign workers for culture! Didn't discover I could do this until midway through then about 100 of them got butchered all at once. Wondered if this effects relations. Finally IMO should be more of a diplomatic boost based on the books. No reason I should be gracious with Galadriel, but Sauron won't trade me sheep.
Again, overall a hugely positive gameplay experience, and I thank the creators, especially
@WildWeazel