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Author |
File Description |
moonster14 |
Posted on 04/14/01 @ 12:00 AM
File Details |
Version: |
Age of Kings 1.0 |
Style: |
Mix |
Number of scenarios: |
5 |
This scenario is pretty basic and doesn't have many triggers but it is fun and original and has a believable story. The story is set during the Roman occupation of England and tells of clans of Celts joining in a union to protcet their homeland. |
Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
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laz123 |
Posted on 08/09/06 @ 07:03 AM
Nice games. Thanks. |
rakovsky |
Posted on 08/16/21 @ 01:48 PM
The scenario begins with you being the Tayside clan and having your capitol at Dundee.
Wikipedia says, "Tayside (Scottish Gaelic: Taobh Tatha) was one of the nine regions used for local government in Scotland from 15 May 1975 to 31 March 1996. The region was named for the River Tay."
But it doesn't seem to have been a name for a clan.
Dundee is on the side of the river Tay in Tayside.
Dundee has a hill called Dundee Law. Wikipedia says, "During the Iron Age it was the site of a Pictish settlement. Roman pottery has been found on the law, suggesting that the Romans may have used it as a lookout post in the first century."
Wikipedia's article on the Romans in Scotland says, "Roman legions arrived in the territory of modern Scotland around AD 71, having conquered the Celtic Britons of southern Great Britain over the preceding three decades. Aiming to complete the Roman conquest of Britain, the Roman armies under Q. Petilius Cerialis and Gn. Julius Agricola campaigned against the Caledonians in the 70s and 80s."
The Romans abandoned the Antonine wall north of Glasgow in 165 AD, retreating to Hadrian's wall in northern England near Carlisle.
In the first scenario, there are Roman cavalry near your city.
In the first scenario, Hadrian's wall has been built, and the wall was begun in 122 AD. Your goal is to fight the Romans because they are planning to occupy Scotland. They didn't seriously plan on occupying Scotland though after their 165 AD withdrawal to Hadrian's Wall.
The second scenario has you attacking a convoy north of Hadrian's wall going to supply Rome's more northern forts. The implication is that Hadrian's wall is in use but the Antonine Wall is not. The Antonine wall was built in AD 142. This implies that the mission takes place in 122-142 after Hadrian's Wall was built but before the Antonine Wall was built, although conceivably it takes place after the Romans left the Antonine Wall. They left Roman Britain in 410 AD. The Romans stopped campaigning in Scotland after Emperor Caracalla's death in 217.[Edited on 08/16/21 @ 06:46 PM]
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rakovsky |
Posted on 08/18/21 @ 12:15 AM
Playability: 5
The Playability was good in that I could beat all the missions in AOE2 (original) without them being overbearingly hard.
There were only three potential issues. One was that the instructions or Hints in some places could be clearer, and this could be considered to hurt Playability a little, but it seems more of an "Instructions" problem because it didn't really stop me from winning per se.
The second issue was that the second scenario did not load in AOE2 HD, so either you must play the second scenario and all of the subsequent missions in AOE2 CD, or else you can extract the missions using your Campaign Editor, and then play the second one in your scenario editor. But since the campaign was made for AOE2 CD, I don't really want to cut it down a point for it not working on AOE2 HD.
In my case, I beat the second mission on HARD using AOE2 Tools' version of AOE2 CD. After beating the second mission in AOE2 CD, and then removing it from the AOE2 HD campaign file in my AOE2 HD Campaign Editor , I played the rest of the missions in AOE2 HD using my newly edited campaign file.
The third issue was in Mission 3 where I got control of my Woad warriors when I wasn't ready to and they were surrounded by towers and archers and got massacred in pens, and then I got all the relics started on the map and a relic victory countdown started, which doesn't make much sense as a Victory Condition because the enemies don't leave their island to invade me or go into the relic areas. The main idea of the mission is to free the prisoners and yet they got massacred and my Victory screen says that I saved them. The Instructions or Hints should really explain better the way to go about freeing them safely. You can just consider this a gameplay strategy issue or a map design weakness that doesn't really stop "Playability" per se. I guess it's kind of weird if you win by getting all the relics and you get a message in the victory screen that you freed the prisoners if you had never even tried to or even noticed where on the map they were. As the player with the relics though, you really still have the option of ejecting your relics from your churches at any time and winning by invading the enemy base if you want.
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Balance: 4
The weakness in the balance was that the enemy didn't train troops, but you could in some missions, so it's a campaign where the enemy's forces are fixed. This fixed force arrangement in AOE2 seems to me to hurt the balance slightly sometimes by making it too easy in those times, and I beat all the missions on HARD, except for Mission 3, which I beat on Moderate. I consider myself a good player on Single Player missions, although I'm still an experienced Noob player on Multiplayer.
Nonetheless, the Designer actually did a good or great job balancing the missions. IMO, it's actually hard to make a good fixed force map because you risk either making the map too easy if the enemy's forces are set weaker than yours, or practically impossible to win if the enemy's forces are set stronger than yours.
