Warlords II Scenario Review

GREECE.ZIP 122,676 bytes: Ancient Greece, 8 players, 70 cities, 40 ruins.
Based on ancient Greece and surrounding empires: Athens, Spartans, Trojans,
Amazons, Persians, Egyptians, and more.  Author: Jeremy Reaban

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          4 (lots of nice unit types, but with problems)
 7 Map design        7 (very good original map with a serious flaw)
 5 Army pics         5 (modified Roman army set, some are really crude)
 5 City pics         5 (pretty good, a bit 2-dimensional, and incomplete)
 3 Background info   2 (a few sentences, but better than nothing)
 2 Cities/ruins      4 (half real, half random drek)
 2 Items/heroes      4 (half new items, only Athens gets good hero names)
   OVERALL RATING  161

"Sort of based on the Greek Myths."  This scenario features a good map of
Greece and surrounding area, with islands here and there.  Most cities are
"real" but many of them are taken from a random game.  Many of the ruins
have interesting names -- Tut's Tomb, Crash of Icarus -- but most of the
ruins are random, like Okok's Tower, etc.  The serious problem with the map,
which *might* have been accidental, is that the Athenians immediately have
control of two temples, which are very close AND connected by roads.  This
makes their position far too strong.  If the "Crystal Temple" was a temple
instead of a ruins, and the "Delphi Oracle" was a ruins instead of a temple,
it would fix the problem.

The author obviously wanted to do a Lord of the Rings scenario, as well
as an Ancient Greece scenario, since he's inexplicably stuck hobbits, the
Shire, and Hobbiton into the middle of Egypt.  *sigh*  Would you improve a
Tolkien scenario by sticking Zeus into the middle of it?

The army capabilities are fairly standard, with a few interesting units such
as Mummy and Phoenix.  The flying scout unit is Sparrow, and totally breaks
the game, making most of the rest of the units stupid to produce.  Buy the
Sparrow production capability for 10 gold, produce them in 1 turn, bless
them (twice if you're playing Athenians), and you have units that fly at
22 and require ABSOLUTELY NO MAINTENANCE COST.  Nobody with any sense would
produce any of the "standard" military units, since they're all slower, walk
instead of fly, and cost money to maintain.  The special units are useful,
though -- LOVE that Greek Fire!  Strangely, there is no unit to cancel hero
bonus, and I wonder why the Amazon unit is -1 to enemy strength.

The artwork on the cities is pleasing and varied for the normal cities, but
every razed city looks the same as any other, and every encampment is a
tower with a flag.  The pictures of the armies come from the Roman set from
the Scenario Builder, slightly modified.  I haven't seen the SB yet, so I
can't say which ones are modified.

The author added a few true-to-mythology item names, but left most of the
names from standard Warlords.  He created 100 names for Athenian heroes but
only 1, 2, or none for any other side.  You keep seeing male heroes showing
up for the Amazon side, which would have been easy to prevent.

All in all, a fair-to-good scenario, but it could have been so much better.

===

This review is copyrighted by myself, but may be distributed in any
UNMODIFIED form as long as NO CHARGE is made for distribution (such
as a per-minute charge for online time) and it is not included in any
copyrighted "compilation" (such as claimed by certain online services
I will not name).  Dirk Pellett