Mars2 Scenario Review

                        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.

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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
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