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Historical Scenario Reviews

The historical setting of the scenario where the player starts with only two cities verses over 100 fully developed Egyptian cities creates a real challenge in maintaining playability. To his credit, Maciej was able to devise a solution to this problem by introducing a super defence unit, the citadel, to give the Jerusalemian’s some breathing room. However this makes the game tilted towards the status quo. Since you only start small, the status quo pretty much means an uphill climb – with bricks tied to your back.

Citadels have zero movement, a defence of 9 and 5 hit points, and each Moslem city has at least one citadel. Practically no offensive unit can destroy a citadel that is behind a city wall. If you were to use your hero unit to assault a citadel, he would become very vulnerable to any other enemy units left in the city in his weakened state after destroying the citadel. I had to resort to saving often and reloading just to continue playing, even though I prefer to play Ironman style. Another alternative is to attack and sacrifice half a dozen or so of you best regular units, the templer knights, per city but as there are over a hundred enemy cities, this would take a very long time. In one of my games, Saladin, the primary Moslem hero, died in only the second month by senselessly attacking a citadel in one of my cities.

On the other hand, any city without a citadel is very hard to defend. In the scenario, after you capture a city, you can’t bring along a citadel (by land) to defend it. For the coastal cities I conquered, I transported a citadel in by sea immediately after capture, so that wasn’t much of a problem. But any inland cities that I managed to capture were very likely to be recaptured by hordes of Moslems.

As there is no research, nothing is going to change the central role of the citadel throughout the game. This made the scenario quite a tedious affair for me. My suggestion is that the citadel should be given only to the Jerusalemians. I suppose the Europeans were more into building castles, siege weapons and stuff like that while the Arabs were more into open mobile warfare (I could be wrong) so this would make sense. The citadels need quite a lot of shields to produce so the Jerusalemians would be limited to the citadels they started out with in a few coastal cities during the first part of the scenario. That would help the scenario move a lot faster.
 

PLUSES

The map looks extremely accurate, even down to the terrain. The desert is where it’s supposed to be and the Nile delta was very well done. The mix of terrain and the bonus terrain resources all fit in very well. The choice of unit names, tribes and the inclusion of geography north of the holy land were all nice touches.

The civilopedia was updated and that was definitely a lot of hard work. Below is an example of a good civilopedia entry:

St. Peter’s Cathedral.

One happy citizen in every city. It was one of the largest churches of the Christian East and a place where the (false of course) Holy Lance was found.

MINUSES

Another civilopedia entry, for the Wall of Crying, was so long it ran off the bottom of the screen. Since the OK button was off the screen, I had to do an Alt-Ctrl-Del to get out of it. (Later, to my horror, I discovered that you can press the Escape key and clicking OK is not the only way to return to the game). A description of the wonder Crusades, the one you start out with, was left out so I have no idea what its effect is. These errors/omissions indicate that more extensive testing should have been done.

In the readme, it says that “Jerusalem was lost, so there is no capital”. Actually the first city you build is called Jerusalem. I found that out when I built my Jerusalem where Turkey is today. It would have been better if I actually knew which city was initially Jerusalem (it turns out to be Al-Kuds) so I could work towards recapturing it.

My suggestions for a few simple improvements that would dramatically improve the score in this category are:

• Changing the background for the message boxes. I could barely make out the words in any of the messages because of the flowery background in the same color as the words. 
  

• Some minor adjustments to eliminate mismatched sounds. Overwriting the machine-gun wav file with the sword-fighting wav would ensure that there is no gun fire. A similar adjustment would stop the camel from sounding like an elephant.
  

• Improvements need work. Eliminate the library-type improvements if research is not part of the game. Also, only the Orthodox Cathedral has any effect on happiness. The Catholic Cathedral and Heretic Temple have absolutely no effect although the help description says otherwise.
  

• Make sure the messages don’t go off screen.
  

• There was also a message meant for turn 1220 (even though the game lasts for 465 turns) which says that “so and so city falls in reality, there will be no further events”. But there are events after 1220. 
    

ARTWORK

The author collected units and icons from various sources quite tastefully and artwork was in keeping with the period of the crusades and gave a good look and feel to the whole scenario. I especially liked the Castle cities and Moslem cities. The only fault I could find was that the unit shield would sometimes be hidden behind the unit. This problem can be easily eliminated by editing the units, choosing edit icons and using the shield placement tool.

ORIGINALITY

One refreshing feature of the scenario was the robbing of caravans. Money is given to Francs who kill a caravan although I didn’t seem to get any from killing caravans. Perhaps there is a way to rob caravans which I didn’t figure out. Trade flourishes under the Moslems and most of my cities have trade routes initiated by the Egyptians. Another unit worthy of mention were the missile type fire boats, Branders, although I think the Egyptians had way too many of those. 

More events, especially those giving new technologies and advances would have helped the scenario to move along and make it more original. The main events are just the arrival of the original force and later Richard the Lionheart landing in Cyprus (He died even after capturing a city as I couldn’t ship any citadels over because of the dozens of fireboats the Egyptians were using).  

In a scenario where each turn is an hour I can understand foregoing advances. In this case, the lack of a working tech tree and messages saying that “so and so” discovered “whatever it may be” leading to new units called “whatever” does not do justice to the Civ2 game engine. I believe the Arabs were relatively enlightened when the Europeans were just emerging from the Dark Ages and discoveries like medicine, calculus and astronomy could easily be worked in. 

HISTORICAL ACCURACY AND EFFORT

I have to add a 10% bonus here to balance out my low score. That would make the overall score more in line with my perception of the scenario as a whole. There was extensive documentation with regard to the history of the crusades, including seven pages of an excruciatingly detailed chronology and a list of 150 cities from the time. The detailed Civilopedia text, despite the Crying Wall problem, deserves some points for effort. 

On looking through the events file later, I was initially perplexed by events which would take place in turns 717, 1079 and even 2113 when the scenario was supposed to end in 465 turns. I interpret this to mean that the author tied his events to the actual dates they occurred and that the game could be played for over 2000 turns! Perhaps if each turn was three months, all the relevant events could be squeezed into 500 turns.