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The Year Of the 4 Emperors
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Author |
File Description |
Barbarian |
Posted on 05/12/99 @ 12:00 AM
File Details |
No. of Players: |
4 |
The year is the 69th year after the death of Jesus Christ. The roman emperor Nero the last of the Caesar dynasty of the roman emperors (probably the most disgusting and insane emperor even to Caligula) has been assasinated. It is time to replace Nero with a new emperor. He has no living heir and 4 generals in different corners of the Earth all claim to be the new emperor. But who shall replace him. This scenario I made is on the civil war that followed Nero's death. This is a multiplayer scenario and it is not fun when played in single player. You can have 2-4 players and you have to be either Vespasian (blue), Galba (red), Otho (yellow) or Vitellius (brown). The idea of the scenario is to capture the ruins on Rome and hold it for 2000 years sounds easy doesn't it. Theres a catch though. Barbarians are all on every border and if they break through then we're doomed. To survive you must have a split force one to attack barbarians and the other to defeat your rivals. May your conquest of Rome begin. Singleplayer also : No |
Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
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rakovsky |
Posted on 12/14/20 @ 11:55 PM
I finally beat it by playing as Player 1 with hackedraptor (Ishraq) as Player 2 on Gameranger and with the AIs set to "Easiest."[Edited on 01/07/21 @ 09:38 PM]
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rakovsky |
Posted on 01/07/21 @ 10:41 PM
Playability: 2.5
The first Playability problem was that on Gameranger it crashed on 3 out of 5 times that I played it. I don't necessarily consider this the fault of the Designer because on Single Player using ROR 1.0A, my game did not crash: I played for 5 minutes and it was OK. Maybe it crashes so often on Multiplayer because there are so many Players that it locks up. One Player told me that if you have 2 or more Human players and 2-3 or more AI opponents, using so many AI Players can cause freezing and lag, especially if the Players' computers or connections are slow.
I tried playing with a Player named Panamamaster and after 7-15 seconds the game locked up. He said he installed the scenario and its PER file correctly. Then I tried playing it with another player named "TCM Earthquake" (Real name = Lynn) and we got 4 min 38 sec into it and the game froze. I played with EmilioSC on Gameranger twice, and the second time the map crashed 21 seconds into the game.
The second biggest Playability problem was how easy the Designer made it for the Aqua Egyptian Barbarian AI Opponent to win. The first time that I played with EmilioSC on Gameranger, the Egyptian Barbarians won. Otho (Yellow) was holding the Ruins and I sent ships near the ruins and the message on the right side of the screen said "Ruins: 1995" in Blue and the Ruins switched to Blue color. Yet soon afterwards, it gave Barbarians Aqua a Victory and I couldn't tell why, because they weren't holding the ruins. The total game time at that point was 8 minutes, and I had the AI enemy on MODERATE Difficulty.
So I checked the Editor, and I saw that for the Egyptian Barbarian AI to win, all has to happen is for a single Fortification Wall tile owned by Grey Player #7 to be destroyed. This makes it practically impossible to win on Moderate or maybe even on Easy difficulty. The Aqua Barbarian in north Africa has a siege factory and plenty of villagers around the globe and fairly early in the game he makes strong catapults and then sends them northward against the Grey player's walls in north Africa. The Aqua AI player can easily position a catapult within range of the grey wall and at the same time those catapults can be out of range of the Grey AI Player's catapults that are on the opposite, northern side of the grey walls. And it's really not very hard for a few catapults to take down a single Fort tile. Meanwhile the Human Roman Players can't get south of the grey wall to crush the Aqua Player because the Grey wall goes from one edge of the map to the other. In order to get past that grey wall and go southward and fight the Aqua Egyptian Barbarians, the Human Players would have to break through that wall, and breaking through the wall gives the Aqua Player a Victory. It's also not really practical for the Human Players to station siege weapons along the grey wall to protect it because it's a long grey wall and the enemies can easily attack it and destroy a section of it with just a few catapult hits. You don't really have enough forces to quickly build up catapults and defend the whole wall. And by the time that you got them in place for the common benefit of the Roman players, Yellow would have held onto the ruins long enough to win.
After realizing this problem, I put the AI on the EASIEST setting, so that basically thee AIs only attacked the Grey walls weakly. As a result, I beat it as Player 1 with another Human player as Player 2.
If it's so easy for the Barbarians to knock down those walls without you really being able to mount a defense because you can't cross the walls to crush the AIs, you are forced to put the AIs on a low difficulty setting which makes the whole enemy AI Barbarians feature pointless. What the Designer should have done IMO is made it so that the Barbarians don't win automatically by crossing the Roman border wall. Without giving the Barbarians an automatic win, you would have a real chance to counterattack them and fight them if they breached the walls.
