Scenario Review Scenario Title: Gangster Author: Cam Hills Reviewer: Blackclove   Fantasy scenario. Take the role of a mob boss in a fictionalized 1920's America. Download gangster.zip from Apolyton.

Overall Rating 29/30 SYNOPSIS: This is one of the best scenarios I've seen. The map is a North America map with lots of room for expansion, but enough cities initially to keep it exciting. It is challenging, but not crushingly difficult like Harlan's Mongols scenario is.

Playability Rating 9 / 10 COMMENTS: At first I didn't think I would enjoy this scenario, but I turned out to be totally wrong. It's a lot of fun and held my attention right up until the end. All of the various tribes recommended for play seem to be possible to win with. The tech tree is great. It's long, it's got a lot of interesting advances in it, and it fits the theme. Other designers should study what was done here to learn from it. You begin with an interesting choice. You can either stay in your current government, which is essentially fundamentalism with 100% science deduction, and try to kill your neighbors with tons of cash, no unhappiness, and your initial units, or you can switch to despotism and get some science going, but not be able to build the main defensive unit (the equivalent of the fanatic but with the stats of a phalanx). Once you switch to despotism, you can't switch back, though. I felt that staying with the initial government for a while and whacking on my neighbors was a good idea, but eventually you need to switch to get the technology to take on the police, who have good defensive units and city walls. Events are used well and add to the atmosphere. He used newspaper headlines to describe what's happening and introduce characters. I greatly enjoyed extorting money from the green player every ten turns or so after I beat the stuffing out of him. It seemed very appropriate given the milieu. Too bad Elliott Ness eventually killed his last city. I question the inclusion of artillery as a gangster unit. The first automobile unit you get seems a bit too powerful; it has a move of 3 instead of 2.

Level of General Care 10/10 COMMENTS: This scenario is about as good as it gets for care. Flags, units, wonders, tech tree, etc., are all included. It would have been nice to have the unit stats in the readme file, as well as a list of the wonders, even though the pedia is enabled (yay!). At least one unit is not in the pedia owing to it being produced only by police. A bit of historical information about some of the prominent figures might also have been nice. Still, the readme is adequate, containing strategy hints and design notes.

Art and Originality 10/10 COMMENTS: The icons are very well done, and definitely fit the 1920's feel. I was very impressed by the use of small explosions as the combat graphics to represent gunfire. The effect looks very good. There are also new flags, colors, a new cursor, some changes to the terrain, and so on that are a bit gratuitous but still look good. About the only alteration to the artwork I might suggest is making the roads a different color. I found the gray difficult to see against the mostly gray-green background. The wonder graphics are also quite good, including a black-and-white film image for the Hollywood Pictures icon. About the only thing I would change would be the title graphic. It is a scan of an image from The Godfather, and is a bit on the grainy side. Still, it serves its purpose. NEW IDEAS: The author's theme is quite unique and accounts for the high score here. There are a number of special units representing hidden locations and powerful villains that give you a reward for wiping them out. The author has inserted asterisks (*'s) before the names of civilizations that are not for human play. The author also put a few units out in the middle of nowhere that seem to serve the purpose of putting you in conflict with your fellow mob bosses right away, which was a nice touch. The author also made changes to the governments (see above). There are alternate ways to win, like in Midgard.

NOTES: Highly recommended. This is version 3.0 of the scenario.

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