The Last Days Of The Third Age Mod Questions: Rhun armor, Isengard Uruk-Hai tactics and Moria Cooking Pot

[Free Helicopter Rides]

So I have three questions about this mod as stated in the title, I started playing this mod nearly a week ago and it is really excellent, anyway hear are my questions.

1. Rhun Armor: So the armies of Rhun are the Easterling and when I first encountered them I was expecting to see their high end troops clad in that kick ♥♥♥ gold armor you see them wearing when they are marching into Mordor in the Two Towers. My question is do they not wear that armor in the mod simply because it was invented just for the movies sake and thus does not correspond to the books or have I just not seen them yet?

2. Uruk-Hai Tactics: So I'm on my first play through and the character I made is a Uruk-Hai of Isengard and he is currently level 25 and the type of warband he leads is purely infantry with the exception of the one Orc hero who is a Warg rider. I usually try and make his fighting force purely Uruk-Hai because they are good heavy Infantry but unless their is a troop dump of Uruk-Hai Newborns in the camps I usually have to fill out roughly half of my force with normal Orcs. And when facing the armies of good unless I decently out number them I will most of the time get wrecked or take mass casualties, facing human enemies are not to bad because we seem to be very roughly on even footing and I have not fought Dwarves to much but they seem to do well against them.

Elves on the other hand though mow my troops down en mass with their archery skills, when my troops finally reach them as long as their are a reasonable number of them left they will usually do a good job of destroying them in melee. To try and counter act this I order my troops to advance in a Shield Wall formation but it only helps to a certain degree. So to sum it up to win I basically need to have numerical superiority and I'm aware that Orcs are a quantity over quality army but I would have thought trying to lead a all/nearly all Uruk-Hai force they would be a far better quality over quantity troop choice, so to the more veteran players out their do you have any advice or tips you can give me and if so it would be much appreciated.

3. Moria Cooking Pot: So I'm max rank in Isengard and I did get their Cooking Pot but lost it early on when I was a lower level when I was constantly taking losses. I'm now trying to earn Moria's Cooking Pot so I can have the morale bonus and I'm pretty sure I meet all the requirements, I have 30 Moria Influence, the Isengard one costed 20, and I'm rank 3 with Moria and you can get it at rank 2. When ever I go try and get it from their leader no options come up for it, am I just missing something or is it maybe a bug?

[Atomicbean]

1. Rhun high-tier troops DO have some pretty good armor (some of it being from movies/related games.) however, they're not the easterlings. The Easterlings are Khand. (or whatever it's called) that one camp in front of the black gate. The Haradrim (the ones with the oliphaunts) are yet another faction, and are off past minas tirith/minas morgul. Some of their gear reminds me of the movie gear, others more traditional gear based off their RL culture. (Harad being based off arabia, etc.) (...this is also my biggest complaint with this mod, the movie armor for the elves simply doesn't exist, despite how awesome it is.)

2. Elves literally just wreck everything. In my current good-side playthrough I can take about 350 orcs with 0 casualties with a group of about 30-40 elven archers. They're literally just straight up OP. Top-tier mirkwood archers are level 50 with 410 archery skill. Lorien archers have slightly less skill (360 I wanna say.) but it's still vastly higher than vanilla and evil faction archers. (though harad seems to have fairly good archers, so you might look into them.)

I'd say that other than vastly outnumbering the enemy, that some things you should do is use terrain to your advantage (archers become significantly weaker in melee, so if you wait behind a hill so they're forced to get close...) I'd also suggest recruiting a small amount (5-6 is probably fine) of warg riders to quickly charge to melee range.

Also remember that orcs have useless shields (goldor/mordor top-tier ones have decent shields, but they still break in like 4-5 arrows.) However, high-tier Uruk sword infantry have FAR stronger shields, and Harad infantry have massively amazing tower shields. Don't expect orcs to really do much against the higher quality archers (elves), and if you can, get them to stay behind your hardier troops until you manage to engage.

The main reason to use orcs over uruks/men is the fact they increase your max party size (though I'm not sure if that goes into effect if you're not an orc... I haven't done a orc-spam playthrough as anything else) thus allowing you to have 100-200 relatively easily... which destroys most smaller group's morale, thus causing them to panic and run away almost instantly. (not as effective against commanders, obviously.) (this is just an FYI thing, not a recommendation - I still personally find a mix of Uruk/Harad/Umbar infantry with a few high-tier Rhun cavalry mixed in occasionally to be a far more effective (and easier to maintain...) force.)

3. I know that you can only get 1 of each reward, however I'm not sure how that works with losing it. Like, if you get the cooking pot from x faction it disappears from other factions to prevent duplicates, but I have no clue if it's supposed to be re-obtainable if you no longer have one...

[Free Helicopter Rides]

Thank you for the advice Atomicbean I will try it out next time I play, I really appreciate it. And on the Cooking Pot thing I have heard similar things to what you have said but nothing concrete yet so I hope it is still obtainable from another faction. Lastly on my armor question are you saying the Variags of Khand are these guys and have this type of armor in-game or is this type of armor just not in the mod period like the Elven armor you mentioned?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v161/Diannew/Lord%20of%20the%20Rings/easterling1.jpg

[Atomicbean]

There's similar armor (though not identical) on some of the upper tier evil faction soldiers (honestly kinda randomly spread out.) However, what I was saying was that the only place I've seen troops actually called Easterling (thus obviously the faction that's supposed to be based off of them) was in the khand armies. They might be in some of the others as well though, I haven't been fighting too many evil men factions recently. I honestly haven't paid too much attention to the non-harad/mordor forces in recent versions of the mod, since it's been quite a while since I last played and my current playthrough I've literally been sitting in front of minas tirith for 100 days because gondor is unable to defend themselves lol.

That said, the top-tier Rhun cavalry actually has heavy armor. (possibly infantry as well, but finding rhun infantry that actually has armor is.... nearly impossible.) What the in-game easterlings have reminds me more of traditional scale armor or something to that effect - more like what I'd expect in a traditional M&B mod. I might try and find some of both to screenshot later today though since I've almost managed to make mordor the weakest faction in the game now...

I will say it's probably quite feasable to get a similar looking outfit for a player character or companion though, if you mix some of the umbar gear with the upper-tier rhun or harad armor and harad weapons/shields. (...umbar troops have the most random helmets that don't match their armor at all, but kinda remind me a bit of the easterlings.)

I know I haven't seen the actual armor anywhere, but there's very similar stuff, and I know the current version's good-faction gear vastly better than the evil faction gear.

...strangely harad's mounted archers might also look somewhat similar...

[AxeKnight]

you can re-add the cooking pot through the mod menu if you don't mind "cheating"

[Atomicbean]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=678022325

So these are some of the Khand infantry.
I'd say this is probably as close to the easterlings as you'll find... there might be some with better armor, as this was literally just a random war party I found next to osgiliath, not a actual leader's group (so troops weren't top-tier.) but it's definately closer than what the high-tier rhun troops wear.