Slitherine

I am going to outrage any female members of our community by likening this process to childbirth. Of course, I have no direct knowledge of that topic, but for me, scenario design reminds me of what I have only heard and imagined about giving birth: intense labor; much pain; loud shrieking at times; an overwhelming desire just get it over and done with; vows of "never again" only to be followed by forgetfulness of all the preceding; hope that the baby is fine and healthy; and shortly thereafter, a desire to have another one.

The Aleutian Crisis

Enjoy, I hope.

This was a bit of a tribute to my Dad, who served in the Aleutians during the war. He never had to face anything like this action, however!

The Aleutian Crisis new version 1.1 uploaded. (What the heck? How have I gotten away with only one revision of this scenario? It must have been before I started numbering my versions.)

- A few typos fixed but most importantly,
- All Turn Start popup messages now occur at turn start rather than the first move of a turn. The latter arrangement was a workaround but it is now less obtrusive having messages popup at the beginning of the turn instead of while moving units. The reason I am able to make this change is the discovery that linking objectives to hexes is why Turn Start popup messages would not appear if the player looked at objectives at the start of a turn. Objective hex links are now removed.

Remember having played (the old version of) this mission twice some time ago. Even then I liked your way of telling a story, with different events and branches on the way, new objectives being added and such. It makes a scenario interesting and exciting IMO. Great map design, by the way!

But still, I didn't like the enemy ships being idle all the time (first part) and being too easy to defeat on the second - and it was kind of unclear to me when I was able to (re)deploy my ships again for the second wave. And although the initial idea with the choke points to stop the invading force was a good one, the overall (battle) scripting was lacking, the units positioning was squishy (no units in the rear), my deployment zones could be exploited and the follow up events to that idea were kind of missing. Many turns wasted on moving or doing nothing. From my point of view this scenario had GREAT potential that wasn't utilized right. Sorry.

But it's been some time I've played this.

Good comments, Gabe. Try it again sometime.

bru888 wrote:giving birth: intense labor; much pain; loud shrieking at times; an overwhelming desire just get it over and done with..

Yeah, when my mother became preggers out of wedlock 60 years ago she had a shotgun marriage but she could have aborted the baby instead to avoid the pain of giving birth and to cover up her shame, and friends and neighbours wouldn't have minded, but as I was the baby in question, I might have minded..
Below: A tribute to your dad's service for a job well done; sheepish-looking Japs after the surrender of Japan, Sept 1945-

http://www.mission4today.com/index.php? ... orum&f=134

Thanks, on behalf of my Dad.

bru888 wrote:This was a bit of a tribute to my Dad, who served in the Aleutians during the war [...]

Didn't see this. I've felt kind of bad writing "bad" criticism it in the first place, now I feel even worse. Sorry, Bruce (x2)

And you know I didn't mean no harm, right?

I wouldn't ever have played the scenario twice if I didn't like the overall potential. The problem may even have been my expectations with such a large map and quite the many enemy units - but there was still no real big battle evolving. You kind of forced the player into a predefined way of action and it's been too linear on this kind of mission with a huge invasion happening IMO.

On the other hand this mechanic of story-telling worked very well with your follow up scenarios: just a few units for the player, a story to be told AND still enough room to maneuver with different approaches possible (even if limited).

No discouragement intended! Keep the scenarios coming, please!

GabeKnight wrote:No discouragement intended! Keep the scenarios coming, please!

None taken, and will do. Remember with your own budding scenario-designing efforts that people do not get as good as they could be at things if all they get are compliments. We learn from criticism as well.

Plus, yours is only one opinion.