Sunday, February 20, 2011

Battle for Middle Earth - Evil Campaign - Near Harad




Battle for Middle Earth - Evil Campaign Map - Near Harad (+50 Command)
This is a hint/walkthrough post for Battle for Middle Earth. You can find an index of all our Battle for Middle Earth posts here.

This is a very easy map as the Harad forces do not generally send anything tougher than Haradrim Lancers, who have no chance against your perimeter towers. Look on the north side of the map for three empty castle Building Sites and set them up with perimeter towers and mostly Slaughterhouses. You can look around the map for treasure or kill refugees for loot, but that is unimportant. Retreat all units to the far north, behind your camps and let the towers handle everything while you wait for 30000 in Resources.

While you are waiting, start building what you will ultimately want to keep as veteran units. You will end up with an excess of units from the camps you send Tribute, but they will all get slaughtered in the next map because Haradrim units generally have very little long-term staying power.
I recommend setting up 6 to 8 units of merged Orc Archers and Orc Warriors. You can't get Drummer Trolls yet, and you can't build any Mumakils until you take over at least one Haradrim camp. Also, once you take over a Haradrim camp, the other camps will fight your new Haradrim allies, increasing overall micromanagement on the map.

Complicating the issue is that you do not raze a Haradrim camp to take it over: Instead, once you get some units to the camp or get a Tribute Porter into the camp, it will surrender or ally with you and you take direct control of the camp. When all three camps surrender or accept Tribute, you win.

The Haradrim Lancers come at you almost continuously, so it is possible to farm Experience this way. Because Trolls have a vulnerability to ranged attacks, it is hard to level up Trolls this way, although you could try a massed Troll rush from the flanks once the Lancers are engaged.

It is not hard to kill a lot of lancers by simply having a lot of fire archer orcs, but attrition will eventually whittle down your units. I recommend that instead of tediously farming on the map, get the basic orc units you want on the next map, and then send Tributes out to quickly finish this map.
You can also recruit trolls, but I would recommend waiting to do so on the Southern Ithilien map, which is is less hectic.

When sending Tributes, you can only create one Porter at a time. Start with the southeast camp because they have Mumakils. Then from the southeast camp, build a Porter right away and head for the southern camp, because they also have Mumakils. Retreat all the Mumakils to the east each time so as many as possible will follow you to the next map. Finally, send a Tribute to the western camp.
Watch your Tribute Porters and they can still occasionally be attacked and might not make it.

If you are willing to wait, you might want to see if the southern and southeastern camp will eventually start killing each other off and producing veteran Mumakils from a level 3 Mumakil Pen. This can save you a lot of time on subsequent maps if you like playing around with Mumakils and want to keep some on subsequent missions.

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