[LintMan]

Originally posted by Cheezeninja:
Ok, here's the rundown, after downloading the absolutely wonderful middle-earth map from www.ascenciongames.com i couldnt resist the urge to do a little roleplaying as Sauron, dark lord of middle earth So after starting a game as Soul Gate Ermor (yes, yes, you all hate me) i have proceeded to carve myself a dark empire out of the eastern portion of the map with no great difficulty, but much dark laughter, pillaging, and fun. No great difficulty until i ran into pithium's hometown in angmar and the sphinx sitting inside of it. on 3 seperate occasions i have not managed to take their castle simply because the sphinx casts astral shield and im not able to kill it before time elapses (or so i assume... with the 500 odd units in the armies i send and multitudes of str 2 unholy priests it would take forever for me to actually watch it that far) This has resulted in the loss of some choice commanders due to inability to run away when time elapses because they are paralyzed. How do i kill that damn sphinx?

Yes, the middle earth map is pretty cool. The impassable mountain ranges make things interesting, with some good bottlenecks. The downside I found was that some of the home castle provinces were butted up to assorted impassable mountains, which reduces the number of effective neighboring provinces, thus making for less gold and resources than typical in those home provinces.

Also: are you aware that it's possible as of the latest patch to speed up the battle viewing? 'f' makes things move faster, and 'n' skips to the next round. Between those two, you should be able to get to viewing the late battle rounds without too much delay.