Dictator 3 - Awaits Your Command!

[curtsibling]

@AGRICOLA:

Some fine observations there, and also some useful answers from N35t0r!

I will definitely be bringing out a patch/update for D3, when my Xmas holidays begin!

One that you can count, gentlemen!

Thank you for the excellent feedback, and I will strive to ease as many of your scenario concerns as possible!

[AGRICOLA]

The Kremlin, apart from the obligation of cease fire offering, also provides free AT defenses in all your cities.

N35t0r, thanks for reminding me that the Great Wall/Kremlin actually provides city walls for all cities and that City Walls and AT Defenses are the same thing. I have played only scenarios for over a year and obviously have forgotten some CIV II basics.

Also. it's not that I dislike E-boats carrying V-2's. Rather it's that I have great difficulty in visualizing the actual launch of a big missile from the pitching deck of a boat that was not much bigger than a PT boat. I suspect that the rudimentary, non-computerized V-2 guidance system of 60 years ago would have made it an interesting game of Russian roulette.

[N35t0r]

It's just that poor curt over here never intended it to be this way, but he had to compromise. Either to have those e-boats capable of shore bombardment (which definitely is a no-no) or having them able to carry missiles. He had to chose the lesser evil, as IMHO having them bombard is much more game disruptive.


And as for your point about the Clydebank Shipyards, let me remind you that power plants as an improvement do not exist in this game . The different plants have been renamed to several different military production related improvements (steel mill, ammunition plant, etc.)

As for the fact that there are 4 different plants, which makes it redundant due to lack of pollution, let me remind you that the Nuclear Plant (ammunition plant) can meltdown if the city falls into anarchy. Apart from this, all the different plants could have (and i think they do, i didn't pay much attention to this..) different building and maintenance costs.

What i'd do is have whatever everyone can build be relatively cheap but with a high maintenance cost (like 4 or so), then the other two 'clean' plants (solar and hydro) one more expensive to build but less expensive to maintain (3 or so); and the third, which you research last, relatively expensive but less costly to maintain (like 2).
Apart, add in the ammo plant somewhere to be in between both in cost, and also require 2 maintenance...

[AGRICOLA]

At least 2 of the plants really are redundant.

Originally posted by N35tOr
It's just that poor curt over here never intended it to be this way, but he had to compromise. Either to have those e-boats capable of shore bombardment (which definitely is a no-no) or having them able to carry missiles. He had to chose the lesser evil, as IMHO having them bombard is much more game disruptive.

I appreciate your point. It's just that I when I try to picture it, I find the idea of trying a V-2 launch from an extremely top-heavy and pitching E-boat absolutely hilarious. Actually, IMHO, V-2's are highly cost-INeffective so there is little likelihood of me putting them on an E-boat.

And as for your point about the Clydebank Shipyards, let me remind you that power plants as an improvement do not exist in this game . The different plants have been renamed to several different military production related improvements (steel mill, ammunition plant, etc.)

Agreed that there is no city improvement that is called any kind of power plant in this scenario. However, if I had used the terms Steel Mill, Oil Field, Ammunition Plant and Munitions Plant in my post, readers not familiar with this scenario would not have had the least idea that I was referring to Power, Hydroelectric, Solar and Nuclear Plants, respectively. Also, let me remind you that calling a canary a whale doesn't change what a canary actually does and can do. Regardless of what they're called and what their descriptions say, Steel Mill, Oil Field, Ammunition Plant and Munitions Plant function exactly like CIV II power plants. Why not call them that? As a player, it keeps my life real simple if city improvement names are descriptive and that their descriptions accurately and quantitatively describe the function of the city improvement. I really would prefer not to have to learn an almost complete set of new names for city improvements to play one modern scenario.

As for the fact that there are 4 different plants, which makes it redundant due to lack of pollution, let me remind you that the Nuclear Plant (ammunition plant) can meltdown if the city falls into anarchy. Apart from this, all the different plants could have (and i think they do, i didn't pay much attention to this..) different building and maintenance costs.

Reality is a bit more complex than what you have suggested because in this scenario there is no reason why ANY player would ever want to or need to build a Nuclear or Solar Plant.

Here are the actual costs for the various types of plants:

Type/ Cost to build / Upkeep
Power/ 100 / 2
Nuclear/ 200 / 2
Hydro/ 200 / 3
Solar/ 200 / 3

Except for the 50% lower cost of the garden variety Power Plant, there isn't much difference between the rest. An extra gold piece/month really doesn't matter. However, let's also look at the technical ability of all playable combatants to build the various types of plants. The situation at the start of the scenario is as follows:

US has the techs for both Power and Nuclear Plants
Russia has Nuclear and Hydro but cannot ever get the tech for Power
Britain, Germany and Japan do not have the techs for any type of plant. They respectively need 1, 1 and 2 tech advances for Power, fewer than for any other type of plant.

