Celton88: Wpegg is right. LOTR 2 has a better interface. Also Google some game strategies to get a better grip on the mechanics. I played the sequel and had fun doing that. Haven't got around to the first one yet, don't know if I will either. The second one is fun enough and I'm not sure if there is much.of a difference between the games.
Also, remember grain is better than cheese long term
I have played several games over the last week or so and I have to say that in some cases yes, some cases, no. I find that reassigning trained workers to harvest grain wreaks havoc on their materials production efficiency. Sadly, or maybe because I am such a good ruler, my productive counties are like the U.S. southern border. I am always being swamped with immigrants who suck down my grain surplus. I keep having to buy extra or plant even more fields. On the other hand, cattle take a constant labour load and I hate having to tickle the cow fields up and down each season to balance growth and labour for materials production.
I guess it depends on certain counties and their status at moment of capture. The best time to take a county is in winter when a merchant is in the county and you have a treasury fat enough to absorb the startup costs for whichever food production system you will use.
I remember I used to use sheep a lot when I first played this game many years ago, but now I don't seem to use them as much. They can be good for making some fast cash, especially when they have just been shorn and you can sell both them and their wool for some quick funds.
Tloya: Playing LotR2 first is probably for the best. LotR1 is significantly more complex and LotR2 has in-game help boxes. LotR1 is the more interesting game in my opinion (excluding combat, which is kinda bleh) but starting it when used to the 21st century luxury of games explaining the basics for you can be hard. You can download the game manual on GoG for reference which is definitely helpful.
Probably the biggest thing to understand in both LotR1 and LotR2 that the games don't do a good job of explaining is the work efficiency system. Assigning your peasants to tasks--farming crops, tending animals, gathering resources, making weapons--is probably the most fundamental part of Lords of the Realm. What the games don't explicitly mention (in-game, at least) is that when you initially assign peasants to a task they're really bad at it. The more consecutive seasons you keep the same peasants on that task, the better they'll get and the faster they'll do it. In LotR1 you'll see a percentage amount appear over tasks that shows how efficient your peasants are being, with 100% being the max. As far as I know efficiency percentage isn't labeled anywhere in LotR2 but you can definitely notice it if you pay attention over several seasons.
This creates some interesting choices--farming wheat will give huge amounts of food that can be stockpiled over the long-term, but because of the cyclical nature of farming you have to assign nearly all your peasants to the wheat fields in the fall to get a decent harvest, which wrecks any efficiency you've built up in resource gathering.
In Lords2 you can determine labour efficiency by clicking on the relevant window, ie. weapons or wood, etc. I leave just enough workers in a vital industry to maintain efficiency. Unfortunately, in Lords1 this does not work. You can have a handful of workers at 100% but as soon as you add new recruits, the efficiency declines.
