Hey everyone! Over the last few days, I've been (re)tinkering with this scenario, and I've really beefed it up. Major changes include:
- I've retooled how Elvish "sacrifice" works. Probably the biggest thing is that I've also added in a Valinor port for Elvish swanships to dock. Basically, if you bring your battle-summoned elves here and "return them" (aka sacrifice them), you earn 40 cultural points, which is more than can be earned at most Elvish cities. This will encourage you to send your Elves to Valinor rather than just "return" them in, say, Rivendell. Of note, Elvish king units cannot be loaded into Swanships (which are the only vessels that can get to Valinor safely), and king units cannot be loaded into eagles (so don't even try to paradrop them in the middle of a mountain and not worry about regicide kicking in).
- Arnor and the Shire have been removed as playable civs. This was done simply to streamline the whole game. Having to have separate .biqs for different civs was just a headache. Arnor and the Shire have both been partially absorbed by Gondor. (The units and civilopedia entries are still in the files, so if you want to 'plug em back in', go for it).
- The ring can no longer be captured by anyone except Gondor. This is to really make it tricky if you're playing as Mordor; you can't just wait until the ringbearer waltzes near Mt. Doom. You actually have to conquer Middle-earth now.
- I worked on re-balancing many of the units and techs.
- I added a few new graphical updates, and I swapped out a few of the older units for newer, shinier ones.
- The Civilopedia has been overhauled so that it's not so buggy; I also did another proofread on it.
- And finally, I added some better sound effects for things like enslavement ("summoning") and the like.
I think I'll call this version "2.5," since it builds off the 2018 update, but adds a lot of fun new features. Enjoy!
