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Well, I finally finished winning every conquest but one last night (on Monarch mind you; I don't enjoy playing on emperor or the new Sid Level). I ultimately decided not to bother with the Age of Discovery campaign. It just didn't appeal to me when I started it up.
I was going to put down some comments on each of the scenarios, but decided that would be painfully tedious to read, so I'm going to instead just post my personal rankings of the scenarios and a 1-10 score on each of the scenarios.
So, without further ado, from best to worst:
1) Mesopotamia 8/10. Nice fun, relatively balanced.
2) Middle Ages 7.5/10 Basically a second era builder scenario, despite my thinking it was a war scenario. Quite fun, and suprisingly so.
3) Rise of Rome 7/10 Not as fun as I expected. Tedious gameplay late in the game. No viable defenders make the only reasonable strategy a constant offense.
4) Sengoku 6.5/10 Solidly designed, but structurally flawed. The prevalence of very high level defenders and the AI building large cities on mountains means that you pretty much have to spawn an army to crack late game fortresses. Doable, but tedious.
5) Mesoamarica 6/10 Very ... different
. Gameplay is limited by the tech tree and limited unit availability though. Likewise the "silent hunter" is incorrectly flagged as a defender in favor of the "temple guard" making stacking the two together as an A/D combination pointless.
6) Fall of Rome 4.5/10 Yick. I thought I'd like this one. I didn't. What's the fun in spawning 1,000,000,000 12/3/1 warlords and running them around in uber-stacks blowing up cities? Likewise, the VP point system is silly, especially if you start in the NW corner and have to deal with Byzantium before they win a VP victory.
7) Napoleonic Europe 4/10 You know, it's not flawed at all imho, it just wasn't ... fun. Other's may disagree, but it just didn't do it for me.
8) WW II in the Pacific 3/10 When I first started playing this one, I thought it was great. Then I actually played through twice and, well, it may look good, but it plays badly. Travel time from the US west coast to the Japanese home islands is like 20 turns, in a 50 turn scenario, which means you have to win the war with the first 30 turns worth of ships and troops. Likewise, a decent Japanese gambit will win the war through VPs long before the first wave of US troops physically sails across the Pacific. Just a bad design
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Not Rated: Age of Discovery as I couldn't get into it enough to rate it.
I was going to put down some comments on each of the scenarios, but decided that would be painfully tedious to read, so I'm going to instead just post my personal rankings of the scenarios and a 1-10 score on each of the scenarios.
So, without further ado, from best to worst:
1) Mesopotamia 8/10. Nice fun, relatively balanced.
2) Middle Ages 7.5/10 Basically a second era builder scenario, despite my thinking it was a war scenario. Quite fun, and suprisingly so.
3) Rise of Rome 7/10 Not as fun as I expected. Tedious gameplay late in the game. No viable defenders make the only reasonable strategy a constant offense.
4) Sengoku 6.5/10 Solidly designed, but structurally flawed. The prevalence of very high level defenders and the AI building large cities on mountains means that you pretty much have to spawn an army to crack late game fortresses. Doable, but tedious.
5) Mesoamarica 6/10 Very ... different
. Gameplay is limited by the tech tree and limited unit availability though. Likewise the "silent hunter" is incorrectly flagged as a defender in favor of the "temple guard" making stacking the two together as an A/D combination pointless.6) Fall of Rome 4.5/10 Yick. I thought I'd like this one. I didn't. What's the fun in spawning 1,000,000,000 12/3/1 warlords and running them around in uber-stacks blowing up cities? Likewise, the VP point system is silly, especially if you start in the NW corner and have to deal with Byzantium before they win a VP victory.
7) Napoleonic Europe 4/10 You know, it's not flawed at all imho, it just wasn't ... fun. Other's may disagree, but it just didn't do it for me.
8) WW II in the Pacific 3/10 When I first started playing this one, I thought it was great. Then I actually played through twice and, well, it may look good, but it plays badly. Travel time from the US west coast to the Japanese home islands is like 20 turns, in a 50 turn scenario, which means you have to win the war with the first 30 turns worth of ships and troops. Likewise, a decent Japanese gambit will win the war through VPs long before the first wave of US troops physically sails across the Pacific. Just a bad design
.Not Rated: Age of Discovery as I couldn't get into it enough to rate it.