Warlords II Scenario Review MARS!.ZIP 143,360 bytes. "Set on Mars, not the real Mars, but the Mars seen through the telescopes around the turn of the century, one with canals and Martians." 6 players, 50 cities, 34 ruins (4 temples). Author: Jeremy Reaban (same author as the Greece scenario reviewed earlier). Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10: Wt Area Score Comments 10 Army set 2 (another army set with too-fast flying scouts) 7 Map design 7 (a reasonable map with a nice appearance) 5 Army pics 4 (hard to see in cities, temples, even in hills) 5 City pics 8 (copied from Ice and Spectra city sets) 3 Background info 4 (brief designer notes, not much about this Mars) 2 Cities/ruins 2 (almost completely random drek, a couple of jokes) 2 Items/heroes 8 (all new items, almost all new heroes) OVERALL RATING 161 Think about the trade-offs and you'll never buy any army type except the Scrawks. Maybe the Gob Martians (-1 to enemy) if you can't find a city already producing them. Maybe HawkPeople once you're filthy rich. The "dragon" equivalent is +3 to stack and flies at 40, with the added bonus that there are NO units to cancel non-hero. (I recommend giving this ability to the Earthlings.) Eight unit types have movement bonus in woods, but the entire map has exactly TWO woods squares. (That's fine, this IS Mars after all, but why give woods movement to army types that have never seen a tree, let alone a forest?) The army pictures are so hard to make out against any type of background, and especially against the cities of the same color, that you essentially have to turn on "View Enemies" option to see the top unit in the stack. With the bad capabilities and bad pictures, this is the worst army set I've seen yet. But, balancing that out is the fact that the army unit names, item names, most of the hero names, map, signposts, and the monsters you meet in the ruins are really quite funny and "martian" like. You'll enjoy playing it once, but probably not twice. The cities and ruins are all random drek except for a couple of descriptions that were changed. On the other hand, he entered a full set of "Martian" items like Boots of Splogsni, and changed probably 400 hero names (but many of those are duplicated several times). Background info is minimal. He created his own city set by copying cities from the Ice and Spectra city sets and making color changes. Given the minimal changes, it would have been better to just use either the Ice or the Spectra city set itself, and save the space in the scenario file. None of the cities look especially well suited to Mars, which would have justified making a whole new set. As I said before, turn on View Enemies when you play it. Quick Start should be On to prevent the light blue side being disadvantaged at the start: all the other sides take two cities the first turn, but light blue gets stuck on an island and has to wander around to find anything. I did not do this deliberately: Mars! scores exactly the same as Greece, also by Jeremy Reaban. So I'll close with the same comment as last time: 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