I was looking back through some designs that have been gathering dust -- thinking it might be a good way to learn the current designer tool (finally) -- and I remembered this World of Middle Earth board I'd worked on for a while, so I made a small test game to see where I left off:

https://www.wargear.net/games/join/81366884

I seem to recall that balancing the factions and the win condition was very tricky, but it's been a while. Any interest?

Beautiful map. A little too complicated for me to follow, but I'll bet Tolkien Fans will love it.

I did a quick border check. Black Mountains can attack Udun, but it looks like Udun can't attack Black Mountains, at least in the Board Explorer, though if I zoom in I see a few pixels of red, so the border's probably there.

Yes, it's immensely complicated I want to simulate unique factions, like you'd find in RTS games like Starcraft or Age of Empires. In other words, where each player is playing with a distinct set of resources, strengths, and weaknesses. So in this board, each faction has a unique bonus structure tied to the geography of Middle Earth's regions. Each faction also starts in different places on the map.

I have no idea how to balance all of that. But I figure that, since players can choose their starting factions, there's also likely to be a meta-game aspect, where if you see that the first player has chosen, say, Ents, then maybe you choose a faction that you think has a strong counter-strategy against Ents.

The biggest issue I recall in play-testing was the victory condition. To make the factions work, I had to give each player an off-board starting territory (their avatar on the left). Each avatar can attack to the board, so that players can't just get immediately eliminated by an early strike against their home territories. But that made a "control the whole board" victory nearly impossible to pull off, especially in larger games. So I thought I would go with a "capture X territories" win condition. But with Abandon on (in order to make the geographic penalties work for different factions, e.g. it's bad to be stuck in a desert), it became a race to see who could simply build up a big stack and then run around a bunch of empty territories (especially the oceans) to nab the win. And that wasn't terribly interesting.