TLD (The Last Days, LOTR mod) for M&B 1.011 Evil men troops preview

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Triglav

Sergeant Knight at Arms
The Last Days Evil men troops preview

Hello again. :smile:

This is the second in the series of troop previews. We'll show you more the closer to release we get.
We still can't tell you exactly when it's going to be released, but it really shouldn't be much longer
Here is our main forum: http://mbx.streetofeyes.com/index.php/board,20.0.html

TLD (The Last Days /of the Third Age of Middle Earth/) for M&B 1.011 is progressing nicely. This time we introduce the baddies, The Evil men you'll get to fight with or against…


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The ancestors of the Black Numenoreans were Men of Numenor who were corrupted by Sauron and turned to evil. They lived along the southern coasts in Harad and particularly around Umbar, which was not under the control of Gondor at that time.

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The Haradrim had dark skin, hair, and eyes. Some wore red clothing and gold earrings and ornaments, and some painted their faces. They were proud and bold people and were among the forces led by the Lord of the Nazgul that attacked Osgiliath at the beginning of the War of the Ring.

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The Corsairs of Umbar were a mix of the native Haradrim and the descendants of the Black Numenoreans - who had been corrupted by Sauron and made settlements in the south before the destruction of Numenor. Under Sauron's direction, the Corsairs captured the city of Pelargir on the Anduin.

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Khand was inhabited by people called the Variags. During the War of the Ring, Variags of Khand were allied with Sauron. They fought in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

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A race of Men called the Easterlings lived in Rhun. The Easterlings fell under the influence of first Morgoth and then Sauron, and they were enemies of the Men of western Middle-earth throughout the Ages. They were broad and bearded and wielded axes. A force comprised of Easterlings and Orcs captured the island of Cair Andros in the Anduin and crossed into the region of Anorien north of Minas Tirith.

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The wild men of Dunland were swarthy and dark-haired. Dunlendings fought against the Rohirrim at the Battles of the Fords of Isen and the Battle of Helm's Deep.


Hope you like them. :smile:


Here is the link to the TLD Gondor regular and feudal troops preview:
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,145480.html

Here is the link to the TLD Scenes preview:
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,135464.0.html

*Texts under images are from www.tuckborough.net
 
This looks awesome. Just curious though: how available will the black numenorians be? There were very few of them left by the end of the third age, so I think they should be few and far between, but quite powerful.
 
Third TLD theme? Gratz mate. |x

    Dunlandings looking v well, i rly like them. About others... I had a bit diffrent imagination about them. (: But thats great work. Also i thought b_num will be not that popular, but powerfull, like hero npcs. ; P Thats your work, so u have to fell free about everythink. [;

Greatings and good luck!!!
 
Tapase said:
Third TLD theme? Gratz mate. |x

Well, if we had a TLD subforum of our own here, it'd be ok to have several posts in there. As we don't I just have to put them here. If I'd have put all these previews into one post, it'd be a mess. And one per 6 months isn't really spamming the board, is it?
 
Quite nice, quite nice. I only have one negative comment, not all of the Haradrim will have the same, native African face will they?

Even just one or two more face textures would make the Haradrim greatly less.. clone-like.
 
Austupaio said:
Quite nice, quite nice. I only have one negative comment, not all of the Haradrim will have the same, native African face will they?

Where did you see they only have one?
Even on the picture several can be recognised.
In all there are 5 different Harad faces, and it's not the native "African" one.
 
A few of those models and textures seem to be of lower quality then I expected. Were the graphics settings just turned down? Perhaps the new graphics options of Warband have warped my memory of 1.011 graphics.
 
Triglav said:
Austupaio said:
Quite nice, quite nice. I only have one negative comment, not all of the Haradrim will have the same, native African face will they?
Where did you see they only have one?
Even on the picture several can be recognised.
In all there are 5 different Harad faces, and it's not the native "African" one.
I couldn't quite tell, their faces all in those nice helmets. That's great to hear, though. Props to all involved.
 
Taal said:
A few of those models and textures seem to be of lower quality then I expected. Were the graphics settings just turned down? Perhaps the new graphics options of Warband have warped my memory of 1.011 graphics.

I understand your concern. We have had to go through same discussions internally.
In theory we could have given any model any number of polies, to model each button and make the size of any texture so large you could see the fibers in each thread of cloth.

But our main goal was playability over detail and when it came to the decistion to have the game run smooth with 20 high-detail guys fighting or with 100 slightly-less high-detail guys, well, we went for slightly less detail and smoother gameplay and prefered a large variety of gear to only a few high-detail pieces.

Our internal texts have revealed that in battle you hardly take time to observe buttons and cloth folds, but are more concerned about the overall feel and flow of the battle and credibility of armies. Therefore it was more important for us to create diversity and randomisation of troops, so we get less clones. But this incredibly increased the number of models and textures the game has to load (just count the number of vanilla armours, each of our factions has almost that many variations). We solved that by mapping as many different armours to ad few texture sheets as possible, and these as well were attempted to be kept at 1024x1024 max. There are some exceptions too, for some special gear, which got larger textures, but compared to native, the game will have to load 10x more stuff all the same...  :???:

End result is, the armours do not look as highly detailed when you see them frozen in a screenshot, but armies will look varied, not clonelike and credibly equipped in game. And when the arrows start flying you'll have other things to worry about than buttons and cloth.  :smile:
 
Looks great to me. I like the dipylon and the similarly Bronze Age Anatolian looking shield on the guys to the front left of Harad. I remember Merlkir's concept art had a really neat style to them that kind of blended the antiquity and the dark ages, so it looks great.

About the only 'complaint' I'd have is the lack of armor on the easterling horseman in the front with cataphract armor. It looks kinda odd to have a half-bare chest with what looks like a fur corselet yet with a cataphract armor. But the guys in the far back seem to have heavier armor, and that's really a subjective opinion of mine so really just a case of flavor and taste. Like you say, lots of variety in the dress of a soldier (Which is a great feature - I'm really glad you guys are doing that since I hate those situations where you have an entire army in 2 costumes) so it's just an odd man out.

 
Great, as always. I really should try to ignore this mod completely until it comes out. It would make the wait much easier.
 
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