Vale Scenario Review

                        Warlords II Scenario Review

VALE.SZP, 186,240 bytes: The Vale; 5 players; 50 cities, 30 ruins (incl. 4
temples).  Object: Become the Ruler of The Vale.  Author: Kendra Michael.
(Any relation to Will Michael, author of Norse scenario, I wonder?)

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          3 (too overloaded with powers, badly unbalanced)
 7 Map design        5 (a good start, but unfinished many places)
 5 Army pics         5 (ok, modified Spectra pictures, difficult to see)
 5 City pics         7 (very slight modification of Spectra cities)
 3 Background info   1 (none, not even descriptions and signposts)
 2 Cities/ruins      2 (cities all random drek, ruins half and half)
 2 Items/heroes      2 (default items ok, only a few heroes changed)
   OVERALL RATING  136

This scenario shows potential with that map, and the ideas about the sides
and general geography of the world, but fell far short of a good scenario
due to lack of effort.  There are numerous sloppy places left in the map,
like roads that connect strangely or don't connect where they should have,
a temple and a ruin blocked in so you have to fly to it (possibly deliberate
but a bad idea), a shortage of ports, terrain that hasn't been "smoothed"
yet, etc.  I'd like to see this map again when it's finished, though.

The army set is so overloaded with powers the heroes have little value.
If you haven't got +2 in the stack, you're doing something wrong.  (It adds
to +21 in all terrains, and another +17 in various terrains on the different
army types.)  But nothing cancels city bonus.  Firebats fly too fast, and
make it far too easy to map the world and sack enemy cities early on.  The
army pictures are modifications of the Spectra army pics, with a few of
them copied from the default army set.  Some are pretty good here, but many
of them are difficult to make out against any kind of background.

The city set is the Spectra set, which is awesome, except she edited it.
Not enough to make much difference, so it really shouldn't have been put
into the scenario at all.  Using the original city set would be better.

The finishing touches are absent, except for a couple of hero names changed
(and plenty changed from male to female without changing the name!) thus
duplicating about 95% of the names we already had.  The ruins are described
and named only half the time.  Some of the cities were renamed, but only
after generating random descriptions for them, so the descriptions don't
even match the name of the city.

You can play as Moon Shadow, Golden Dawn, Fire Imp, Draoi (eh?), or Siren,
but who knows who they are, what they're like, or why they're at war.  If
she ever finishes this scenario, I'll try it again.  As of now, it should
not have been released.  Nor played.

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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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