War of the Ring is a turn-based mode in which players take turn moving their armies between terriotires on a living world map and then resolve any conflict in real time skirmish battles. In 4.6, the mode has been greatly overhauled and is now also use to be able to play the vanilla campaigns. The campaigns will not all be released in 4.6 but rather over multiple patches. Using War of the Ring to host the vanilla campaigns has multiple benefits, mainly:
- enables the use carryover units and heroes (heroes and units retain their level)
- allows to force the players to play the mission in the right order
- allows for co-op campaigns to be eventually implemented
- allows to port the BFME1 opeworld campaign (eventually)
- allows for a much larger number of campaigns
Read more about the WotR Campaigns here
War of the Ring[]
In 4.0, War of the Ring was converted to work with the fixed build plot system and worked for the most part. However, there were a few bugs and downsides such as being unable to fight real-time battles on fortress maps or Mordor having issues due to the Sauron levelling system.
In 4.6, and thanks to Photti and Birds, the mode was once again overhauled to iron out the final bugs and make it fully playable. Read more about the overhaul here.