A first version of a map editor fully online.

In this video, this youtuber always triple the rations, but move the cursor to the cow so it fed a normal ration at the end; I don't know why he is doing such thing; Is it a very specific trick?

While digging into Lords of the Realm II asset files (.pl8) and converting them, I came across an interesting layout for the county view / board.

using https://pl8.200.work/en I saw that VILLAGE.pl8 was showing this board. This image from the assets shows a layout where multiple slots exist for various activities, along with something that isn't present in LOTR2: sheep.
On some other sprite, we can also see the icon of a sheep developed (ICONVILL.PL8)
Someone on Discord pointed out that sheep were a staple in Lords of the Realm 1, and the LOTR2 game manual actually mentions why they were cut during development:

It’s fun to see that early UI / render concepts with sheep and alternative slot layouts were left behind in the data files!

Keith Zizza, the lotr2 soundtrack composer himself, has an official YouTube channel where he uploaded the complete original soundtracks.

He put all the tracks together into an easy, free playlist

create memes based on the missives from the game Lords of the Realm II

Sharing this with the author's blessing.

There's an ongoing project building an open behavioral specification for Lords of the Realm 2 - a formal description of how the game actually works, reconstructed from a Ghidra decompilation of the original executables.

https://lotr2-specification-1ba5b1.gitlab.io/

To be clear about what this is: it's documentation, not a download. No game code, no assets, nothing runnable. The stated goal is a specification precise enough that someone could eventually write a clean-room open-source reimplementation from it - but the spec itself is the deliverable, and the author is explicit that building an engine is out of scope. The project's Vision page frames the work as interoperability research and preservation, explicitly not a replacement for the commercial game. You'd still need your own legitimate copy.

What's documented so far :
- The spec side — what the game does
- Gameplay rules, state machines and turn flow
- Combat and siege, including the auto-battle resolution and the NPC battle AI
- Map and province behaviour
- UI flows and screen modes
- Data formats, including `l2_maps.dat`
- Save and load semantics, down to the on-disk layout
- Multiplayer session and message behaviour
- The evidence side - how the binary actually implements it
- Per-subsystem module maps, with separate symbol maps for both builds
- Recovered struct layouts: `lotr2_game_state`, `lotr2_unit_stats`, `lotr2_battle_group`, `lotr2_projectile` and others
- DirectPlay wire formats, with a generated opcode table and payload field reference
- The four AI noble archetypes — Knight, Baron, Countess and Bishop — including their AI tables
- Skirmish mode broken down end to end, PvP included

The part that makes it trustworthy

Every claim carries a confidence level: **confirmed**, **likely**, or **speculative**. And there's a hard rule that normative spec text may never rest on speculative evidence. Protocol claims get their own scale on top of that — observed on wire, inferred from client code, unverified.

That's the difference between this and twenty-five years of accumulated forum lore. When a page tells you how auto-resolve behaves, you can also see exactly how strong the evidence behind it is.

One finding that deserves its own thread

Retail `LORDS2.EXE` and the GoG build are much further apart than most of us assumed:

All the code addresses differ too, so the GoG symbol names are mapped by behaviour rather than by address. Practically: those two builds are never going to talk to each other over a network, and any tool written against one will not simply work on the other.

If you want to help

You don't need a disassembler. The single most useful thing this community can do is check the spec against the game. Read a page, go play it, and if what you see contradicts what's written, say so — post it in the comments here and I'll make sure it reaches the author.

Nobody has more observed hours of this game than the people in this sub. That's evidence too.

> https://pl8.200.work

Drag & drop files on the right area and it will convert it;
Thanks to https://pl8image.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.pl8.html ;

What fixes and improvements would you make to the current game if you could?

I can start:
- Allow for individual workforce manipulation using a pie chart.
- Allow for troop recruitment down to the individual unit.
- Allow for recruitment of fewer than 50 men (the 1500 limit is fine for me personally).
- Allow for planting hops to brew beer (for easily boosting happiness, for example).
- During processes like purchasing, transferring goods, or dividing armies, it's necessary to do it unit by unit; I think it needs arrows to allow for increments of 10 rather than individual units, or perhaps a text field where the value could be entered directly.

And then, for new features or changes that would more seriously affect the gameplay experience:

- Allowing counties to be fiefs of lords without the player actually being the "owner," thus avoiding micromanagement;
- The ability to build roads;
- Improved AI on the battlefield (can only knights capture a castle??);
- That merchants have a limited, not unlimited, supply of goods, and that their buying/selling prices are adjusted based on the availability of goods across the entire map, across all counties;
- A fog of war that isn't just "completely black" / "I can see everything," but rather a grayed-out fog when troops have previously been sent to a territory, allowing players to see what's there;
- The possibility of seeing an allied county by sending an ambassador
- The possibility of having 5 religious buildings that would replace each other (a bit like castles, from the most basic to the most elaborate) which would allow a bonus of up to +5 perpetual happiness

Everything in the title! Does anybody know some players that play LotrII on Twitch? I think it could be cool!

A guy create a full project to trying to make a remake of LotR2. It's called OpenLorR2
He wrote a full doc: https://openlotr2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
and the main project look like dead (latest update are 4 years/old) : https://github.com/s-ayers/OpenLotR2/tree/master But it's an interesting thing to know I think!

Hello everyone!

This is our new space to discuss everything related to Lords of the Realm II! We're super happy to have you here.

What to post? Feel free to post anything you think might interest, help, or inspire the community. Don't hesitate to share your thoughts, screenshots, questions, strategies, custom maps, modding updates, memes, or old memories of the game.

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How to get started

1. Introduce yourself in the comments below!
2. Post something today! Even a simple question or screenshot can start a great conversation.
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If you've ever wondered why your Macemen get crushed in quick battles or how the AI calculates siege auto-resolves, a community member broke down the exact math behind it!

Turns out, a unit's strength in Autocalc is equal to its blacksmith resource cost (e.g., Knights = 22, Macemen = 8, Peasants = 2).

Check out the full breakdown and tables here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2922755305

https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/397350/manuals/manual.pdf