Alexander the Great Review: Will Alexander's Scenario Conquer Your Heart?

[monkspider]

In my review for the Peloponessian War, I raved about that scenario's balance, strategic depth and replayability (especially for multi-player). I thought it was a very well-crafted little scenario. Given Firaxis' sucess in recreating the world of ancient Greece in that scenario, I had hoped that the Alexander scenario would match or even exceed it. Little did I know that I was in for a severe disappointment.

When I first started playing i was intially thrillled by several interesting ideas presented within the scenario. I thought that the tech tree for unlocking different promotions was very clever and it was incredibly cool to build your Alexander into an uber unit, earning the various titles that go with achieving high levels of experience (Alexander the Victorious, the Amazing, etc) and the benefits thereof. By the time my armies had moved out of Asia Minor and were threatening Babylon and Egypt, I thought to myself "Man, what a great scenario. This is even better than the Peloponessian War. This is great fun."

However, by about the time I reached Persia proper, things started going downhill fast. The thing about this scenario is to acheive victory, you have to capture every single city on the map. At first it is very interesting to try to match the exploits of the historical Alexander, and match your units against the strong Persian armies. However, eventually there is a point where you have several insanely strong armies destroying everything in sight, and the weakened Persian/Indian armies are hopeless to try to stop your stacks of doom. At this point, the fun factor really gets sucked out of the scenario. By the time I reached India/Central Asia, I just couldn't continue. It just became so mindnumblingly motonous to continue to push around my huge armies to try to capture each of the little cities remaining on the map. It was enough to drive a man to drink himself to death in ancient Babylon.

So I think that the Alexander scenario has some really good ideas at it's very core, like the aforementioned tech tree/Alexander promotion system. It has some great flavor, some cool units, and it is truly just a blast for the first half of the game. However, it is just too monotonous to go through with the victory condition of capturing every last little city. The manual mentioned being able to vassalize a civ and this counting toward your conquering the world goal. Sadly though, this option must have been removed because I was never able to get the option to force a civ's capitulation and none of the techs seemed to unlock it. Being able to vassalize some of these civs or setting a domination-style goal of controlling say 75% of the cities would break up a lot of the late-game monotony. As it stands this is a scenario with a lot of potential and good ideas, but until it is significantly retooled, I have to give it a

[MasterDave]

I have played some of the scenarios, namely barbarians, vikings, a little of the Mongol one, and they all seem to get boring for me fairly quickly. None of them are as interesting to me as the main game, especially the main game when played against other humans.

[Prussia]

I agree, the scenarios don't provide much lasting entertainment, all they do is provide historical, or ahistorical additions to the game engine, which is nice to see a little bit of color and diversity added to the game, but it's pretty repetitive to have the entire game focused on war.
Part of the essential civilization is about empire building, and when you take it out, you take out a part of the game that's critical for entertainment purposes.

[Henrik]

Originally posted by Prussia
I agree, the scenarios don't provide much lasting entertainment, all they do is provide historical, or ahistorical additions to the game engine, which is nice to see a little bit of color and diversity added to the game, but it's pretty repetitive to have the entire game focused on war.
Part of the essential civilization is about empire building, and when you take it out, you take out a part of the game that's critical for entertainment purposes.

A good scenario designer realizes this and builds his scenario around it. These scenarios are all very poor efforts...

[Will9]

The problem with this that it doesn't work with civ. Alexander didn't attack every city in Persia. He won most battles on the feild and Darius would then keep retreating out of cities. But in civ the AI will stay in their cities when losing and true battles don't exsist.

[LDiCesare]

In order to have a good evaluation of this scenario, compare it to the Alexander scenario that came with Call to Power II. In comparison, Warlord's scenario is worth nothing. Not worth playing.

[joncnunn]

In addition to the documentation error; there is no techs unlocking vassal state; never-the-less Egypt starts as a vassal to Persia but will be freed as soon as you conquer enough of Persia.

So it really is a conquer the world game and so the end game is kind of monopolis if you've had the foresight to switch from Hyp. type [to defeat the Persian Axes] to Phalaxes [to defeat the Indian War Elephant] soon enough.

There's also chess play with enemy catapults, the higher the difficulty level, the more often that will occur.

In addition, the two Indias really should declare war on the human at some point when Alexander first nears their territory instead of waiting for Alexandria to finish off Persia and then pick off one and then the other seperately.

Both Indias and Egypt could really use an Iron Resource to help their armies.

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I also ran across to Python script logic bugs. The first is that one of the 2 City Coordiates for the Build Alexandria test is wrong and so Alexandria (and the Great Library) never appear. Workaround, the turn after capturing the two Southern Egyptian cities, go into world builder and add a Greek City in the X,Y Alexandria is supposed to be and then add the Great Library.)

The second is that the script set to third version of Alexander reset to the default. Work around, declare a revolution to the third version the turn you reach the condition that unlocks it.

The other bug/feature is that there appeared to be no way to build Plantations on Incense in this conquest.