I think we'll discuss this one in an upcoming ModCast, but our agenda is quite packed so we might not get around to it for another couple of weeks. So for now I'll post my thoughts here.
In general, I really like the concept of this scenario, it has a lot of potential. IMO this is much better than all those lame Earth [insert date here] scenarios (which are nice in itself but there's just waaayyy too many of them and none really stand out, or at least none that I've tried so far) and I prefer smaller scenarios like this over those humongous Earth or WW2 scenarios and the like. I hope we'll see many more scenarios like this, from you and others. If my comments below make me sound overly critical it's only because I really like this idea and would like to see it taken to the next level. I wouldn't have written this post if I didn't like what I saw.
Cool as the concept is, there are some major issues with this scenario as it stands. By far my biggest beef is that, as it is, this scenario is waaaayyy too simple and straight-forward. I played this on auto-pilot with no real thought or strategy, just forming a giant Stack of Doom of my starting units (over time supplemented with newly-built Swordsmen) and moving that from one city to the next without ever meeting any real opposition. I finished the game in 80 turns, and I reckon if I tried it a second time I could probably do it in 60 if I'm even slightly clever about it (and I'm a pretty mediocre player, I'm sure others could do it even faster). If you're gonna make a heavily combat-oriented scenario like this you need to add a few more twists to add some variety to the gameplay and present the player with a real challenge that requires actual strategy to win.
Off the top of my head I have 4 fairly easy-to-implement suggestions that would completely change the face of this scenario and IMO probably make it a LOT more challenging and fun:
1) Enable Always War.
Right now I can move my SoD to one city at a time without punishment, only declaring war as soon as I'm about to cross a border. All civs are nice enough to sit around and wait for me to attack them.
If you make the human player at war with everyone else though, I'd constantly have to worry about being attacked from 4 or 5 different sides by numerous different parties. That would force me to keep a significant portion of my army dedicated to defense and would likely lead to a lot more open-field warfare that puts all those Chariots to good use, rather than only having my SoD with some quickly-whipped Swordsmen attacking one city after the other without ever seeing a single Chariot do battle.
The one caveat here is if you use Always War the AIs would start attacking each other as well, which could be bad as it might make the player's job even easier: just let the AIs slaughter each other (especially in the crowded area near the coast) and clean up the survivors afterwards. So you may have to be a bit smart about it to ensure the AIs focus their efforts on the human player, for example by making them all allies with each other.
2) Reduce the number of civs.
The number of cities on the map is just fine and I like the thought of not being able to raze them or found new ones, but if you have exactly 1 city per civ warfare becomes extremely straight-forward. I just march my SoD straight to the enemy capital, attack it and poof! The Civ is dead and the entire army outside the city is gone. For the most part I didn't even have to have any defenders in any of my own cities, as my SoD always got to the enemy capital before he got to any of my cities, and I only lost 1 cottage to pillaging in the entire game. Of course the fact that I never have to be at war with more than 1 civ at a time only compounds this problem.
If you keep the number of cities the same but reduce the number of civs to just 2-4 (e.g. give Rapiqum to Mari, Malgium to Eshnunna, everything else to Larsa?), then players suddenly have to start worrying about defending their own territory from counter-strikes, and dealing with a clean-up operation after taking a city -- entire enemy armies don't suddenly disappear anymore (or less often). Makes the game a lot more challenging and fun.
3) It's the economy, stupid!
I appreciate you want this scenario to be about all-war-all-the-time, but the whole guns vs butter concept is the key that makes Civ work. In this scenario there's no point in having workers, doing research (there IS no research), building anything other than Swordsmen, generating GP, etc. I just set the tax sliders such that culture is maximised while keeping my economy in the green and pump out Swordsmen and the odd Bowman in all my cities and send them straight to the front line. Sid's design mantra is that a game is a series of interesting decisions, but in this scenario there are NO decisions, there's really only one way to play.
The fact that Swordsmen are available from the start also makes city captures too easy early on, not to mention that it's a tad anachronistic as the Iron Age historically started 500 years after the setting of this scenario.
You could make things considerably more interesting by taking away some of the most advanced techs available in this scenario and making players research them themselves. Things like Iron Working, Construction, Literature and Code of Law give useful benefits, so not having those at the start gives players an incentive to maintain a real economy: maximise the science slider and deal with more unhappiness/slow border expansion, use those workers to create some cottages at the expense of whip-friendly farms, build some libraries and markets in addition to just Swordsmen, use some specialists to pump out beakers (or spies and steal the techs from the AIs), etc.
I'd probably also add some additional prerequisites to Iron Working (Construction & Code of Law?) so that Swordsmen aren't available until later in the scenario, adding more variety to the combat (this would force players to use some of those Axeman, Bowman, Spearman and even Chariots to attack cities early on).
4) Boost the AI.
The military AI is unfortunately not terribly capable, especially not when it only has one city -- it's too focused on improving its economy then, that's just how it's wired. Most of the time it simply refuses to have more than 5 or 6 units guarding its one city, though having only 3 units is even more common. And in my playthrough I didn't start seeing Walls until I was almost 40 turns in, i.e. halfway through.
You could dive into the SDK and completely rewire the AI to be more combat-ready, but that's probably a bit more work than it's worth (to say the very least). I faced the same problem with the Desert War scenario I made for Firaxis, the easiest way to solve this is to give the AI the buildings it needs (i.e. Wall, Baracks) at the start and creating a copy of the Archer/Bowman unit but with zero movement points and pre-place a bunch of those in every AI city so that there will always be a decent defense in place. That should make city captures a lot more challenging (which is after all the point of this scenario).
Of course, if you combine all of these suggestions the pendulum might just swing the other way, making the scenario impossibly hard. So you may have to experiment a bit by trying one or two ideas at a time and tweaking things further, or by just increasing the length of the scenario (although I really like the current length, I wouldn't make it *much* longer). But I do think that if you follow these suggestions or other fixes that have similar effects this scenario could be a ton of fun. IMO this has the potential to become one of the best Civ4 scenarios to date, but it's not there yet.
