Sounds really good! 😄 Have you been thinking about a fixed tracklist? I'm not sure if the triggers can be manipulated well enough, but even if there are improvements over the original one, I'll be more than happy. Would you also mind documenting your findings?

Hey, while you're in there among the voice lines, would you be able to poke around and make a list of unused campaign lines? I hadn't thought about that and I should look into it further. I probably can fix that too.

Greetings, everyone, The idea of an LotR mod has been floating around since the moment Asophix introduced his SHL lord editor. Last year I even started some work on a mod. Though I've put it on hold eventually. The biggest hurdle was getting enough voice lines for each lord, as SHL skirmish lords have ~30 voice lines each. What I realized recently is that almost half of those are never used in the game. Unlike SHC or SHC2 there's no real way of communicating with your allies, so all those lines related to sending goods, requesting goods, thanking, helping, and so forth are completely irrelevant. I've also remembered that there is a decent source of already prepared LotR voice lines out there. The Battle for Middle-Earth strategy games from the early 2000s featured every major character as a unit, so their unit lines could be repurposed. Lords The initial work I've done last year was narrowing down how to distribute the six available lord slots. This was the breakdown I've settled on. It may be a bit basic. Spoiler The good lords Arthur and Lancelot would be replaced by Aragorn and Theoden. The evil lords Vlad and Mordred would be replaced by Saruman and Sauron. The ice lords Dietrich and Siegfried would be replaced by King Dain and the Witch-King. Ice featured units that can be seen as part of both the forces of good (dwarfs, bears) and evil (giants, wolves, dragons). So dividing it between good and evil seems logical. I've attached the old gamerules.dat where I've attempted to give each character a fitting unit roster. Here's a breakdown of my train of thought. This is all from last year, so maybe I'd do things a little different now. Spoiler Aragorn I wish the game had the ranger unit introduced from SH3 onward, alas it doesn't so Aragorn is most the archer lord. Now the editor received a great update since, allowing the use of outlaws and light cavalry. I believe outlaws could be used to represent rangers and be part of Aragorn's army now. Also, he uses Merlin, who is a stand in for Gandalf. Theoden The current Theoden is very outdated. Mostly working as men at arms and knights lord. These days, he should probably use light cavalry as well. Fully embracing the horsemen nature of the people of Rohan. The knights of the round table could be renamed to different famous Rohirrim. Dain He's the King under the Mountain and as such focuses on dwarfs and crossbowmen. Polar bears are also used representing the Beornings. Witch-King The Witch-King is the evil ice lord so to say using all the evil creatures of the north such as giants (trolls), white wolves (wargs) and dragons. Crossbowmen and macemen would make up his main fighting force. Saruman The fallen wizard would mostly use Saxon warriors (orcs), hellhounds (wargs) and pikemen in his armies. Sauron Sauron would be the toughest lord and mostly using units from the sorcerer's tower. Saxon warriors (orcs), bats, werewolves, dragons and demons would feature in his roster. Now, all of these were just ideas I've been playing around with. Everything is subject to change and suggestions are welcome. I've not designed any new castle. Orcs, trolls and other creatures of Middle-Earth Middle-Earth wouldn't be what it is without its iconic creatures. I've discovered an entire unit reskin pack in the SH2 download section. If the creator gives his blessing, the orcs could definitely be reused. Units like the white wolves and hellhounds can get away with a name change, imho. Same with Merlin and the kights of the round table. Saxon warriors becoming orcs is pretty much given. Macemen are another unit that could also turn into orcs, though I'm not sure how popular this idea would be, since a player might want to use them when playing as a good faction. Again there are also the Battle for Middle-Earth games which have models for each unit from the movies, I don't know how easy/difficult it would be to port the models from that game into SHL. Anyway, these are some thoughts I had about this project over the course of last summer/fall, which I've since forgotten to share. Any ideas and suggestions are welcome, as nothing here is final. gamerules.dat

This sounds great. I've been wondering, for some time now, why there's no music during skirmish matches when playing as evil.

I’d be interested in testing this out for you. Let me know and I’ll take a look 🙂 Feel free to PM me the voice lines / music if you want.

