Review of the Second Reich

Author: Michael Jeszenka

Reviewer: Allard H.S. Höfelt

[Historical/20th Century]

This early 20th century scenario depicts the first World War in Europe from the beginning to the end.

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Francois Baire's Review of Second Reich

Overall / Playability / General Care / Art & Originality / Concluding Notes

Overall Rating

24 / 30

COMMENTS: None.

Playability Rating

8 / 10

COMMENTS: Because the author chose to depict the whole war, from the beginning to the end and in all of Europe, he clearly had to leave a lot of things out. This is quite a shame, cause all action of the Western Front before the war turned into a trenches war has been left out. Though the author mentions this in the readme, I think it's one of those things in this scenario that make in not perfect. There are several ways to force the scenario to stay historical instead of just leaving hard things out.

I think the scenario makes good use of multiple events (14 files!), but this still could be improved. Like adding a batch program to change these files automatically or the changing certain rules (allowing more historical accuracy). Who will use the multi player events? Are they really useful?

The scenario is not hard at all, it is quite possible capturing Paris early. This really disappointed me (I'm not a great scenario player anyway). I started over, and played more stupidly to have more fun. Also I was able, without any difficulty, to destroy Samsonov's as well as Rennenkampf's armies, which in real life was actually almost impossible.

This scenario never really gets boring. There are a lot of nice events to entertain the player (again, though I think this goes instead of some more historical accuracy).

Level of General Care

9 / 10

COMMENTS: The scenario is really fun to play, depicting the situation quite accurately. The eastern front could use a little bit more (Russian) units at the start of the game.

General care is great! From everything it's clear that the author really wanted this scenario to be perfect, and in many ways he succeeded with this. For example, all city names are in their native tongue (even in Belgium Wallonia and Vlaanderen), and have accents where needed.

The map is nice enough. A lot of grassland, but that's mostly not bad because there are a lot of railroads and other things to distract. It does get annoying, however, in the far north and in Russia and Poland, where the large amount of grassland is less cut through by roads and railways and is supposed to be much more tree like and unfertile. The terrain is a bit too little diverse. Mountains are in a straight line flanked by two lines of hills. This will be a tough thing to improve, and is perhaps not worth all the trouble, because, as I said, the map is nice enough.

A few things do not get the attention they deserve, such as the suburbs terrain type, which is mostly hardly visible.

Art and Originality

7 / 10

ARTWORK: Though some units are nice, a lot of units lack something to make them "real" instead of being tin men soldiers. They mostly look plain blue, or plain green, with some gradient filling. It looks as if the most difficult part -the creating of the unit- is done, but the easy and more rewarding part -the detailing of the unit- has been left. For example, the transport unit looks awful, but as soon as a unit has more detail (like the Hungarian Division unit), it starts looking great.
The terrains is mostly unchanged from the standard terrain, with the exception of No Man's Land and an occasional swamp square. The terrain resources look nice, but are mostly borrowed from other scenarios.
Still, there are a lot of nice and new graphics in this scenario, such as the city icons, the fortress icon, the rivers.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: This is a great scenario, which I would advise anybody to play. Still, because the author wanted to include everything, even the Russian Revolution, I feel that because of that the scenario is not as perfect as it is the obvious intention to be. Perhaps adding (much) more events will correct this in ?a next version?

Also, a nice thing to change in a future version is to make it much, much harder.

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