Catfish's Cave - War of the Ring

The War of the Ring scenario is a project that has been in development, on and off, for some time now. It began life back in 2000 when veteran scenario designer Harlan Thompson persuaded me to make a Lord of the Rings scenario for Test of Time. I worked on it for a few months, then lost contact with him and didn't touch the game for another 3 years. Late in 2003 I was asked if I'd finish the project and reluctantly agreed. Dissatisfied with the original prototype, I began the scenario from scratch in early 2004, replacing my old gigamap with an even larger one. Due to my wavering interest in Civilization 2, development has been punctuated by long periods of inactivity and the project has kind of dragged. Anyway, I've decided to dust off the beta version and post it here for download.

Downloads

War of the Ring Readme Document

File	Description	Date	Size	Download
WotR_20081120.7z	Required game files.	20/11/2008	627 kB
WotR_Events_AVI.7z	Required AVI files for events. Events will not work correctly without them.	13/11/2008	820 kB
WotR_Graphics.7z	Required graphics files.	30/10/2008	1.28 MB
WotR_Improvements.rar	City improvement and wonder graphics for the Civilopedia.	16/09/2007	4.22 MB
WotR_Main_Snds.rar	Core sounds for the game.	08/10/2008	4.93 MB
WotR_Events_Snds1.rar	Sounds for events - pack 1.	19/09/2007	3.19 MB
WotR_Events_Snds2.rar	Sounds for events - pack 2.	07/09/2007	2.88 MB
WotR_Skin.7z	Game menu, city screen and background graphics.	23/11/2005	1.20 MB

Use an archiving program like 7-Zip (freeware) or WinRAR (shareware) to extract 7Z and RAR files. Just one will do; both applications can extract both types of archive.

To do/fix:

Balance the difficulty level.
Make Moria challenging without being impossible. Adjust timeline/research if required.
Test the dynamics of the end-game (post Ring-destruction).
Complete the city improvement descriptions in describe.txt.

Screenshots

The map of Middle-earth.

The Map of Middle-earth

The Hunt for the Ring: Bree-land and the Shire.

Bree-land and The Shire

The Siege of Gondor.

The Siege of Gondor

End Game: A fleet led by King Elessar heads south to the Havens of Umbar to pacify those barbaric Corsairs once and for all.

Gondor fleet invades the Havens of Umbar

The City Information screen, shown at two-thirds original size.

City Screen

The Defence Minister screen.

War Council

The Wonders section of the Civilopedia: The Forge of Mount Doom.

Wonder Info

The screen that appears when Aragorn enters the Paths of the Dead in Dunharrow. This is one of the many single-frame AVI files used to replace event-triggered text boxes. Substituting video for text frees up a considerable amount of events memory.

The Paths of the Dead