Warlords II Scenario Review

MINARIA.SZP: 186,240 bytes.  8 players, 64 cities, 40 ruins (including 4
temples).  Battle for the fabled continent of Minaria.  A purely invented
world, sprung fresh from the author's imagination (as far as I know).
See WARNING below before installing.

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          1 (only 1 unit type is worth producing)
 7 Map design        8 (a finely detailed map, well done)
 5 Army pics         5 (default with minor changes)
 5 City pics         9 (uses Spectra city set from the Scenario Builder)
 3 Background info   1 (nothing)
 2 Cities/ruins      9 (excellent and complete names and descriptions)
 2 Items/heroes      3 (only a few changed from defaults)
   OVERALL RATING  163

The author created a new map and added lots of finishing touches to make
it more interesting.  Signposts add amusement and flavor.  Strategically
it's a good war, but nothing of special significance.

The scenario is set to use the Spectra city set created by SSG and packed
with the Scenario Builder (or the update disk for Warlords).  This city set
is AWESOME and perfect in every way, being three-dimensional and complete
with matching razed cities and encampments.  I can't really give the author
of this scenario credit for creating it, but he gets credit for choosing it.

[ !! WARNING !!  The SZP file includes CSPECTRA.PCK, which is not only not
necessary, but unwise.  Though I didn't see any differences, the one it
includes is different from the one packed with the scenario builder, and
installing this scenario will OVERWRITE your existing Spectra city set.
I now set all of my city and army sets read-only during installation of
new scenarios, to prevent this in the future.  (Warlords refuses to run if
they're read-only during play.)  Scenario designers: please! if you use a
default city set, exclude it from the SZP file by using "packscen -c"!  If
you edited one of the default city sets, rename it to something unique! ]

The army pics are just slight modifications of the default armies, which is
just fine if that's what you want, but scores few bonus points with me.

The entire scenario is spoiled by the obviously untested army set.  Get rid
of Bat Riders, and maybe I'd look at the tradeoffs between the other units,
and decide which ones to produce.  But with Bat Riders flying at 46, taking
1 turn to produce, and being strength 3 in cities (5 after you easily get
them double-blessed), and being the cheapest production type to buy, there
is absolutely no reason to create any other type of unit, EVER.  When I had
35 cities, 34 of them were producing Bat Riders.  I only produced the slow
walking, slow-to-produce Ogres in 1 city because they cancel city bonus,
not that they ever got to a city before the Bat Rider swarm took it.  The
author either never play-tested this army set or never even considered any
trade-offs between army types.

All the cities and all the ruins are reasonably named and fully described,
which would make this a great scenario if it had a useful army set.  He
also changed 9 out of 39 items, which is fine.

Out of 800 hero names in the files packed with the scenario, only 23 of
them are different from the defaults.  Request to scenario designers:
please save the space in your scenario file; if you don't have enough
names then either duplicate them out to 100, or skip it.  Warlords will
use the default files with a scenario if they're not included.  People who
download the scenarios and store them on their machines really don't need
another copy of 99% of the names for every scenario.

The scenario is titled "Battle for the Fabled Continent of Minaria" but
there's no background information to help someone get into the mindset for
the battle.  Just who are these folks, anyway?  The city descriptions and
ruins and signposts help quite a bit, but even a brief story packed with
the SZP file would have been helpful.

In short, this scenario provides a nice map, with much attention to
detail.  The city set is a default set, and the army set is useless.

===

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