Mythtec Scenario Review

                        Warlords II Scenario Review

MYTHTEC.ZIP 152,868 bytes, Mayan/Aztec fantasy world, Central America ca.
1500, 86 cities, 8 players, 32 ruins (incl 4 temples).  "A fantasy world
of the Mayan, Aztecs and other ancient civilizations of Central America."
Author: Bob Plyler.

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          8 (well balanced with thought given to trade-offs)
 7 Map design        7 (a bit light on forest and hills, but a nice war)
 5 Army pics         9 (unique style, you'll get used to them!)
 5 City pics         9 (NICE!  too bad about the razed cities, though)
 3 Background info   5 (short explanation of army types; designer notes)
 2 Cities/ruins      8 (all interestingly named, most described well)
 2 Items/heroes      7 (mostly new items, good but limited hero names)
   OVERALL RATING  264

The author says "I created this scenario primarily to play the AZTECS army
and city set with a random map."  I really like his cities, and I've played
a few random games using them.  The encampments match the cities, so he gets
a few bonus points for that.  The razed cities are the defaults, which is
understandable since the SB doesn't let you copy from the normal city pics
into the razed pics so you can modify them easily.  If he'd gone to the
extra work to create the razed city pics anyway, this would have been a
perfect city set.

The army set is also excellent, not only for this scenario, but for random
games as well.  There are a few useless unit types that should have been
modified, but overall the army capabilities are very well balanced between
a unit's strength, speed, and turns to produce.

The army pics are in a unique style that at first looks strange, but it
actually adds to the flavor of the scenario, and once I got used to them,
I thought they were quite attractive.  They're easily distinguished and
"descriptive" of the unit type, as well as interesting.

The map is fairly well done.  As mentioned above, my biggest complaint is
that in Central America ca. 1500, there must have been a few more trees.
Isn't deforestation a recent problem?  And the region is nowhere near as
flat as this map shows.  Aside from those geographic inaccuracies,  the map
makes a fairly interesting war setting, with just the right amount of roads
(not too many, like some scenarios).  Other features are well placed.

The cities and ruins are all named, and the author obviously did plenty of
research to get the names and descriptions for them.  Not a perfect score
because some descriptions are very terse or blank (not a high percentage).

Most, but not all, items fit the scenario.  He added 50 good hero names, but
the other 750 duplicate the default names.  Dilemma: take the time to come
up with 800 names, duplicate the names 16 times, or not put in any new hero
names at all?  I vote for taking time to come up with a full set of names,
but a scenario can be excellent even without that extra effort, as this one
proves.

There's one ruin inaccessible except by flying, so you may want to turn off
quests to eliminate a slight chance of messing up computer players.  Other
than that, options in this scenario are pretty much your own preference. It
is replayable using this map, though I think I'll have more fun using the
city and army sets on random maps like the scenario author.

===

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
--