That sounds cool. I also saw these music files over the past month. I have been looking through the game files to find voice lines to try them out in my user maps. I found some that are complementary along with tons of unused campaign, skirmish, and multiplayer lines that aren't used. I also noticed the odd timing of tracks and some tracks not playing. That would help so much. If you truly figured it out I can't wait to see them implemented, especially in the campaign where there was more potential to be had...also the unused and misplaced campaign lines such as the polar bear line at the end of Ch 4 of the Arthur campaign that should have been played in Ch 5. If you actually figured out a solution that would be very complementary to the game.

Hey there, fellas. I've been quietly engineering something. If you are familiar with Stronghold Legends, then you're aware that the in-game music has some glitches. The battle music hardly ever plays outside of a campaign scenario. Even then, it often glitches and ends abruptly and starts a peacetime song after the first few seconds of the battle track. The map editor never switches over to peaceful music like it did in Stronghold 2, even though those tracks still exist in the system files. Some special tracks made specifically for SHL, like the beloved Thorns on a Rose which featured prominently in the demo, never play when they should. Certain tracks play too often, and some hardly ever, and the mood conveyed can feel somewhat random and out of sync with what's happening. I may have sufficiently figured out the music system well enough to solve (or at least mostly resolve) all of the above problems. Testing for it so far has been great, and I think I'd like to have some other people try it out. What's cool is that it *should* be an entirely localized patch, so it should run on any game mode, including in multiplayer, without file issues from different languages or the like.

Well that makes a lot more sense. I always felt like it was a bit off.

Behind the scenes In the original SHK Editor there is a weird quirk, when it comes to displaying buildings. Even not long after its release, people complained about the Engineer's Guild being off by one tile, when rotated east. Even though this itself is an easily fixable problem, delving into the buildings list reveals that almost every building has a whole slew of corrections applied on top. When adapting the Editor for the Legends buildings, all buildings got vastly different dimensions, so all corrections had to be painstakingly found out and updated. Still, the in-game Map Editor in SH2 & SHL is able to effortlessly rotate buildings. Is the math behind it so complex and difficult? What could cause this mismatch in HicRic's interpretation? The answer lies in the anatomy of a building. See, building footprints starting with SH2 are slightly more complex than for example in SHC, as buildings are comprised of two components: Occupied Area: this footprint is reserved for the building itself, and can't be built on Walkable Area: this footprint outlines a general area for peasants / units to approach the building. While still can't be built on, walkable areas can overlap for multiple buildings. Since most buildings effectively carve out a rectangle or square, HicRic's interpretation was that this could apply to every building, and as such a rectangular 2D area was assigned to each of them. There are however buildings with more complex footprints, like the Keep, where the campfire's 4x4 area is attached to the occupied area of the building: Going further with the above theory, it seems that rotation around a center point always results in a consistent position, however it is almost never the case, if the building's footprint is not a perfect square and is included a walkable area. HicRic also realised this and implemented a correction system on top, which adjusts the building to its real position. This does not follow a pattern however and takes unjustified effort to implement. What HicRic failed to account for, is the fact that the focal point of the rotation is the center of the occupied area, not the center of the building's effective rectangle footprint. See how the yellow point is about two tiles away compared to the real point of rotation, visibly misplaced: In short, all buildings in SH2 & SHL have occupied areas each that assumes the shape of a rectangle or square. Using this knowledge, the brute force correction system can be dropped and building administration can become more intelligent, further improving invalid building placement checks and other related features. Thanks for reading! 🙂

Thread moved to modding club section from Legends general discussions. Also in light of new features added to the editor some updates were made to existing AIs. The rat has lost his swordsmen. His assaults will now consist of men at arms only. His defensive swordsmen were replaced by pikemen. The snake received a major overhaul. Gone are the Saxon warriors and men at arms. His armies and raids will now contain a large number of outlaws instead of men at arms. The Saxons have been replaced by macemen.

Fantastic news! I've been pleased with the castle editor, but there's no question that the UI feels very dated and can be hard to work with at times.

