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The map covers all of Africa, plus the author has thrown in a few areas at the edges to represent India and various European nations. The author did a good job trying to defend these cities; each has city walls, and except for India they have a home guard kind of unit with incredible defense. Unfortunately for some reason the computer tended to either disband this unit or move it out of the city in question. I was able to capture all of the European capitals without much trouble. This isn't really the fault of the author, and I can't really think of a good way to prevent it from happening. As stipulated in the contest rules, Ethiopia and Italy are both included and some events take care of the battle of Adwa. I suggest using a faster time scale -- maybe the four seasons, like I did in "Toussaint L'Ouverture" instead of months, or two month intervals. This would make the main events come into play much more quickly. As it is, the major offensive begins on turn 70 with a "create units" event series. By turn 70, I had already eliminated almost all of my rivals. (As England I'd already crushed both Italy and Ethiopia.) Most of the game is a scramble for Africa, with all the nations beating up on the barbarians. The creation of "Indian Troops" in India every few turns was a nice touch. The indians are settler units that can also fight, plus they are alpine. The idea of alpine settlers is a good one; I think something like this might be useful in other games. The Boer War is depicted by having the Boers be a civilization. This worked pretty well. My Boers were aggressive and captured a lot of neutral cities before being crushed by the English (in both games). |
The author did a great job with the terrains. He's added a "nomads" terrain in the desert as well as a very cool looking "zebras" terrain. There's also a lot of oil in the deserts, which leads to a lot of mining and railroading in some places. The tech tree is too short. Even my fundamentalist government was able to reach the end of the tech tree. Also, some strange choices for technologies have been made. You can research genetic engineering, for example. The tree has only a few new additions, but they are appropriate to the milieu. Perhaps some more work here would help the scenario. The author has tried to change some of the wonders to fit the era. My favorite was the League of Nations instead of the U.N. A lot of the usual Civ2 wonders are still there, some rather nonsensically (Magellan's in Spain?). Again, this is more a matter of lack of effort or lack of time rather than a major flaw, but it should be corrected. The wonders should be made more appropriate to the setting. The author has included cities.txt, and although most of the names are made up, they looked good to me while I was playing. The title.gif is really nice, using four pictures of adventurous looking stuff. Units are civilization specific in coloration, which is nice. He made use of flags for some of the civilizations, but not all of them. Why not add flags for the others as well? The author changed aqueducts to "Health Stations" and made them required relatively early. Food is plentiful and so building health stations becomes important very quickly. |
ART: The terrains are great. I can't say enough times how much I liked the zebras. Other than that, though, the artwork was fairly poor. The units provided with the scenario are mostly swiped from other sources and if changed at all are changed only a little bit. A lot more work should be put in to making the artwork up to snuff. |
| CLOSING NOTES: The main attraction of this scenario is its playability. It suffers a bit on the details, and could use some more art. In addition, the scenario really needs something special to differentiate it from the other scenarios in this contest. However, it is a solid job and certainly worth playing for an evening or three. |
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