LoTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Preview

While the elves are great in open battle, the dwarves are adept at fighting against cities. Their units are slow, but can take a tremendous amount of punishment before going down. King Dain - the Dwarves' main hero who fought with the elves at Mirkwood - exemplifies the theme of the Dwarven military: he can kick a lot of ass and hand a lot of kickings. Slow units also means slow movement of armies across the map, so the dwarves can build Nydus canal-like mine shafts to quickly transport their armies. One interesting aspect of the Dwarven military is the fact that they have no mounted units. Instead, they have a battlewagon, which is basically a chariot propelled by a beast.

Well that dwarf is just a cutie.

Since they are excellent with engineering, they can make quite the nasty siege engines. And it's quite hard for enemy armies to demolish Dwarven cities; when you've got most of the buildings a city made of stone by people that live their entire lives surrounded in the stuff, the city's not gonna be taken easily. Less mobile armies like the dwarves' just can't fight open battles as well as they can city battles, since open battles have many moving units and focuses of action; a city general stays in one spot, so its defenders follow suit.

Dwarven defenses may be strong, but there are ways to get through them, and not just by reducing them to rubble. Namely, by using the goblin's ability to climb walls, completely bypassing any fortification. And although that ability makes goblins sweet-ass units, the rest of their army could possibly have asses sweeter than even that. They can field spider riders, wyrms, half-Troll marauders, and mountain giants, but mostly importantly, they can build dragons. Big, flying, fire breathing brothers of Puff. The earliest dragon you can get is a wingless drake, which can pretty much just breathe fire. But as you go on in the game, you'll be able to get fully-grown dragons. Fully-grown dragons fly around, incinerating people and crushing their tiny bodies in the creature's massive jaws. Oh freakin yeah.

Check it out, ships.

Even though one of the goblin heroes - Gorkil - is its king, the one that really catches the eye is - as you would expect - Drogoth, the Dragon Lord. That guy is completely armored from head to tail; I can't imagine how difficult it will be to take him down...and how expensive he is.

Okay, I've focused too much on the powerful, expensive dragons. The fact of the matter is, the goblins are mostly centered around being the fastest, most aggressive, and weakest per unit civilization in the game, even moreso than Mordor. They are able to rapidly spread across the map, though their buildings are very weak; it's easy to take out a goblin camp. Thing is, as time goes on, destroying just one camp won't do much damage, as the goblins will have spread so far elsewhere. Additionally, if you don't destroy a building completely, it will automatically repair itself. They're like the plague.

Technically, the Men of the West is as new a faction as the Elves, Dwarves, and Goblins, but it's pretty much just Gondor and Rohan merged together. Exactly what units were removed from the two civs' unit trees from BFME1 is unknown, though I would imagine that the Men of the West won't be able to train Elven Archers and most of Rohan's other soldiers; to alleviate some concerns, both the Gondor Knights and Rohirrim are currently in the game. What will take the place of the Elves' ranged power are the Duneduin Rangers, Aragorn's buddies. And Aragorn is just one of them any heroes the Men can get, which include the Hobbit Sheriffs.

Next: BFME2 goes to a more traditional base setup
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