Greetings to All! The Castle Editor for Stronghold Legends has been serving us well for almost two years now - at the time of writing -, as it allows for modifying castle layouts for all the Legends lords, in an intuitive and considerably user-friendly way. One example would be the Vlad Enemies pack by @ Sir Windows , which brings us Radu and a handful of other characters to fight in Skirmish mode. However, it is obvious that the Editor's design and overall serviceability does not hold up to what we would expect in current times, since this application is essentially a re-compilation of Lord Britian's SHK Editor, intended for SH2 from 2006. Even though the source code had been somewhat modernised and extended with a handful of nifty features, the underlying visual tech is still the original one. Due to its dated presentation appeal and challenging maintenance hurdles, I decided to start working on a re-implementation. The new Castle Editor aims to bring a similar editing experience that feels more like present times, powered by the same tech presented by our Lord Editors, while also preserving portability for your comfort. The key advantage is that the source code would be fundamentally similar, while the visual style can also reminisce that of SHL with colorful backgrounds and visual elements adapted from the game itself. Some more advanced features could also be added upon request, as always. As a recap, allow me to list the core features to be expected for the Castle Editor: Displaying a Lord's castle on a 100x100 grid overview, with small pictures sized exactly to the footprint of each building. Setting the order of buildings based on their priority. Placing troop markers in the layout to tell the AI where to send its defensive and patrolling units. Placing traps in various key locations. Placing 'no build' tiles in order to restrict the AI from building in places of patrol points, or the way of rolling logs. Taking note of a file history so that you can recall your favourite files from a bullet list. Automatic saving option. And more to come. At this point, the parsing and creation of a castle file is done, and the presentation is being worked on. Should you have any remarks or feature requests, feel free to comment or send a DM to my profile! Until next time, Asophix

Both were pretty bad, but the SH2 behavior was more often frustrating for the player. Map design could fix the AI issue by always putting iron and stone in relatively close proximity in an estate.

This isn't directly related to this pack but I noticed something. While playing SH2 I realized ox tethers work differently compared to SHL. Oxen in SH2 seem to operate across the entire map while they have a pretty limited range in SHL. The SH2 system has the issue that an oxen placed next to a quarry might decide to walk across the map to service an iron mine. Still this is imho much better than the SHL situation where the AI will place all their oxen next to their single stone quarry while leaving four iron mines unserviced. It's be a neat if there was some way to set ox tethers back to their SH2 settings.

I'll take note of giving him more farms. He should have plenty of peasants at the campfire for some more food production anyway. Yes, I've looked at the .uni files before. All the files listed in the .uni are there so the issue must be rooted somewhere else. I've also looked into the AnimList.csv and AnimList.anl. At least as far as I can tell everything is where it's supposed to be.

Have you tried looking at the .uni files? They contain at least from my investigations lists of all the files needed to load the model correctly. You can open them in Notepad++, or use the Granny Viewer 2 software: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/62-adding-units-from-stronghold-legends-into-stronghold-2

Thanks for the acknowledgement, @ Sir Windows ! Hálás vagyok a magyar ellenfélért! Hunyadi feels kinda slow to build up, but he is fun to play with once he gets stabilised. It's hard to find a map where he plays on full swing. His consistent attack rate is something I like, kinda like Lancelot. He may be in need of more farms, as he tends to break even on consumption sometimes ~ selling food for gold could improve his standing. Holy Knights with the update is way more consistent, he actually attacks very fast now. His raids are also somewhat annoying, as you can never suspect him bringing out a mounted knight, or just a small band of archers. As a footnote: I noticed some minor graphics differences as well, even though I don't know how the animations work in either SH2 or SHL. In SH2 Steam Edition the swords texture is consistently missing from the armoury, but not in Legends. Simply replacing the one from SHL did not resolve the problem.

Light cavalry was made possible by @ Asophix hard work as he found the unit codes for the unit in the gamerules.dat. I noticed a minor issue though. The animation of the horses doesn't work, despite all the files being present by default in SHL. I wonder if this could be fixed somehow. Initially I thought maybe the SHL files are somewhat incomplete/broken, so I replaced them with the SH2 equivalents for the light cavalry. Unfortunately, it didn't help. Still, it's only a minor issue, as the rider's animation work fine. 🙂

Interesting thought @ Sir Windows ….. Would there be any other changes which would make your mod better? Ie other aspects of the game you’d like to customise which haven’t yet been found?

Well, yes you can indeed. This update took a bit longer since I got distracted by something else but here it is. Many thanks @ Asophix for making it possible with the newest version of the lord editor. Radu builds breweries now Holy Knights granary will now be built outside the castle in order to reduce walkways for farmers steamroll group slightly adjusted And now to the biggest change for this update: a brand new lord is added to the roster! General Hunyadi Difficulty: medium Preferred troops: light cavalry, pikemen, crossbowmen Protector of the Hungary, regent of the kingdom, General Hunyadi is both a mighty warrior and a cunning general. He is a master defender and deadly skirmisher, seeking to undermine his enemies before they can become a threat. The general doesn't think much of glorious combat in open fields, instead preferring to cripple his enemy with his deadly light cavalry raids. His castle is a formidable fortress that will cause many attackers heartaches. Still, one shouldn't underestimate his siege force once he decides the time has come to strike at his enemy's castle.

