Zweiter Weltkrieg

Playing
as the Axis is always fun, since you are certainly for the first 100
weeks (=50 turns) the agressive civ. After that the Allied get their
heavy bombers and you get trouble in Russia. The key to success in this
scenario is fast research, which can become difficult because you have
to build up defences (Air Defence, Coastal Battery) against the Allied
and troops against Russia as well. The amount of turns as the Axis
depends on your tactic: it will be a quick game when you choose to go
all research (either you win early, or loose early), and if you play
save it will be a longer, more difficult and more interesting game. A
wise thing in about all single player games might be taking over the
minor Axis territory or at least Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria: they
are an extra side for you to attack Russia from. And if you think it’s
not enough you can take Turkey as well: just be sure to have a strong
border with Spain. You can expect attacks from there when taking
Turkey. Believe me: taking over their cities is better than giving them
all your techs.

A very nice effect of the Axis, wanted
or not, is that everything is very real. In the beginning you will
conquer Europe with ease using the Blitzkrieg tactic, but later on when
the enemy has better tanks and air defences, the Blitzkrieg won’t work
anymore. In real history the Blitzkrieg wasn’t used anymore because
there weren’t enough planes and because the enemy Airforce became too
dangerous.

Playing as the Allied means a bit boredome
in the early stages. You see how the Axis takes over Europe, and all
you can do is research and rule the seas. Once again research is very
important, you should get good tanks and long range bombers as soon as
possible. Without them you shouldn’t even think of taking one Axis
city. The place were you should be able to act first is Afrika, besides
the Northsea and Atlantic. In Afrika you have the Minor Axis in front
of you. They’re weak and with little research you should be able to
take over their bases there, helped by the Minor Allied that can
approach from the other side. Once you have researched enough, you can
build up forces: first a lot of bombers followed by cargo ships filled
with Shermans. Then operation Overlord can begin.

Playing
as the Russians is really fun in my opinion. If you wait until you are
attacked by the Axis, you can get pretty frustrated. My tip is to
attack the Neutrals and maybe Minor Allied early. They are weak, and
even though your forces are just little better, you can gain a lot of
influence by taking their cities over, and besides that you stop the
German expansion for at least a while. Once again Turkey can be the
key. If you have Turkey you can take over the Minor Axis from a good
starting point. You should not move too fast though: you have to
balance the building defences at the border with the Axis and building
forces to take over Turkey. After taking Turkey you should become
friends with the Independants and turn them against the Axis. Give them
a few useless techs, ally with them, make them declare war to the Axis,
and give them and obsolete T-34 tech. This way you force the Axis to
spread forces. Axis troop concentration will weaken near your border,
or at least lost units will be replaced far too late. Make sure you act
quickly, and give the Independants better techs when you see they’re
losing. Hopefully the Allied are acting the same moment and invade the
Axis from somewhere else. Now you should slowly retake lost cities and
begin taking Polish cities. Your final attack should wait ’till you
have traded some techs with the Allied (that really helps!) or even
with the Minor Axis. As soon as you can build the B-29 you should
launch your attack towards Berlin. The Russians are most fun after the
Axis and it is certainly the civ with the most changes if following the
above tactic.

Maybe you think that it’s no fun to use Allied
techs, but this scenario was meant to let the player discover how the
war could’ve gone as well. And besides, Russia did get a lot of planes,
tanks and weapons from the Allied in the Lend-Lease program.

All
of the units used in Civilization II are changed and adjusted to fit
the scenario. Kobayashi even had a shortage of units: in the readme you
can read that some units are meant to be used as other units as well.
For example the P-51 counts as the Bf 109K as well, and the Lancaster
can be seen as the Halifax, B-24 Liberator and Short Stirling as well.

The
scenario had no unbalanced units in it. All units that are meant to
fight eachother have about the same strength, and you often don’t know
how things will go. Only the B-29 is a bit stronger than its opponents,
which is only good because it’s the ‘crowbar’ needed to decide the war.
It’s like a goalgetter or pinch-hitter in football: someone that can
decide the match.

Kobayashi did a pretty nice job on the
submarines. Submarines have 0 attack strength: they have to loaded with
torpedoes to have effect at all. Without torpedoes they’re just fragile
pieces of china between a horde of elephants.

I
could not find any errors in the tech tree at all, and I didn’t
disagree with the relation to new units. The only thing I think
could’ve been different was the fact that the Panzer IV doesn’t get
obsolete. In my opinion it should get obsolete after the Panther comes
available, or maybe after the King Tiger does. The Panther is really
the better version of the Panzer IV in this scenario, with the only
difference that it cost 10 shields more.

The tech
tree is of high complexity. Techs are either ‘Allied-special’,
‘Axis-special’, ‘Sovjet-special’ or available for all. All the special
techs come available with techs available for all, though need an other
special tech as well. Just take a look at the pics of the tech trees
kobayashi included and you see that it takes time to make such a tech
tree. It’s an almost perfect tech tree without disfunctional or useless
technologies.

I can only make a comment on the non-event messages. When you save and quit, it says ‘No, Cry Havok! Let slip the Dogs of War’ and ‘Yes. I’m needed in a Galaxy saving mission’.
Now either kobayashi made a mistake and thought he was working on an
other scenario, or he really thought about this message and is refering
to his Star Trek scenarios when talking about the Galaxy saving
mission. Maybe the message is a build-in text to the ones that know his
other scenarios.

The
map used in Zweiter Weltkrieg came from the scenario ‘Third Reich’,
which covers World War II as well. The map is well chosen: it has
Europe, the important places of Afrika, a part of the Middle-East,
Russia, and the north-eastern coast of North-America. I can only say
that maybe the map should’ve gone further to the east, so Russia would
be even larger. The terrain was properly adjusted for the scenario,
though I would recommend to make mountains unaccessable for all units.
Ofcourse the Wehrmacht was able to go through the mountains in
real-life, but a super-heavy-weigth tank as the Tiger couldn’t. The
same could be said of the swamps, but that is more difficult though,
since Hitler did make use of the swamps for his early tanks (e.g.
Panzer III) in his attacks against Poland and Russia.

No mistakes
concerning placements of cities were mad as far as I can tell. English
city names were corrected in this version. The only thing I must say is
that I would’ve given all the cities their original names and written
correct in their native language. Generally this means that most German
cities would get another name (Cologne to Köln, Munich to München,
Vienna to Wien). The only errors I found were ‘Salonika’ and ‘Smyna’,
those should be ‘Saloniki’ and ‘Smyrna’. Little erros that slip in
easily and are difficult to find when not particulary looking for them.

The
eventsfile for Zweiter Weltkrieg is something special. For example:
when the allies conquer Ploesti, the oil supply for the Axis is cut
off, and the Guderian wonder becomes obsolete meaning Axis units aren’t
‘veterans’ anymore from the start. On the other hand, when the Axis
conquer Port Said, the Suez-canal is closed, and the Allies must start
paying maintenance for all the buildings that cost 1 maintenance. A
third example is the disappearance of the French Maginot-Defence line
after Paris is conquered by the Axis. The Maginot line forces you to
take Paris as oon as you can, via the Netherlands and Belgium, since
you will loose a lot of troops of you want to break through the
Maginot-line. Texts appear when certain things happen to inform the
player what effects something has on the game and what really happened
in history.

Last I’d like to point out the music
files, kobayashi included in the scenario. Both are used to ‘support’
the in-game messages telling you something special has happened. It’s a
nice add to the game, though I may say that sometimes the music goes on
too long. Especially when you have 3 or 4 special happenings right
after eachother it can be a bit too much.