Scenario Review Scenario Title: 100 Years War Author: Gary Reviewer: Blackclove   Historical scenario. Covers the 100 Years War, and features many of the major powers of the time in Europe. Download at csc.apolyton.net

Overall Rating 22/30 COMMENTS: The game runs from 1369-1568, and takes place in Europe, Asia Minor, and North Africa. A major conflict is in progress involving France and its ally Aragon trying to defeat England and Castille. Simultaneously, the Holy Roman Empire is trying to expand into Italy while the Turks push ever westward. Italy, North Africa, and any other nonaligned kingdom is represented using a single civilization.

Playability Rating 8 / 10 COMMENTS: The author has done a good job making medieval warfare seem interesting. Right from the start, hostilities are unavoidable. You are perpetually at war with virtually everyone else, which creates some interesting problems. How do you fight a five-front war? You will quickly drain the treasury and find yourself spread awfully thin. My favorite civilization was the Aragonians, who start relatively rich and heavily armed. However, they have little territory to begin with. You need to decide where your main initial expansion will be. A good test of whether a scenario is fun or not is whether it is fun to talk about what you did. This one is. Gary did a fine job of providing choices that make a difference. As befits the period, expansion may be slow for some players. This is not the Jihad scenario or some other very quick-moving conquest scenario. However, there is plenty of action. There are a lot of units and this may turn off those who like faster turns. FAULTS AND BALANCE: The main play balance problem is the strength of the English. They are not much fun to play, as they roll over all of Europe except the Holy Roman Empire fairly easily. Even the computer is able to devastate the French using the English navy and military. I recommend weakening them quite a bit, while propping up the doomed French. There is also something fishy about the objective scoring system. I don't think there are enough objectives to actually get a victory (?). There are three types of siege engines, one of which has a movement rate of 3. This seemed a bit too fast and the unit quickly became my favorite. The tech tree is quite short, and could perhaps be longer. One thing that was kind of nice was that each tech gives you a tangible advantage. However, I felt tech advances were a bit too easy to come by between diplomats, research, and so on. Perhaps adding a few more techs to the tree would reduce the value of diplomat units. Joan of Arc gets created (I though this was a cool effect) sometimes. When she arrives, I think her supporting units (knights) should not be stacked on top of her, or else she should begin in a fortress square. I found it a bit too easy as the English to dump a few siege engines on her and wipe out her entire army just as it arrived. Given that she is the last gasp of the French defense, she should be given a real chance to capture something!

Level of General Care 6 / 10 COMMENTS: The map is fine, and city placement is good and very dense. Pedia.txt is included. The documentation is short but effective. I wish he had a list of terrains and their values in there, though. There are serious bugs in the events file. When a king unit is killed, it is supposed to show some kind of reward message for the victor. However, the events are set to happen only if the king unit died attacking - not if is died defending. In the case of the Aragonian king, for example, this is impossible. There are many events but they tend not to happen very often. More frequent events would add to the mood of the scenario. The many typos and spelling errors should be corrected. In the title text alone, we find "beggining" (should be beginning), "expand it's" ("it's" is a contraction for "it is", "its" is the proper possessive), and "acomplish" (should have two c's).

Art and Originality 7 / 10 NEW IDEAS: The use of "hamlet" terrain is clever, although the hamlets are not very good producers. I would have expected them to be more valuable as a terrain type. Although many scenarios use king and hero units, the ones in this scenario are particularly important because they are so powerful. I really felt better use of events would have helped this otherwise quite good scenario. Each civilization has its own military units, which is rare in pre-modern historical scenarios. It added a nice touch. ART: The art is good, if mostly borrowed. He used new terrain.

NOTES: None.

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