War in Middle Earth

War in Middle Earth is a real-time strategy game released for the ZX Spectrum, MSX, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MS-DOS, Commodore Amiga, Apple IIGS, and Atari ST in 1988 by Australian company Melbourne House.

The game combined both large scale army unit level and small scale character level. All the action happened simultaneously in game world and places could be seen from the map or at the ground level. Individual characters could also be seen in larger battles (in which they either survived or died — Gandalf alone could easily defeat a hundred orcs). If the battle is quite small (less than 100 units approximately) it can be watched on ground level. Otherwise it will be only displayed numerically. On ground level characters could acquire objects and talk with computer-controlled friendly characters (such as Radagast or Tom Bombadil).