Trivia / Age of the Ring

• Creator Cameo: The mod designers used their own faces as the models for the Ruffian and Ruffian Bow units, believing that if they were going to make a cameo, it might as well be as the "the lowest of the low among the baddies in Middle-earth."
• Creator's Pest:
  • According to the creators, this was the main reason Azog ended up being dropped from Misty Mountains. They had felt forced to include him by nature of his importance in the film adaptations of The Hobbit, but they disliked him greatly as a character in those films, and felt his presence in Misty Mountains only dragged the faction down by tying it further to the controversial film depiction. This only went further later on, as they'd go so far as to give Azog's depiction in the Battle of Azanulbizar mission and the War of the Dwarves and Orcs campaign a significant redesign to not resemble the film, and even dedicated their 2022 April Fools' Day joke to making fun of him.
  • Some of the creators have claimed a dislike for the Catapult Troll used by the Shadow and Flame faction—not for any character or gameplay-based reason, but because it proved a lot more difficult than expected to do animations for, given the complexity of a large contraption on a troll's back. It's likely for this reason that the unit's description includes a jab at the concept, pointing out the redundancy of strapping a catapult to a creature that can already throw rocks.
• Orphaned Reference: The Dol Guldur Ravagers and Tomb Guard were originally designed to be immune to the Slow Decay gimmick of the faction. However, this led to a situation where once Dol Guldur hit the endgame, it could basically ignore Slow Decay completely, and so they were changed to still suffer from it. Despite this, ingame lore still describes them as "resistant."
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The decision to have eleven factions was in part a result of the base game's AI limitations, which did not have the coding to support more than twelve different AI programs (the twelfth controls the game's Neutrals, Critters, and Creeps). Because of this, the adventure factions do not possess functioning AI, hence why the creators sequestered them off.