Warlords II Scenario Review

ILLURIA.SZP  36,640 bytes: based on the world of Illuria in the original
game of Warlords.  Too bad the author screwed up so badly.  I looked at
it for 5 minutes on turn 1, said "this is S**T" and never played it.

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          1 (default army set, which doesn't fit Illuria)
 7 Map design        3 (destroys much of the strategy of Illuria)
 5 Army pics         6 (default army pics)
 5 City pics         9 (default city pics)
 3 Background info   1 (included, but useless)
 2 Cities/ruins      3 (spelled MOST of the city names correctly)
 2 Items/heros       1 (default items, incl. ones not in Warlords 1)
   OVERALL RATING  117

This scenario gets most of its points by using the default army and city
images, instead of screwing them up, too.  If you grabbed this scenario
thinking you could play the original Illuria game under Warlords II, you
would soon be corrected.  The author claims he "made every effort to get
this one as close to the original as possible!" but if he really made
"every effort" he would have also edited the army set and he would have
put the temples where they belonged.  He obviously either NEVER played
the original, or else he deliberately threw in some stupid changes on a
whim that totally destroy much of the basic play of the original game.

For example, in this scenario, Carmel is utterly worthless -- not only
does it produce light infantry as weak as all the other cities' light
infantry, the TEMPLE isn't there!  The author of this scenario decided
for NO good reason to put the temples in utterly inaccessible places and
have ordinary ruins where the temples used to be.  Galin, like Carmel,
instead of being critical, is worthless, because the temple isn't there.

Besides that, there are blatant errors in the map, like no forest at all
between Hithos and Galin.

The way a person would LIKE to play this scenario is to set the options
as similar as possible to Warlords (original): hidden map off, diplomacy
off, view production on, quests off, neutral cities weak, and deleting
all items from the item list except those found in Warlords.  However,
if you do that, Warlords II will crash, as I discovered when I tried it
the first time.  The problem is with number of items -- you have to have
all those extra items to get it to load the scenario.  (This has been
reported, and may or may not be fixed later.)  Two more major problems
that can't be blamed on the author of the Illuria scenario: there is no
way to turn off sacking a city, which was impossible in Warlords, and
even worse, the dwarves start with a griffin instead of having to wait
5 turns to get one!  This hands them two more cities instantly, both
producing griffins every 3 turns (instead of 7), while everyone else in
the north is stuck with cavalry and infantry.  The whole balance of play
is ruined.

The default army set for Warlords II cannot be made to simulate the
original Warlords, and the attempt to do so makes a travesty of many
of the important strategic cities in Illuria.  Kor produces giants as
good as those from Stormheim, so the ORCS never bother to produce any
wolf riders in their capital city.  The Horse Lord cavalry is no better
than the cavalry Lord Bane gets in Malikor (I'll bet you never produced
any cavalry in Malikor in the original, because it was total crap).  And
similar discrepancies abound, making this scenario nothing like Illuria
from the original game.

In short, this scenario isn't worth the price of the disk space it uses,
in my opinion.  Even considered as a war scenario on its own merits, it's
unbalanced in favor of the dwarves, and the temples are so inaccessible as
to be utterly worthless.

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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