Lord Malbeth
Emperor
Introduction
Many years ago, during the Second Age of Arda, the evil Lord Sauron forged in the fires of Mount Doom the One Ring, a superweapon into which he imbued his very spirit. Centuries later, the Elves, Dúnedain, and Dwarves Khazad-dum formed a Last Alliance and marched on Sauron's realm, Mordor. After much carnage, the Alliance defeated Sauron and cut the One Ring from his hand. Sauron's spirit fled, but the victory was incomplete, for the One Ring was not destroyed.
For the last three thousand years, the Ring slept in secret, and the world knew an uneasy peace. But recently, the ring has been rediscovered…
Eager to reclaim what is his, Sauron has returned to his ancient realm of Mordor and is planning to destroy all of the free peoples of Middle-earth. In the face of Sauron's seemingly unstoppable might, Frodo Baggins has been entrusted with the Ring. If Frodo can throw this devilish artifact into the fires of Mount Doom, he can un-make a great evil and save the world. Will he be able to defeat Sauron and see the Return of the King? Or will he die trying? You decide...
What's New?
While on the surface, this is an update of my 2009 scenario, "Return of the Shadow: The War of the Ring," a lot of things have been completely rebuilt from the ground up. For that reason, it's really more of a remake than anything else. In terms of features:
First: It is recommended that you use the GOG version of Civ3 to play this scenario. Initially, I modded most of it using the Steam editor, but at some point, for an unclear reason, the Steam version began crashing whenever I tried running the scenario. The GOG version, however, seems to work fine.
Second: It is also recommended that, before installing this mod, you download Flintlock's C3X "master-patch," which can be found here. This mod fixes many of the base game's issues while also extending the game's capabilities. While it isn't essential to use this scenario with Flintlock's patch, C3X will make your experience all the better.
Third: Download the files here and unzip them into your scenario folder, located at "..\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Scenarios"
Many years ago, during the Second Age of Arda, the evil Lord Sauron forged in the fires of Mount Doom the One Ring, a superweapon into which he imbued his very spirit. Centuries later, the Elves, Dúnedain, and Dwarves Khazad-dum formed a Last Alliance and marched on Sauron's realm, Mordor. After much carnage, the Alliance defeated Sauron and cut the One Ring from his hand. Sauron's spirit fled, but the victory was incomplete, for the One Ring was not destroyed.
For the last three thousand years, the Ring slept in secret, and the world knew an uneasy peace. But recently, the ring has been rediscovered…
Eager to reclaim what is his, Sauron has returned to his ancient realm of Mordor and is planning to destroy all of the free peoples of Middle-earth. In the face of Sauron's seemingly unstoppable might, Frodo Baggins has been entrusted with the Ring. If Frodo can throw this devilish artifact into the fires of Mount Doom, he can un-make a great evil and save the world. Will he be able to defeat Sauron and see the Return of the King? Or will he die trying? You decide...
What's New?
While on the surface, this is an update of my 2009 scenario, "Return of the Shadow: The War of the Ring," a lot of things have been completely rebuilt from the ground up. For that reason, it's really more of a remake than anything else. In terms of features:
- Playable civs include Gondor, Mordor, Isengard, Rohan, the Elves, the Dwarves, and the Ents. Non-Playable civs include the Southrons, the Easterlings, the Northmen, and the Wildmen.
- This version uses a map I created myself, using a variety of official maps as a guide. My goal was to make the game world slightly bigger than it was in my original.
- Great care has gone into recreating the dark and mysterious atmosphere of the books: ancient ruins are scattered across the map, the forests and mountains are overrun with all sorts of evil beings, and there are even barbarian units that you can capture and upgrade to aid you in your war!
- Just like in the original version, the Ring is a flag unit, and Mt. Doom is the goal of Reverse Capture the Flag victory. The Ring also functions as a fantasy nuke that can inflict massive damage on your enemies… but doing so will preclude you from scoring a Reverse Capture the Flag victory.
- If you play as the Elves, you can try to win a Cultural Victory by returning elves to Valinor (aka sacrifices).
- Mass Regicide is in effect, and each king unit has special abilities according to their characters
- Each civ has its own UU, including Guard of the Citadel, Orcs, Uruk-hai, Riders of Rohan, Elvish Bowmen, Dwarven Warriors, and many others. Many other unique units (e.g., Barrow-Wight, Entwives) can only be produced by constructing certain improvements or wonders.
