Somehow, the original LOTR seems to have missed the game walkthrough and faq boat. The GOG forum is the last refuge of this game's fandom, so why not share with each other what tricks you have discovered?

1. Infinite Unit Spam Want to draft mega armies without happiness penalty like the Knight always does? It's possible! You incur unhappiness whenever you draft more than 10% of the population. The trick here is to draft many small armies under the 10% limit. As long as you do that, you're free to draft as much as the population (until it falls below 500) without recourse.

Example

Population: 1120
Draft 100 | Population 1020
Draft 100 | Population: 920
Draft 50 | Population: 870
Draft 50 | Population: 820

Combined total 300 | Population: 820 | Happiness penalty: 0! This trick can be used for population management when you're short on food in newly conquered counties.

2. Shuffling Sheep Sheep only reproduce and get sheered between winter and spring. In every other season, they do nothing but occupy fields and manpower. Instead of wasting serfs tending them in other seasons, just shuttle them off to another city. The ideal scenario is to pair of two sheep farming cities, and ship their sheep towards each other, timed for an winter arrival. Remember to make new sheep fields when they arrive!

Example

City 1 and City 2 are 3 seasons travel apart.
In Spring, City 1 ships 100 sheep to City 2.
In Spring, City 2 ships 100 sheep to City 1.

In Winter, City 1 receives 100 sheep.
In Winter, City 2 receives 100 sheep.

You save 3 seasons worth of manpower this way, especially for the all-important Autumn harvest season!

3. Teleporting Cows This trick is thematically opposite of Shuffling Sheep. Cows don't produce cheese during transport, so every season traveled are a season of food wasted. Instead of shipping cows between counties, buy cows from merchants at the destination county with funds from cow sales elsewhere. Often times, the cheese from saved travel time alone is sufficient to bridge the price difference.

Example:

Scenario 1:
City 1 and City 2 are 3 seasons apart.
In Spring, City 1 sends 40 cows to City 2.
In Winter, City 2 receives 40 cows.

40 cow x 3 season = 120 cheese lost from travels.

Scenario 2:
City 1 sells 40 cows for 24 Crowns each (+960 crowns)
City 2 buys 40 cows for 36 Crowns each (-1440 crowns)

But those 40 cows in City 2 immediately begin to produce cheese, food which would otherwise have spent grains.

120 grains saved at 4 Crowns each (+480 crowns)

Overall: 960 - 1440 + 480 = +0!

4. Forced Routing Ever bothered by the enemies troops sticking around when their morale already hit rock-bottom (0)? That's because your melee units are forcing them to, by engaging them. Simply give your melee units another movement command, and the battle is yours!

5. Bonus Move If you ever find your army one movement point short this turn, try split off most of the army. If you're lucky, the split army will land towards the direction you need and save you a turn.


6. Tax Holiday Rowdy serfs at your door? A tax break can just be the ticket. Tax rate:

20 Crowns = standard
15 Crowns = +1 happiness
10 Crowns = +2 happiness
+5 Crowns = +3 happiness

Often times, it's far more cash efficient to lower your taxes than double/triple rations.


Have you found any other tricks for the original Lords of the Realm? Share it with everyone here!

Interesting stuff, Can you please give more of these?

Sure!

7. Serf Holiday A grain based economy leaves you many idle serfs during Spring and Summer. In early game, you can better manage your food supply by send them "on vacation" to a neighboring neutral county. By 1. Infinite Unit Spam in Spring, you can draft all those idle mouths without any Happiness impact and save on grain. Just return and disband them at Fall for harvest. Remember to check your labor allocation after the forced vacations!

8. Forced Migration Conscripted troops disband only in their home county ("army name" of county),rejoining the county's labor force. When you combine two armies, it'll retain the home county of the larger troop. Take advantage of these two facts to shuffle labor force between counties!

9. Flanking Bonus When your lines outflank the enemy on impact, it reduce the enemy morale and boost your own. This is helpful to force a quick rout against neutral counties.

10. Fast Labor Allocation You can also assign serfs in the "Fields Screen" (second button down), click the middle number instantly fill any labor shortfalls from your available labor pool.

This is especially worthwhile because it seems the game (at least in the floppy version, which is what I'm playing) treats the disbaned army as an influx of population - and bumps up the county Happiness considerably as a result.