Battle for Middle Earth

I wandered into WalMart on Friday since my wife out and decided to try to find something that would run on my laptop,

I picked up The Battle for Middle Earth.

I must say, this is quite a fun game. You play basically the timeline of the Heroes to a point. But you also play random clashes between you and the opponents. Its part RTS like Age of Empires....and then a little Heros of Might and Magic...

The battle that everyone wants to play, I just played and was tough.
I player yesterday both, the battle of Helms Deep and also the battle of Minas Tirath. Though got tough when they got troops thru the wall in Helms Deep.

Helms Deep:
My battle followed the same rough pattern as the movie. I had all the possible archers I could on the walls and fired as fast as possible. Eventually, to many Seige Engines came in the form of orcs holding ladders, they let a few people on the wall. I was able to fight that off fairly well, when the orc with the dynamite came and blew up the wall. I immediately just selected all my troops, and pulled them back to the inner wall, as they couldnt last once the wall was breached. Once I got them to the inner wall, and consolodated my troops, it was easy...Then Gandalf came and wiped out the rest.

Minas Tirath:
This was pretty cool, the map starts with a few troops showing up, and two counters ...8 minutes till Mordor attacks, and 30 minutes till the Allies show up. Well, along the wall, I put a Trebuchet in every other build spot, with a arrow tower in between....I confess I think the Trebuchet's worked better that I would have thought...I would imagine more Trebuchets would have been better, with also a door for my troops to slip down the the ground secretly.

Now, I built a bunch of stuff in all the build spots. Stables, Barracks, Archery school...etc... I could build more troops as I had 300 already but I was ready, I basically massed my troops around the gate (right in the center of the wall) to the left and right...about two Trebuchets from the gate...
(the wall has Trebuchets about every foot on the map...so I put some archers about as far as two feet from the gate)

This was easy to start with...I was quickly having my Trebuchets pick of catapults and small groups while my archers nailed anything that got closer.
I get a little nervous when I was all the damn Siege Towers (those wood buildings on wheels that allow guys from the ground, to climb stairs to then get up to the height of the wall.) There were ALOT of them, and they are tough.

Well, needless to say, it got nasty. I picked a few of the Siege Towers, but some got setup and some of their troops got onto my walls...that is when I sent in my ground troops on the wall to stall them...I have Tower guards that are great...some horseman, then of course there is Faramir, Pippin (yeah I know, but the little guy is tough), Gandalf, and Aragorn.

This happened two or three times where they got troops on my wall, but I fought them off, and then destroyed their towers...Well, then came the battering ram. It was nasty...I destroying it seconds AFTER my gate was shattered.

Right around this time, when I saw a huge amount of troops were entering the map to attack me, I saw my wonderful group of Rohirim Mounted troops show up on my map to rescue me.

 

This game cost me only $9.99, and I am not a bit fan of playing games from books or movies...but this was WELL worth it...I would have paid 30 or 40 for it.

 

I havent played hard yet...just easy to learn the game