Consequently, I cannot see any logical reason why anyone playing the US, UK or Japan would want to build anything but Power Plants both for their lower cost and the need for fewer tech advances. Can you? Similarly, anyone playing the Russians would surely not build a potentially hazardous Nuclear Plant when he could get a Hydro Plant for the same price. OK? Therefore, aren't Nuclear and Solar clearly redundant? Hydro could also be done away with if the Russians were given Power and Nuclear at the start rather than Hydro and Nuclear, but such a decision is obviously Curt's prerogative.

On the basis of the above analysis, my comment that 4 types of power plants are not needed in this scenario is absolutely correct.

[gerryandersson]

I just wanted to say, Great Scenario.

[Panda]

I'm pleased to report that the first turn money bug found in most scenarios is alive and thriving. Germany on its first turn captured Kiev with little difficulty. Due to usual scenario problem it got all of Russia's money (4080 GP), not to mention the Wheat Fields Wonder. Subsequently, Kiev was not hard to defend. Japan really benefits from the bug. During its first turn it can easily capture Vladivostok (4080 GP), Hong Kong (5096 GP) and Xi'an (163 GP). Japan gains 9339 GP and starts the game with 14069 GP rather than 4730 GP. Not a bad first turn. If they could only get at Manila!!!! You can prevent the fall of Hong Kong by immobilizing the Zero fighters in Fuzhou and Formosa.

There must be a hex-editing solution to this, but I've never bothered to isolate it. I can recommend setting all movement points to zero and passing a round, but you'll need to reset city shield production afterwards.

@AGRICOLA:

Belated welcome to Scenario League (except we aren't that exclusive anymore). I've been looking through your other posts and have to admire the the articulation of your comments and humbly suggest that your talents are *desperately* needed as a Scenario League reviewer.

Take a peek at this thread (it's a sticky): http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=96000

Honestly, you'd be great. Designers are all perfectionists and need good quality feedback. And if you have the time there is always a need for playtesting scenarios for that kind of quality critique to improve the product. Like all of your posts

[curtsibling]

I second that!

AGRICOLA, your review of D3 was superb (as are those of all the posters in the thread, cheers!)
and I hope you stick around to lend us your insights!

[AGRICOLA]

@PANDA and Curtsibling


Thank you for the very kind words from both of you. I'm completely red-faced from embarrassment

at having put my ignorant foot into the home of the Scenario League without at least knocking on the door and asking "May I enter?". PANDA, you can undoubtedly make short shrift of my feeble defense that I thought that this forum is very much like any other at Apolyton and that Curt is partly at fault. I took his response to my E-mailed comments about DICTATOR and his suggestion that I try DICTATOR 3 as license to post on his DICTATOR 3 thread. Things sort of snowballed from there.

If you think I can do some good, I would be happy to help out. It's the least I can do to for the community of people who devote their time and talents to developing the scenarios I've been playing. I'll finally have Internet service next summer thanks to the Canadian government's edict to Ma Bell, our telephone monopoly, that all Canadians, no matter how remote, are to have Internet access by 2006.

PANDA, I'll check out in detail the site you suggested. If there are any special instructions, please E-mail me.

[N35t0r]

Re: At least 2 of the plants really are redundant.

Originally posted by AGRICOLA
Agreed that there is no city improvement that is called any kind of power plant in this scenario. However, if I had used the terms Steel Mill, Oil Field, Ammunition Plant and Munitions Plant in my post, readers not familiar with this scenario would not have had the least idea that I was referring to Power, Hydroelectric, Solar and Nuclear Plants, respectively. Also, let me remind you that calling a canary a whale doesn't change what a canary actually does and can do.

Which is increase production on a city with a factory

Regardless of what they're called and what their descriptions say, Steel Mill, Oil Field, Ammunition Plant and Munitions Plant function exactly like CIV II power plants. Why not call them that? As a player, it keeps my life real simple if city improvement names are descriptive and that their descriptions accurately and quantitatively describe the function of the city improvement. I really would prefer not to have to learn an almost complete set of new names for city improvements to play one modern scenario.

Hmmm, this is a new approach (for me at least ). I had never heard of someone who prefers to have the original names for improvements. I tend to like the atmosphere created by the new wonders and city improvement names, and prefer when they are renamed.... Though i agree that Curt has been a bit too vague on some of his descriptions lately (and the lack of an extensive readme doesn't help either ) But of course, everybody is free to prefer what they want, that's what makes us all different .

Reality is a bit more complex than what you have suggested because in this scenario there is no reason why ANY player would ever want to or need to build a Nuclear or Solar Plant.

