Total War: Shogun 2 doesn’t use NVIDIA card on linux

The advantage is actually not that great. If you play a lot you do get more retainers and more experience for your general but it's overall strategy and tactics that will win you the game. My general currently has 8 stars and I remember when I started off I beat a 7 star general without using any veteran units or retainers.

As to how the players are matched, if you let the game manage it, it will try to find a player of your level if one is available, if not, it will keep searching for any available player of sufficiently close rank.

Running software using the ION processor will require extra software. Windows 7 Nvidia supplies Optimus. On linux there's a project called Bumblebee.

To recap the several sources on the web for 64bit Oneiric:

Install LOTRO roughly following the howto

sudo apt-get install wine winetricks
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-lotro
winetricks vcrun2008
winetricks d3dx9
cd /wherever/you've/downloaded/the/game
wine LOTROSetup.exe

This will have created a wine environment (sometime revered to as 'bottle') in .wine-lotro in your home directory and installed the game there, including some native windows dll's that the game needs.

To launch the game from wine you'll need the special launcher called PyLotro. Normally on Ubuntu you do

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ajackson-bcs/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pylotro

But there's no Oneiric version in the ppa yet. So just get the source version (not the 'Stand-alone Version' exe one).

To have it use the Nvidia processor, you install Bumblebee

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee

And since wine is 32-bit, and 64-bit Oneiric uses multiarch, you install the 32-bit version of some libraries like this

sudo apt-get install virtualgl-libs:i386

without it you'll see those LD_PRELOAD errors.

To have the pylotro launcher use optirun to run wine, I made a tiny wrapper script like this

mkdir $HOME/bin
cat << EOF > $HOME/bin/optiwine
#! /bin/sh
optirun wine \$@
EOF
chmod +x $HOME/bin/optiwine

In pylotro /Tools/Options, tick the Advanced Options and set /home/{username}/bin/optiwine as the Wine Program. And of course set the right WINEPREFIX et al.