Bulgarian crisis 1997

Quick update:
About 5 playtest took place as the Govt. forces as they will be the first playable side, others will require tweaking of unit stats, starting units etc.
From the looks of it I can guarantee a severe challenge to control atleast 43 out of 48 objectives for a descisive victory.

The AI is now in line with the production of units as all improvements except the City Walls (Urban Terrain) which require only 10 shield to build. This is also to symbolize the destruction a civil war brings and for small towns /under size 4/ not to become megapolises in 20 turns.

Icons are patched up and looking nice, Pedia lines up next untill I figure out more events for the later turns to make it more interesting, which reminds me: the ''Event.txt'' file can be 20KB large at max right?

Ok I am getting there, AI is working just fine! First time I ever managed it, I am very proud !

So there is one very important fundamental question!

What difficulty do you prefer? Struggle to survive, or complete conquest?

Since the first version is made to be played with the Govt forces, I reached the desired effect that after few turns the map looks something like this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Syrian_civil_war.png

There are a lot of small towns and villages as you can see from the ''Arena'' style scen. in the first post and flushing out the countryside will drain your resourses and the player will experience first hand what does it means to have no resources to fight back.
Major cities get besieged and do not fall easily /one good thing for the player/. The units are very expensive and if anything will be produced in the countryside it is either Militias or something force build.

Since the map is big I still do not posses the skill to make all unit spawns by events and smoothen out the initial eruption of the conflict so all hostile units begin spawned already on the map ... yes there are like a thousand units in the first turn.

In general I got some more tweaking going, some idea or unit gets implemented fom time to time and I can say that the scenario is 90% ready. You will see it soon

Personally I prefer the struggle to survive, the challenge!

I require one brave playtester. Any volunteers ?
I don't have friends around playing Civ II.

I'll give it a try. As I told McMonkey and EZRhino earlier on, I'm not a masterful or highly-skilled player, but I'll try if you'd like.

Ok, whoever is totally impatient to have a look here it is:
One sidenote that there is no reccomended difficulty level to play on. I played on Emperor and my best score was 26 out of 45 objectives, so try some different levels if you can.

I downloaded

First impressions upon starting the scenario:

- The map is excellent as are the units

- It is very difficult to work out which units belong to which faction. The shield colours of the Government forces and Ultranationalists look the same. There is a fix for this. Presuming you are now using ToTPP add the following lines to the rules file just underneath the @COSMIC section:

@COSMIC2
UnitShieldColor, 28

This will ensure that the Civ colour set in the Cities.bmp appears on the map. ToT makes all shield colours way darker than they should be!

In my save I have borrowed the shield from my SCW scenario to help distinguish the sides even more clearly, but that's a personal preference.

- You can eliminate the Cities Celebrating text popups by using the CivCity utility. I think you click on the 'we love the king' flag to specify that the city is already celebrating. You can also eliminate the sewers text popups by raising the 'Sewer System needed to exceed this size' in @COSMIC. If the scenario is not concerned with city growth it might be worth raising the level from 12 to get rid of the pop-ups.

- I would advise you include a People.bmp as the default one does not match the rest of your graphics which look very nice indeed! For now I have just put the ones from SCW in, but there are loads of more appropriate modern People graphics available.

- With those minor aesthetic changes made I'm ready to launch into BCW. It looks like a very well made scenario and it looks like it's going to be very challenging considering how much territory I'm bound to lose when I end my first turn!

I put together this map to help players unfamiliar with the geography Bulgarian get an idea of the strategic situation and the main Government strongholds. I will use this map to plan my strategy. If you would like a copy please let me know.

Thnak you McMonkey for your attention!

First of all I have not applied ToTPP as I was sure that the new features would distract me from my task of finishing the scenario before my year two of lawschool starts (yes I am 20 !!!), I will probably work with CivII next summer. For now I adressed the issues as it follows:

Unit shields: This had me worried too. I took the more simple approach to swaping the colours of the Ultranationalists with the "Peacekeepers" who are there for the border unit and some cosmetic representation of the neighbouring states.

So now the Ultranationalist are Blue and the Borders white and not purple. About the SCW shields, well they are certainly easy to spot but they are a little bit too obstructive for my taste (also I am so used to the units that I recognize them easily so you do have a point) but I will include them in the Units.bmb file!

About the sewers and celebrations: I have not noticed the city celebration texts due to the fact that ingame I went to "Game Report options"(Ctrl+E) and unchecked it. Same can be done for the Aqueduct warning since the Aqueduct was renamed to Sewers and the Sewers to Waste Processing station. You need sewers for above size 4, and as you can see there are a ton of small vilages that must not grow beyong size 4.

People: I have totally missed this aspect, I am on it!

*30 minites later*

Made an improvement to the unit shields based on your SCW ones, added some new fancy people (from Yugoslav wars), edited the Readme file and changed an icon (nuclear plant).
Also let me know if the sarcasm level in the unit desription section is too much!

P.S.: Forgot to include your map of strongholds ... next time!

First let me say that I really like this scenario. Usually I'm averse to 'tactical'-style games (never actually finished Red Front), but something about this has kept me hooked.

Based on my playthrough thus far, the only hangup I notice is depending on AI actions in the first turn, enemy units will starve production in Plovdiv and Dimitrovgrad, forcing the disbandment of several units before they can even be used. Tag a few as NONE, maybe?

I did some tweaking to the rules to integrate the scenario with the TOTPP, one perk of which is removing the need for the modified .exe for stack kills. I also compiled some custom sounds; I can post the files here if you like.

Otherwise, keep up the good work.

*bump*

I am going to have some days off to my old place where my Civ II rig is located so I will have some time to polish this thing. Any new feedback will be appreciated.

On a tangential note, I image searched on Google "Vidin Bulgaria," (assuming that's still your city of residence) - very nice city, with awesome looking and very pleasant street scenes. I don't honestly think my home city of Edmonton has a single building even verifiedly 200 years old standing.

Currently I ama law student in Sofia, but my parents still live in Vidin so I visit regularly in vacations. It is the orthodox easter in two weeks so as I said I am going back to the old PC rig where all the Civ II files are in.
And yes, the city looks nice assuming it is spring or summer. In autumn and winter it looks like the hollywood stereotype for the former eastern bloc city (grey everywhere). As a matter of fact this applies for most of the cities.

I think that applies for the majority of cities everywhere! Everything looks better in the sunshine!

From my memories of my original playtest I would say the map seems very good, the unit roster is sound. I just think the scenario needs a bit of a polish to make it look and feel more complete, then there's just the minor issue of the events to contend with!

Event problem? You have not mentioned it earlier.

Say, since you're hanging around these at the moment, I'd like to ask a question I've wondered since I learned about him (and that he's still alive) sometime last year. Is there currently any perceptible, if even small, political or social movement to restore Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha or any of his descendants or heirs, to a monarchial position in Bulgaria (assumably a constitutional one given I highly doubt an absolute or traditional monarchy would fly in modern Europe)?

The chance of a monarchy being brought back to Eastern Europe? About same chance as a snowflake on the sun, give or take a few percent.

Ahem. 2001. This:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Saxe-Coburg-Gotha