Warlords II Scenario Review

ISLANDS.ZIP: 96,033 bytes.  8 players, 80 cities, 40 ruins (4 "temples").
"This particular scenario is an island-hopping campaign.  There are no more
than six cities on any island, and most have only two or three."  A modern
air warfare scenario, supposedly.  Author: S. Han.

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          5 (planes are ok, missile launchers move too fast)
 7 Map design        4 (different, but not much of strategic interest)
 5 Army pics         4 (schematic-looking rather than dynamic)
 5 City pics         8 (uses Ice city set from the Ice terrain)
 3 Background info   2 (short blurb, not really about the theme)
 2 Cities/ruins      1 (complete random drek, except for the blank names)
 2 Items/heroes      1 (defaults do NOT fit an air warfare scenario!)
   OVERALL RATING  148

The author created an army set he likes to use in random games, and it's
reasonable for that, if you know your F-16s from your F-117s.  It's ok for
this scenario also, where most of the world consists of small islands, but
it's faster to take a boat from one to the next.  There are 22 flying units
and only 5 "walking" units.  The land-based units are all anti-aircraft
missle launchers, and are given a bonus in the city.  That would be fine
except to really fit an air warfare game, you'd have to hand-edit the army
data file to set their speed to 2, and edit boats similarly.  As it is, the
best way to capture a city is to attack it from the sea with a-a missiles
and maybe one good plane or hero to strengthen them.  The trouble is that
boats get 20 movement points at 1 per step on water, while most of the
planes only get 20-30 at 2 per step.  The fastest plane is only slightly
faster than a missle-launcher on a boat, and it takes longer to make than
the same strength (in a city) missle launcher.  A little hand-editing with
a hex editor would improve this army set.

The pictures of the planes and missiles are simple top-down views like you
might see in a design document.  That's fine also -- but not very exciting
like some aircraft pictures I've seen in other scenarios.  (Paul Fields's
A-10 leaps to mind.)  Also, on top of the snow, the white armies tend to get
lost and are difficult to distinguish, and all armies are a little hard to
see in a city.

The map itself is fine, but nothing to get excited about.  He chose the
Ice terrain set for this scenario, which makes it the first scenario I've
seen like that.  (I kept wanting to make some hot chocolate while playing
it.)  The city pics come from the Ice terrain set from SSG, and therefore
are excellent.  As the description says, the world consists only of small
islands, so there's not much room for interesting geography.  Given that
this is supposed to be air warfare, I would have left out all the roads
entirely, especially the ones that make it easy to move missile launchers
over mountains to the next city.

The finishing touches, that most scenario authors add to really "create"
the scenario once the map and army set is done, are completely non-existant
here.  There's essentially no background telling who's at war and why and
over what and where, etc.  For that matter, is this an AIR war at all, when
the sides are named Grey Dwarves, Storm Giants, Horse Lords, Orcs of Kor??
When your hero flies in a B-2, what does he do with a Spear of Ank; how
impressive is his Crown of Loriel??  Did he find them under a dragon in
Exor's Tomb?  And why would he want to capture a city named "Tarasail"?
Just because it's "a great fortress, overshadowed by an unexplored valley"?
(Just how does a valley overshadow something?)  The author set all the
city and ruins names to random drek, *then* changed four ruins to temples
without even bothering to rename them (the names are still Par's Hold,
Hunil's Crypt, etc.) and added three new cities without even bothering
to name them at all (their names are blank).  (The cities were apparently
added not for any strategic reason or to improve the map, but just to
round out the number of cities to 80.  A bad reason.)

My point is this: if you've gone to some work to create a map, why not put
in a little more work to make it into a world?  We can generate our own
random cities and ruins, thank you.

If you like air warfare, give this army set a try.  If you LOVE air warfare,
play this scenario once, maybe twice.

===

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