YMMV / Age of the Ring

• Breather Level: Just like in the base game, the Last March of the Ents is far easier than the nightmarishly difficult Helm's Deep. You have a lot of strong units with powerful ranged attacks and self-healing, and Saruman has very little that can threaten you in return. Even if you're going for the side objective of keeping all the Ents alive, it's a walk in the park compared to things like defending the walls or saving Haldir.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Just about every faction has a unit type that tends to be spammed in lategame matches. Prior to 8.0, the major offenders were the various half-pike half-sword infantry units (Gundabad Berserkers or Iron Hills Warriors, for instance), which were efficient and versatile enough to displace most other infantry once you could pay for them. Both got lightly nerfed in 8.0 to encourage their factions to use something else.
  • Lothlórien's pre-8.0 incarnation was infamous for overfocusing on the Marchwarden unit. Marchwardens could be obtained pretty early on (only needing a level 2 infantry building), and were nothing if not annoying to take down—they had great range and damage, but thanks to also being the faction's elite infantry unit, unlike most archers, they could wear heavy armor and weren't that weak to cavalry, and if they did get charged, they could switch to swords and ensure that whatever reached them would not enjoy the experience. Add in the fact that Lothlórien didn't have a lot of other elite options in general, and it was downright optimal for a player who could afford to do so to spend all their cash on Marchwardens and nothing else before blobbing them together and watching everything to come within a hundred yards get pincushioned. Even the devs joked about how irritating they were in a set of patch notes released on April Fools. 8.0 pushed them up to requiring a level 3 infantry building, handily reserving them to the lategame, nerfed their damage, and dropped their armor when using bows considerably to ensure they could actually be defeated if they got charged without escorts.
  • Isengard is designed such that focusing on the Dunland side of the faction is functional as a strategy, but in some versions, it reached the point where Isengard players considered it not just viable, but preferable to build as few Uruks as possible. The Wild Men were already Isengard's best early-game strategy, and Wulfgar, the central hero of Dunland, was good enough (with a versatile skillset and a rather powerful leadership) that the other half of the faction being locked behind him wasn't a problem when you would be trying to recruit him anyway. This sparked some grumbling not just for balance reasons, but because Isengard in all versions had orcs making up most of its army. 8.0 ended up delivering some heavy thwacks to Dunnish units and Wulfgar for exactly this reason, though going all-in on Dunland is still a workable tactic.
• Fandom Rivalry: The community has a fairly friendly one with the Edain mod community, due to the fact that they're largely aiming for the same goals but go about them in very different ways. Though arguments over which does the job of being the definitive mod better can be heated, most will accept that they're both good in their own right.
• Replacement Scrappy: Lug the Mauled got a very significant backlash upon his reveal (the creators claim to have received threats over it), largely due to the fact that his reveal coincided with the mod announcing that Azog would be dropped from Misty Mountains. The fandom seems to have warmed up to him since then, though, finding his Laughably Evil attitude charming.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Given that the game has gone through several major updates, factions that were once largely unpopular can see a swing in their favor thanks to redesigns.
  • Goblins were probably the least popular of the base game's factions, widely seen in the fanbase as a mishmash of barely-connected units with dubious lore and few heroes (only one of whom was a canon character, and she didn't make much sense there). Even as Misty Mountains in Age of the Ring, they spent a fair bit of time as a redheaded stepchild among the evil factions, due to a motley design focus and an annoying gimmick of many of their units being locked behind fortress upgrades. After 7.0, though, a mix of Truer to the Text alterations, the removal of the more egregious troop-gating, and a much clearer theming as the "wild" faction left them in a rather good place.
  • Lothlórien pre-8.0 was a rather disliked faction. Its theming was rather bland and vanilla compared to the more diverse Rivendell and Woodland Realm, and its unit roster was small, which encouraged a gameplan of overfocusing on the somewhat overpowered Marchwardens. 8.0 gave it a massive lease on life by redesigning the building system altogether to focus on Mallorn Trees (with all the faction's core buildings being Mallorn permutations), making the faction far more unique, along with making Marchwardens far less spammable and giving the faction some other viable elite options.
• That One Boss: Drogoth from the Blue Mountains mission in the War in the North campaign. This is because Drogoth is, for all intents and purposes, a reskinned Smaug, and is about as strong as Smaug. The only units the player can train that can even attack him are Ered Luin Guards, who are not exactly the best archers around, and the player is also not allowed to research Mithril-tipped Arrows upgrade for some reason. As a result, the fight against Drogoth ends up being a massive slog where the player has to send wave after wave of Ered Luin Guards after the dragon.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The texture quality of the mod is one of its most highly-praised aspects. Zooming in on the individual troops would leave anyone shocked that it was running on an engine from the early 2000s, with even the original characters looking like they walked right out of the films.