Historical Realism

[kobayashi]

I posted an old article by Morten Blaabjerg titled

Historical Realism - Notes on Recreating History in Civ2 Scenarios

on the wiki site. You might recall him as Hardjoy. It is very well thought out and composed as were Morten's projects like Hammer of he North and it contains almost everything I ever wanted to say about the topic, only 10x more eloquantly than I ever could.

http://sleague.apolyton.net/index.php?title=Historical_Realism_-_Notes_on_Recreating_History_in_Civ2_Scenarios

[Elensar]

An excellent article.

[curtsibling]

Always enjoy your CIV2 lessons, Koby - I'll read this one over lunch!

[kobayashi]

And I just worked out a way to transcribe tables in the old site to the unwieldly wiki format - and I used it to upload one of my favourites, FW advanced Slot Properties by William Keenan.

The process (this won't make sense to you if you haven't made a table on the wiki site) is

1. copy and paste the whole table to Excel and unmerge all the merged cells. Clean up a bit here and there to make sure the contents of one cell are not split into two lines.

2. cut and paste (unformated) into Word. Search and replace all the hidden 'tab's with 'manual line break's. Search and replace all the 'paragrah breaks' with 2 'manual line break's.

3. Copy back to Excel and fill in the rightmost column with all the '|', '|-' and '!'.

4. Copy back to Word (paste unformated) again to change each row of cells into one contiguous line.

5. Copy into the Wiki edit screen.

[Case]

There are also websites that allow you to convert from tables to wiki format. I've used http://area23.brightbyte.de/csv2wp.php a few times and recomend it and there are some other links at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#External_links

[techumseh]

This is not a bad article, although it's longer than it needs to be. Morton puts his finger on a couple of pitfalls which I've come across as well.

First, the attempt to "force" history, by including historical events that may not make sense given the new history the player has created by playing the scenario. For example, in a Barbarossa scenario, units for a Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad are created at the time and place of the actual battle, when in the game, the Germans have already pushed the front past the Urals.

The Test of Time events are by far the best tool to avoid this problem, since the use of multiple triggers allows the designer to customize his events. For example, if Stalingrad was in German hands on the Jan 1942 turn, events might place reinforcements nearby. But if Moscow was also captured, the reinforcements would come near there instead. You simply can't do this with MGE.

The other problem, which I've encountered in otherwise well done scenarios, is the lack of clear goals for a scenario. Simply performing the basic tasks of Civ2 - exploring, building, researching and conquering- is not enough, no matter how pretty the artwork, or well designed the tech tree is. Without clear objectives and a way of measuring your success, why bother to play a scenario at all?

[Elensar]

Indeed. Fictional or historically based.

In my opinion, the best scenarios are those that provide goals that can be obtained by sufficient player skill, rather than by something in the game engine.

For instance, take the Dagor Bragollach scenario. Its pretty well designed.

But what, exactly motivates the player? All you can do is sit, build horsemen and archers, and wait, trying not to lose cities and heroes.

Research as a key to trigger events is one of the better ways to brighten up dull scenarios like this.