- Airfields and Radar Towers are included as Eagle Eyries and The Argonath. However, you can't build them--they're preplaced. Railroads don't feature at all. Craters are featured as "devastation," and mountains cannot be crossed except at specific mountain passes.
- Naturally, the game features a number of customized Wonders like the Lair of Shelob, Meduseld, Barad-dur, etc. Many of these wonders produce certain units or give your nation a major production boost.
- Every unit/building/civ/tech/etc. gets a custom Civilopedia entry. Most are based on the ones I included in my 2009 scenario, although all have been extensively rewritten to improve flow, grammar, readability, and accuracy. (Note: Many of those original entries were in turn sampled from Quasidemo's older LOTR: War of the Ring scenario, whereas others are based on text borrowed from Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia or Arda, lotr.wikia.com, the Tolkien Gateway, and a number of reference books.)
- Why aren't Arnor or the Shire playable characters anymore? Where are the Dunlendings or the Haradrim? One of the first changes I made to the scenario was to simplify the number of civs. Some civs, like Arnor and the Shire, were removed because a) they were too far from the scenario's main action and b) their 'role' in the scenario could more readily be filled by another civ (e.g., Gondor, in the case of Arnor and the Shire). Other civs were cut because, frankly, I found the version with a boatload of AI enemy civs to be a bit messy. Additionally, by merging a few civs into each other, it became harder to wipe out smaller enemies first before focusing on bigger foes: Now, if you want to wipe out Isengard--for instance--you'll need to capture Isengard and Dunland. And if you want to conquer Gondor, you'll need to capture the Shire, too.
- Why does Mordor have a number of cities in Eriador? In the original version of this scenario, most of the action took place on the Gondor/Mordor or Isengard/Rohan borders. That's pretty accurate to the books, but it makes for a lopsided game. For this version, I therefore tried to 'expand' the conflict by giving Mordor a few cities where the realm of Angmar once was. Yes, this is anachronistic, but it means that Eriador is no longer a barren expanse of nothing. Now, the forces of Mordor pose a threat to the once peaceful settlements like the Shire, Bree, the Grey Havens, and the Dwarven mines of the Blue Mountains.
- Modders have created a number of cool graphics for units like the Riders of Rohan, Elvish Spearmen, etc. Why haven't you used them? It's true: There's a lot of really great unit artwork on this forum. But as I was redeveloping this scenario over the last few years, I challenged myself to fit as many "vanilla" units as I could in the scenario. Part of this was (once again) inspired by Quasidemo's original LOTR scenario, which only used custom graphics of the Balrog and the Ring. But I also made this decision so that the whole scenario has the late 90s/early 2000s CGI aesthetic of the original game. With that said, this scenario still features dozens of units downloaded from this forum.
- "Captain Balkubar"? "Lostladen"? Elves in Edhellond? The Southrons conquering Tolfalas? What is this fanon!?? As much as I love "official" lore, in order to fill out this scenario and make it more enjoyable, I was forced to deviate slightly from Tolkien's canon in a few areas. Some of this "filled-in" content is based on draft content found in the History of Middle-earth series (e.g., the Southrons overrunning Tolfalas, city names like "Lostladen" and "Nargil Pass"). In other instances, I fudged the timeline a bit to make things more strategic. (For instance, while Edhellond had long been abandoned by the close of the Third Age, making it an active harbor provides the Elves with a city in the thick of the action.) Other concepts were borrowed from spin-off media (e.g., city names like "High Fells of Rhudaur" or "Thaurband") to fill in some story gaps, and in a few places, I freely dabbled in speculation to close holes (e.g., the name "Balkubar," which is an Adunaic name of my own invention used to refer to the leader of the Corsairs, who otherwise goes unnamed in Tolkien's extant work).
- Who made this unit? Where did you get that Civilopedia entry? Full credits for graphics and text are included in the main folder.
First: It is recommended that you use the GOG version of Civ3 to play this scenario. Initially, I modded most of it using the Steam editor, but at some point, for an unclear reason, the Steam version began crashing whenever I tried running the scenario. The GOG version, however, seems to work fine.
Second: It is also recommended that, before installing this mod, you download Flintlock's C3X "master-patch," which can be found here. This mod fixes many of the base game's issues while also extending the game's capabilities. While it isn't essential to use this scenario with Flintlock's patch, C3X will make your experience all the better.
Third: Download the files here and unzip them into your scenario folder, located at "..\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Scenarios"
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