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Balance: 2.5
The first main balance problem is that it's too easy for the Barbarians to win on even Moderate Difficulty (and maybe even the Easy difficulty) because they just have to take down a single wall tile according to the VCs. The enemy Aqua AI Player has a siege factory in North Africa and you can't attack his base because you can't cross the barrier without destroying one of your grey ally's tiles yourself. The wall is pretty long so it's pretty hard to defend the whole wall from the enemy's catapults due to your own catapults naturally being about one tile further from those enemy catapults than the wall itself is due to the logistics of catapult v catapult wall defense. Another reason that it's hard is because you also need to capture and hold the ruins in the center of the map.
The Second problem in balance is that Otho (Player 3) starts out in Italy and it's relatively easy for him to get the ruins at the start, but unlike the other 3 Roman Human Players, Otho doesn't start with gold or stone near him. Meanwhile, from his starting location, Vespasian (Player 1) can only get a bit of gold in the Sinai, although he can take a boat and get a lot of gold and stone and wood in Turkey, which is what I did the time that I won on Multiplayer. So there is this weird imbalance where one almost resource-less player practically starts next to the ruins and fights against 2 players with giant piles of resources, as well as against a 3rd player who has to sail to get them. Still, the Designer was probably making it this way to match the history where one faction held the capitol yet one after another those who held it lost power to other stronger invading factions. So this imbalance makes some sense in light of the storyline.
For Galba, there is a huge gold pile in Span, and there is a gold pile that he can get to in NW Africa south of the tree line but north of the Roman wall there. Vitellius also has a big gold pile. There is some fish, like in the North Sea and on the northern coast of Africa, but few food resources in general on the map.
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Creativity: 5
I thought that it was a very creative idea to have four Human Roman Players having a Civil War - the 69 AD one - to fight over Rome and hold it for a set length of time while also trying to defend the Roman empire from Barbarian enemies on the edges of the Empire.
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Map Design: 2.5
The main design problem in my view was how easy it is for the Barbarian forces to win by breaking through a wall tile while at the same time it is hard for you to actually prevent that from occurring because you can't cross the border wall in North Africa as there is no opening or gate for you to pass through. At most you could try to defend that long wall by putting catapults next to it and hoping that the enemy catapults will get within your range long enough for you to hit them before they destroy a single Grey wall tile. At the same time though you also need to rely on your Roman Human enemies (players 1-4) to help defend the rest of the wall from enemies like the Green ones that come through the Balkans. It becomes unrealistic because they are also interested in conquering Rome just like you are. And you are not set to all ally with each other, so if one player decides to go for the Roman ruins instead of defending the all while the rest of the players are trying to defend the wall then either that player will win or else the Barbarians can destroy his section of the wall.
A marginal design flaw is that the Opening, Victory, and Loss Sequences each include a video. I find that to be fine for a Single Player mission, but the Designer designated this as a Multiplayer map and the videos don't even play when I run the scenario on Gameranger. It doesn't interfere with playability, but including videos seems pointless for a map that the Designer designates as not for Single Player when the videos only play in Single Player mode.
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Story/Instructions: 3
There is no history section or BMP map. A Bmp map would have been helpful for an idea of where the various Players are.
However, the Designer did a good enough job with the instructions and the Victory Screens. They tell the story well enough and the instructions are straightforward enough that you know what to do, except that it wasn't clear enough what my demands were for defending the Roman Empire from the Barbarians. The Instructions say that if Barbarians cross the border, "then we are doomed." I took this mean that in a vague sense, if the Barbarians enter the Roman Empire, then as a matter of course it's very likely that they will conquer the Roman factions. But instead, the Instructions here were referring to the fact that the Designer had specifically set the Egyptian Barbarian player's Victory Condition to give him a win if any of the Grey Roman Player's wall tiles were destroyed.
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Additional Comments:
Playing as Vespasian in my successful Multiplayer playthrough, in order to attack Otho in Italy, I built an extra trireme and attacked by sea. he will need to use a fleet. Vespasian's forces are roughly equal to Otho's. I landed my troops in Italy by boat. Vespasian only has 3 villagers and no TC at the start, so I built a TC near the gold in the Sinai and then landed in Turkey and built a second base near the stone, wood, and gold there.
If Vespasian went through the Caucasus, he could go around the Roman wall in Judea and take Babylon, where there is also a gold pile. There is also a decent gold pile right outside the Roman wall in Judea, and it's not real clear just looking at the map if the Designer intended that pile to be inside the Roman wall instead of right outside it, where it's tough to get to.[Edited on 01/07/21 @ 10:47 PM]
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HGDL v0.8.2 |
Rating |
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3.1 | Breakdown |
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Playability | 2.5 | Balance | 2.5 | Creativity | 5.0 | Map Design | 2.5 | Story/Instructions | 3.0 |
Statistics |
Downloads: | 163 |
Favorites: [] | 0 |
Size: | 94.00 Bytes |
Added: | 05/12/99 |
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