In Mission 3, the scenario where you conquer two forts, I actually lost on HARD. Even had I replayed it and won, it still would have been a close match. In that instance, the Designer gave both sides fixed forces, so he did a great job balancing them. More specifically, when I played the mission on HARD, I got all the Scottish forces around the map and took out the East fort, but it ground down into practically a match of my Champions vs. enemy arbalesters, and the arbalesters barely won- like by a few archers. I still had 1 trebuchet vs. several enemy towers, but the archers would still win against my trebuchet.
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Creativity: 4
I thought it was creative, with a little theme or story concept for each mission that played into the larger campaign, like one mission being attacking supply wagons and the final mission being freeing prisoners. Plus, the terrain had variety with woods and resources and water.
The main area for improvement with creativity would be the enemy bases and artwork. For example, there were usually no roads between enemy bases in the missions, although the supply wagon raid mission (Mission 2) did have a road. Also, the enemy bases were usually overly plain, with no houses or barracks, and the outline of the forts just being squares or rectangles with tents or harbors inside with the enemy soldiers.
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Map Design: 3
One downside in map design was the weakness in creativity in designing the enemy bases as I mentioned.
The main Map Design issue was the problem in Mission 5 where you can win with a Relic Victory even when your Woad Warriors in enemy captivity are all killed by their enemy guards, despite your Objective being to free those prisoners.
Let me explain my problem in MISSION 5. Playing on HARD, I followed the advice in the Hints to cover the seas before going for the enemy base. I took this to mean to dominate the seas before making a land invasion. So I made cannon galleons and after conquering the enemy navy, I started attacking the enemy towers with my cannon galleons. But in the course of doing this I revealed the Gaia prisoners and got ownership over them. They were in a pen surrounded by towers and archers, so they got slaughtered. If I had researched elite Celtic woad raiders first in my castle, they would have fought better. I only had a few cannon galleons, and they weren't enough to save the prisoners. I would have needed to clear the land entrance first to the base on its northeast side first. That way I could have sent in a land force to save them. Having many more cannon galleons would have been good too. But it turns out that a land invasion is not possible anyway. At best, you can punch a hole in the walls of the island. After all, the instructions do talk about an "island" with the prisoners, but you could conceivably have an "island" on a map connected to the mainland by a bridge. Basically when you go to fight the tower area in the middle of the map, you are moving into the prisoner area, so just be ready to punch through their holes, make an invasion force on transports, have lots of cannon galleons for the towers, etc.
One good idea for the scenario designer for MISSION 5 would be to warn about all this in the Hints. Another good idea would be to make saving at least some of the prisoners an Objective. But I am uncertain whether you as a Designer could even make a Trigger where you lose if all the Prisoners get killed. It would be tough because for example you could manually say that if units X, Y, and Z die, then Red wins. But there are so many prisoners, that the list of Trigger units would be very long, and you would be making a separate Trigger Condition for each of them, and I don't even know if the game engine could handle that well.
Surprisingly, when I got all the relics in this mission, a message showed up saying that if I hold all relics for 500 years, I will win. This means that I don't even need to invade the enemy island base.
I am going to guess that the Design intent could have been for you to carefully use your cannon galleons and trebuchets to knock out the towers without getting ownership of the prisoners, and then once the towers are gone you should launch a land invasion and also use your galleons to knock through the wooden walls surrounding your prisoners. I won while making a land invasion and still had 120 "years" of the relic victory countdown left.
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Story/Instructions: 3
The Story seems to be in 122-217 AD, after Hadrian's Wall was built and before the death of Emperor Caracalla, the last emperor to invade Scotland.
Some Scenarios did not have anything in their "Story" tabs. The Story was overall nice, because you are helping the Scots fight the Romans and there is a game concept involved in an overall plot, like fighting supply wagons in one mission, and then moving southward and attacking Hadrian's Wall.
But it really could use more history, particularly what years the story is set in. I tried to figure this out in a separate Comment that I put in this webpage. The Story could use more information, like who was the Roman Emperor at the time, who was the Scottish leader (if known), which forts exactly were being attacked, other than just forts somewhere east of Hadrian's wall. By the way, I don't know if you have seen a map of Hadrian's wall, but it generally runs roughly west to east, so generally you are not going to get a Roman fort being "east" of Hadrian's wall, kind of like how you aren't typically going to consider any fort in the American West as being "east" of the horizontal US-Canadian border.
In MISSION 1, the Instructions say that you are responsible for supplying grain to other Scottish clans and the Hints section says to sell your grain to other clans to buy other resources. I thought that this meant that you should supply grain to other clans using the Diplomacy menu and that this would autogenerate allies' units. Some AOE2 scenarios work that way. But I didn't see my allies' small tent areas spawning any units, so I realized that this must just refer to the Market's Sales menu. 10 Minutes in, all my allies resigned, even though no one was attacking their little patch of tents and soldiers. This is a known AOE2 bug. I guess that if the Designer had given them some villagers and farms or something they might keep in the game. It seems to be related to them having restricted resources. |
HGDL v0.8.2 |
Rating |
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3.8 | Breakdown |
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Playability | 5.0 | Balance | 4.0 | Creativity | 4.0 | Map Design | 3.0 | Story/Instructions | 3.0 |
Statistics |
Downloads: | 2,919 |
Favorites: [] | 0 |
Size: | 501.67 KB |
Added: | 04/14/01 |
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