Hey, can we expect to see updates soon-ish to the existing or the newfound lords? 🙂 The lords each have been given a lot of custom content, so I take it is no small effort to get everything in place.

Hello All! A new version (v1.4) has been released. This version addresses a bunch of design changes and improvements that has been previously implemented for the SH2 Lord Editor. Simply follow the download link in the main post to download! Changelist: Buildings are grouped into their respective categories (SH2 LE). Tooltips have been added to Lords and a few more screen elements (SH2 LE). A few more lines of descriptive summaries have been added to each category's content (SH2 LE). Added Pictish Boat Warrior, Outlaw and Light Cavalry to the unit rosters. These units bring much flavour to the gameplay and it can also open some creative avenues for custom lords. Unique units - Dragons and Magicians - can no longer be set as Siege Army group types. I felt that dragons and casters have no place in a proper siege army. It is possible that e.g. a Merlin accompanying a siege formation could fit well, so upon request I may re-add the casters to the sieges. Validation rules have been revised. Complete list: Weaponcrafter workshop productions must be selected at least one type of product. Army groups consisting a unique unit must be given a maximum count of 1. The Siege Army groups' total size must not be less than the Siege Army base size. An error is thrown if Hovels cannot support the required number for running the economy. An error is issued if a blacksmith or armourer has no iron mines to supply them (thanks @ Sir Windows !). A warning is issued if Fantasy Units have no Special Recruitment Building, or vice versa. A warning is issued if there is no Pantry for supplying Royal Food, or vice versa. Overall run-time memory footprint decreased via code refactor. Attempts to save fail silently while validation errors are present (SH2 LE). About Window opacity slightly decreased for a more pleasant experience (SH2 LE).

Fantastic. Glad to see this kind of work coming along after the recent editor improvements. :D

Some feedback regarding the V2 lords: Radu Just like his original incarnation, he is considerably steady at building up. So far he is the most consistent lord. He builds no breweries for the Inn. I barely saw any harassment groups from him, apart from a few pikemen and archers. I could like a few more macemen, or more of the archers. 🙂 Holy Knights The defensive positions are manned well, however he is still conflicted between raids and armies. He forms his siege army fairly late. I recommend toning down the steamroll group to streamline his raids. The granary could be leveraged more by adding a gate, or pre-placing it in the AIC. The armory could be turned outwards for smoother weapon influx. Transylvanian Lord He is much better now, but still takes quite some time to build. The siege force is quite formidable (more threatening than vanilla Arthur!). The castle layout seems to be suffering from the fact that the walls greatly prolong travel time for workers. This is barely mitigated by having access to a second gatehouse. His pace could be enhanced by adding a gatehouse to the rest of the cardinal directions each. Men-at-arms could be used more in the raid groups. Overall it's a great improvement and can't wait to see the rest of the upcoming lords in the roster. 😉

First update to the lords is out! Thanks to @ Asophix and @ IgnasheunKnight for the initial feedback. The first update addresses issues with the holy knights and Transylvanian lord. Holy Knights Slight redesign of his castle with the goal of reducing stone cost and improving the economy. Engine tower with dragon harpoon removed in favour of more archers Number of lumber mills and quarries increased Number of weapons workshops reduced Apple farms added to food production These changes should hopefully help the knights get set up a bit faster. The reduced weapons production should get balanced out by more income from wood/stone/food which they can use to buy weapons. The engine tower+harpoon was a heavy investment which usually didn't pay out. Its removal should allow the knight to get things like a church built much earlier. Transylvanian Lord Number of lumber mills and quarries increased Number of bakeries increased Number of weapons workshops reduced Poleturner added Raiding behaviour and troop types changed Macemen removed from siege and raid rosters Men at arms added to raid and siege rosters The Transylvanian lord was by far the slowest and most sluggish new lord. Higher lumber and stone production should allow him to get his economy going and his castle completed quicker. Bread should provide him with a new income source as well. Men at arms were added to his roster in order to give him a cheap unit option for raiding and assembling a siege army quicker.