Scenario Review Scenario Title: Dungeon: Heroes of Beckhorn (v. 2.0) Author: Blackclove Reviewer: Gothmog   Fantasy scenario. A small town recruits heroes to fight off hordes of monsters coming from nearby dungeons. The object of the game is to destroy all of the monsters before they destroy you. While the scenario emphasizes combat, there is fair amount of research, exploration, and civilization building you have to do. Download Now! Download Sounds File #1 Download Sounds File #2. Note: Downloadable files are for version 3.1, which is newer than the version reviewed here. Files provided courtesy of Platehead's Site.

Overall Rating 23/30 OVERALL: This unusual scenario is based on the notion of transforming Civ 2 into a Dungeons and Dragons Quest. It is well designed and fun to play, but some technical problems hold down the score.

Playability Rating 8 / 10 COMMENTS: Even though the scenario runs the standard length of time and the map is large it still doesn't take forever to play. That's because most of the terrain is unproductive and there aren't a whole lot of units. For this review I played it twice. The first time I was overrun by the monsters. The second time I prevailed. To play the game, you take your heroes out to explore the dungeons and destroy the monsters' lairs. While the monsters are weak at first, they get stronger over time. With only a few heroes to do the fighting and locals that aren't worth a hoot, your strategic decisions are critical. If you are careful, you should be able to defeat the monsters, but if you make enough blunders and lose too many heroes, you'll soon be overrun. To me, that makes the scenario balanced. Three units in the game are somewhat off. The Magebolt was a missile unit with a range of 1 and attack of 4. With such a small range and attack, I deemed them to be useless. The Fireball was, to my surprise, not destroyed after attacking. I think this was probably some kind of typo made editing the rules.txt file. I suggest that these two units be reevaluated. The notes said that if you discovered the right advances, you would be able to get a paladin. I never got the paladin. I don't know if that was because of technical problems or because I didn't do the right things during the scenario.

Level of General Care 7 / 10 COMMENTS: The overall care taken to set up the scenario is fairly high, but the scenario suffers from a few technical problems that I had to fix in order to complete the scenario. Good Things: The documentation included with the game package and the pedia.txt file were more than adequate to understand the game. The tech tree was pruned and redefined appropriately. The designer has used just the right amount of technology slots to play the game. You don't spend most of the game researching future tech as you do in some scenarios. By the time you get there, you're either going to be mopping up the monsters or they're going to be mopping up you. City improvements and wonders have been pared down to a level that both sets the scenario mood and adds difficulty to the scenario. Maintaining happiness is a problem because the population can grow rapidly and there are no happiness wonders and only two happiness improvements. The story line contained in events was both informative and good for maintaining the mood. The events files also blocks negotiation with the monsters and prevents them from fighting each other. While there has been a lot of tinkering with the basic statistics of the game, everything tends to be in balance. Technical Problems: I could not build the Armageddon unit, the bomb, even after discovering the prerequisite advance and wonder. This problem can be fixed by granting the nuclear fission advance, which seems to be some sort of undocumented requirement for nuclear weapons. The scenario crashed when I ran into the Captive unit because it was defined with 0 hp and 0 fp. Changing these stats to 1 hp and 1 fp cured that problem. One of the heroes, Klaw Swiftkill shows up in a section of dungeon unconnected to anywhere! The worst problem I had occurred near the end of the game when I had caused global warming to occur by using too many Armageddons. This transformed the dungeon tiles bordering on the dungeon walls to be transformed into Inns, (because they occupy the swamp slot). I thought at first that this could be fixed by setting the eliminate pollution flag on, but it was on! Apparently, the flag doesn't apply to nuclear pollution. Other Faults: There are a few anachronisms that occur in the game: Nuclear weapons for Armageddon, paradrop for teleport, and the default city names are the Roman city names. The pedia.txt file needs further revision. A revised game.txt file and a revised city.txt file needs to be added to the package. In most cases terrain transformation and simple modification produce the same result. I think the idea of transformation here ought to allow you to skip a step.

Art and Originality 8 / 10 MEDIA: Although the unit artwork is borrowed, the units selected look like they belong together. Some of the shield placements on the units make them hard to see at all and need to be fixed. The terrain artwork makes you believe that you are in a dungeon. While the city graphics are OK, I didn't like the monster cities with the question marks on top of them. What the game could really use is a SOUND directory. I guess one wasn't included because it would make the distribution package large because all of the custom and extra slots are used. ORIGINALITY: This scenario gets high marks for originality. Here's how a few things were done. To create the dungeons the sea tiles are used to simulate the dungeon walls. This works because there are no sea units. Then the dungeon tiles have no production value. Cities in the dungeon were generally placed on resource squares. This limited their growth, because they are supposed to be monster lairs after all. All of the terrain has been radically altered to induce rapid city growth. This is offset by the fact that the humans don't have much actual space to expand. The combat unit statistics are also unconventional. In general, the movement allowances, attack, defense, Hit points, and fire power are much higher than in the normal game, but this is offset by limiting the number of heroes in the game and also by giving most heroes some sort of weakness.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS: I recommend this scenario highly in spite of its technical problems. I hope that Blackclove issues a revised version that addresses some of the technical issues soon. {the revised version is out -Blackclove}

NOTES: This is for version 2.0 of the scenario, which introduced some new bugs. Version 3.1 of the scenario is now available.