Here are the actual costs for the various types of plants:

Type/ Cost to build / Upkeep
Power/ 100 / 2
Nuclear/ 200 / 2
Hydro/ 200 / 3
Solar/ 200 / 3

Except for the 50% lower cost of the garden variety Power Plant, there isn't much difference between the rest. An extra gold piece/month really doesn't matter. However, let's also look at the technical ability of all playable combatants to build the various types of plants. The situation at the start of the scenario is as follows:

US has the techs for both Power and Nuclear Plants
Russia has Nuclear and Hydro but cannot ever get the tech for Power
Britain, Germany and Japan do not have the techs for any type of plant. They respectively need 1, 1 and 2 tech advances for Power, fewer than for any other type of plant.

Consequently, I cannot see any logical reason why anyone playing the US, UK or Japan would want to build anything but Power Plants both for their lower cost and the need for fewer tech advances. Can you? Similarly, anyone playing the Russians would surely not build a potentially hazardous Nuclear Plant when he could get a Hydro Plant for the same price. OK? Therefore, aren't Nuclear and Solar clearly redundant? Hydro could also be done away with if the Russians were given Power and Nuclear at the start rather than Hydro and Nuclear, but such a decision is obviously Curt's prerogative.

On the basis of the above analysis, my comment that 4 types of power plants are not needed in this scenario is absolutely correct.

Of course i see your point that with values as it is all the different plants are useless. I didn't have the values at hand when i wrote the above, but i was suggesting that with a bit of tweaking, it can be made that the player could seriously consider between the different plants.

IMHO, a difference of one or two GP/month can make quite a difference, especially when you have 20+ cities with the respective improvement.

With careful tweaking, i can see that building the different plants could become a matter of 'shall i build x which is cheaper but more costly to maintain?' or even, 'shall I research y, which although doesn't lead to any weapons, allows me to build z plant which is really worth the lost research?'

[Panda]

AGRICOLA:

Perhaps I should have said "welcome to Apolyton" instead? Unless you've been lurking in the background all this time?

I was going to e-mail you, but you seem to have disabled the feature of disclosing your e-mail to the public...

The Scenario League was founded as a seperate site focusing on modifying civ2, and scenarios with peer review; basically as repository of knowledge. Then it became a hosted site with its own forum, and was finally, recently merged with the pre-existing Civ2-Creation forum, at the same time the Civ2-Help forum was abandoned, and the Civ2-PBEM (play by e-mail) forum was created because the League forum was inundated with PBEM threads over creation threads (and a good thing too...)

So we're no longer just the League; we are definately a "community", but not a "clan" (which was a perception at one point), and nobody needs (or has ever needed) an invitation to post here. But your sensibility is touching

As to the review process, the League does offer guidelines at the bottom of the front page(http://sleague.apolyton.net/), but at the end of the day it's down to the reviewer themselves, and the nature of reviewing has stirred up more than a couple of debates. One person commented that it should be like your local newspaper offering a book review, but I liken it more to the peer-review process of academic journals (once described to me as settling old grudges or making new ones...). The League reviews do "rate" scenarios in seperate categories, but the objectivity of the reviews and the enthusiatic ratings were sometimes questionable. Much as I hate ratings (see http://apolyton.net/misc/column/36_ratings.shtml for the full article) I have come to accept them as a necessary evil and have two scenario reviews to my name. The problem I had was reviewing them as a designer I could spot technical mistakes and missed potential, which is good because I included those insights, but tended to see them for what they were not and comparatively with similar works.

Which is why I think you'd be so good; and no mistake the League is desperately short of reviews. Designers have all too often been concerned with their own work, and though they offered them for review they seldom contributed a review themselves. And while many players have made invaluable contributions playtesting, feedback on the forums is less crtical and therefore less instructive. I figure, fine: if the designers don't want to do it then look to players with a critical, objective mind and articulate prose.

[AGRICOLA]

@ PANDA

Apologies re E-mail. Couldn't get logged on Apolyton for 3 days. For some reason, all of a sudden, the site demanded that I log on. Password forgotten, but couldn't get to webmaster because that link didn't like my E-mail address. Finally got on, reset control panel and obviously had finger trouble with E-mail buttons. Everything should be OK now.

Have downloaded form and instructions. Will check out thread you suggest.

[curtsibling]

Originally posted by jasev
OK, I know I always type the same things, but... may I upload the new version to the Spanish Site, curt?

Just a quick note and thank you, jasev!

Checked the Spanish Site today, and must convey my thanks for my mention on the column, that is an honour!

I urge everyone to support the Spanish site as it is one of the veteran CIV web strongholds.

Long may it stand!