Warlords II Scenario Review

HOBSON'.SZP 41,174 bytes: Hobson's Choice, 8 players, 100 cities, 40 ruins.
"Every effort has been made to give all ... players an equal chance of
winning."  The name comes from a difficult choice each player faces: race
for the center cities, or take the easy (but time-consuming) ruins nearby.
The city productions and other map features offer other choices leading to
victory or disaster.  Author: Frank Mascaro.

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          4 (default)
 7 Map design        7 (random-looking map with a few interesting features)
 5 Army pics         6 (default)
 5 City pics         9 (default)
 3 Background info   1 (not included)
 2 Cities/ruins      2 (mostly random drek names and descriptions)
 2 Items/heroes      3 (default)
   OVERALL RATING  177

The author's focus in this scenario was to produce a world in which every
player has an equal chance of winning, but must make tough decisions that
could either spell victory or defeat, depending on what the other players
choose.  He's accomplished his objective fairly well, thereby creating an
interesting scenario best for multiple human players, but good against the
computer also.  It doesn't score many points because no work was done to
improve the army set, the city or ruins names, items, heroes, or any of the
other things you can do to improve a random map game.  This scenario is just
the city production capability -- little else was added, since that was not
the author's purpose.

Play it with hidden map on the first time, off thereafter.  (No fair if
you know the world and the computer players don't.)  Diplomacy and quests
on.  Playing it with Quick Start "on" can create a nasty conflict in the
critical center cities immediately, otherwise it will take someone a long
time to capture those cities.

Note: to install this scenario, the SZP file must be named HOBSON'.SZP
with the apostrophe/quote, not HOBSON.SZP (which is how it comes when
downloaded from a certain crippled online service I will not name).

===

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