Thank you for the quick response! It worked.
As I said, the map itself is done very neatly. Rich in Detail, good job!

@Graxel - this is known bug in the game since patch 5.1 or 5.0

You can fix it by creating a blank 8-player scenario in the scenario editor and just launching once. That should reset the names for the computer players.

The map itself is great.
Only problem (a big one though) is, that since I played "Middle Earth - Free Play" everytime I start a normal random map game, the other players are named "elves", "orcs", etc. This won't go away even when I deactive the Middle Earth steam addin. This is really annoying. Any idea how to get rid of this?

Does this have Rhun and Harad? Better.

@Los | Adm Dark [KoC] - What exactly isn't working? I can only offer advice if I know what the problem is.

doesnt work

@jaimiegaia - It's quite easy. Once you have selected the scenario you will see yourself at the top with a civilization and a blue 1. Click on that blue 1 to become a different player. Player 2 is red, and so on. To change your starting nation, click on it and choose your desired nation from the drop-down menu.

as in ho do i select a different number?

anyone know how i change my starting nation?

Yes, I noticed that although it said 500 in the setup, it still topped out at 200, but that wasn't such a problem in the Free Play version because I wasn't immediately under attack. If you can figure out how to do it, that would be great. Thanks.

I purposely hid some of the Rings/Relics and had others well guarded ;)
Did you find them all?

About increasing the population cap - I left a comment on the orginal page. In summary: It's not straightforward, and I'm still trying to find out how to do it.

I played this mod recently, and it is much easier than the earlier version. Still hard to collect all the rings/relics, but that is what makes it interesting.