Orcs vs. Dwarves! -- Dwaves vs. Orcs! Scenario

a review by Vincent Wong
6th Febrary 1999

Orcs vs. Dwarves Scenario (ODS) is the first scenario variation out of the original War of the Avatars Scenario (WAS) based on the same venerated map of the Forgotten Realms. ODS is basically a team game version without the option of summoning any avatars. If you like team games this could be the game for you. FR100 is the first commercial run of the scenario as a fast 14 days turnaround, and being one of the lucky few that were invited to participate I jumped at the chance.

In this review, we will look at all the possible angles including the Pros and Cons of a team game and possibly some suggestions on how this version can be better improved. Like the first scenario War of the Avatars, ODS is not an open ended game, it is a closed ended game that the winner will be declared on turn 40 or less; however, there is a guarantee of 20 turns run before the game victory conditions sets in.

Starting the game with 100 positions, 50 Orc Players and 50 Dwarf Players this is clearly a racially motivated bash so to speak. Why there is 100 player positions is a good question when the War of the Avatars Scenario is only 50 player positions. Furthermore, one would think that the victory conditions will be very quickly achieve given that there are only 2 teams of 50 a side, especially the allied victory condition; perhaps that was what RSI had hoped for since the first run of the game is a 100% paid in advance game, meaning to say that if the game is concluded fast then there will be profit for the company while a long drawn out game will cost the company more, that is in terms of cost of processing and sending turn reports for 100 players. Thats a fallacy, the game of FR100 is still on going at turn 28 without a clear victor with each side not gaining or losing much ground -- still a pretty even fight, which I think will cause RSI to rethink the commercial aspect of running such a game.

ODS starts the the players without owning any communities, unlike WAS where your main character is a human with neutral alignment at the best rank level of their respective character class type, that is, High Priest, Arch Mage, Lord, or Master Thief. While in ODS, each player belonging to either side starts with their racial alignment: Orcs - Lawful Evil, and Dwarves Lawful Good; and the lowest rank of Warrior Class -- A Chieftain, which in my opinion is pretty hopeless and useless character not much better than a Light Cavalry.

It appears that the first version of ODS is flawed. I won't be surprise that the Dwarves win the game as they already have a much superior force to start off with (imagine 50 players thats 50 times more powerful). To correct the imbalance, the Orcs should have gotten a Half Orc or Human Rogue (extra 15 gold) instead of a bandit, another Goblin Wolf Rider (extra 7 gold) instead of a Half Orc Outcast; while the dwarves should have gotten a Dwarf Infantry (1 gold less) instead of a Halfling Slinger, then they will be almost equal (the orcs will still be 1 gold short).

On hind sight, if I had a known earlier about the troop composition, I would have gone for Dwarves. I choose Orcs because I always like Orcs and played the Orcs Tabletop Army in Warhammer Fantasy Battle from Games Workshop, and I thought they had a slight advantage of generally faster troops in their starting composition - (Boy! Was I wrong! With 3 Orc Heavy Infantry in that combination that is as good as slowing Orcs down to Dwarves Speed of 35 and the Dwarves had 2 extra MP Bonus, which made them faster!!!!! Orcs had a total of 2 MP Bonus, Dwarves had 4 MP Bonus!!!!)

Lets look at the mechanics of the game, essentially the game remains pretty much the same as War of the Avatar Scenario with the following changes. Some of the communities on the map has been juggled changed to accomodate the fact that no players start off with communities. In WAS player starting communites are all human, with that, RSI changed this communities once belonged to players to random races. Which means that those communities are now random, it could be human, dwarf, orc, giants, or whatever. Also some communites have been upgraded or downgraded (from a town to a village or settlement, or vice versa. Which makes my towns guide in FRPBM not very applicable anymore.) Defense of hostile communities have also been beefed up making it more difficult conquer communities especially the dungeon, ruins and lairs.

I have studied the map enough to now that, the map cannot support 100 player positions, 50 players is the optimum that will account for the slow and sluggish progress of the game. So some players will get it better than others as in the original map in WAS, each Realm is place quite far apart from each other, while those with low quantities of communities are slightly further apart. As it happens in ODS, I believe they probably forgot about this fact. Hence some realms in the game goes about several turns before even getting a decent community to start recruiting their army from compound it with the fact that you have no income for until you capture a community, a decent community is at least a village. While some lucky ones are placed near heavy populated areas where they can start conquering towns and villages. The unlucky ones had to split their already weak force to scout for a decent community, and splitting their force weakens their ability to capture communities that has been beefed up defensively. So in ODS setting, the game favours players who are lucky enough to be placed near starting communities.

Early in the game, there were inconsistencies of reports. It look like RSI was trying to fixed the reporting in the game summaries. And some of the game turns had problems that delayed the running of the whole game by up to two weeks delay in running the turn. At one point, one entire turn had to be rerunned. I had worst results on the second run of the same turn (where I won a major battle in the first run and lost in the second run because we had an equal strength force.) It looks like the we are paying to play in beta version of game, RSI must be taking a cue from Microsoft.

Also, it should be noted, that I will advise players to carefully consider joining the game unless you live in an area with good postal service. I had missed so many turns, in FR100 I pretty much gave up giving it proper attention if or ever the game turn reports arrive on time. Postal delays had 2 sides to blame, one was slow delivery from the local post office, and the other was slow posting from RSI office. I have seen postmarks that are 2 days before the game is schedule to run when the report print out date was a week ago. (Sigh ... that was some of the reasons why I receive my turn reports a week after the turn ran.) When you are missing your turns it is very hard to react to enemy ganging up on you -- just a sitting duck while your force gets wipe out. (I have missed 2 turns in a row before not once but many times, since this is a prepaid game you don't drop unless you specify abandon order in your game.) Well again who would abandon, when you have paid in advance, duh?

This part is mostly speculation on why players in ODS don't get a starting community. In WAS an unplayed player position will continue to gain gold because as long as he has a communities he earns gold, and 2 gold for every unused order that was at least 24 gold gain per turn. And also player positions in WAS are prone to drops -- due to missed turns, or unpaid subscription. Perhaps that is why RSI decides not to let ODS players start off with communities because one can tell if there are dropped positions -- a tell tale sign of a dropped position is the realm is in the Top 10 Gold listing but not on others especially if the summary report is detailed early in the game; who would want to save gold when you don't get interest on Gold savings and there is no Avatar to summon? Also, another possibility since there only 600 communities in all of the map; 100 players will start with more than half the communities owned - that we can't have can we? It only goes to support that my contention that the map cannot support 100 players without doubling the total communities from 600 to 1200.

One thing though, a nice feature is that a player can't be eliminated from the game, because he is always reincarnated in the nearest allied community if he doesn't have a community. But then, when it comes to that. What's the point? You can't do shit with a Chieftain even if you had tons of gold when you don't own any community? How are you going to recruit or muster new troops? For Pete's sake!!! I give me an Arch Mage if you expect me to even be remotely possible to capture a weakly garrison community. Oh well, maybe RSI expects you to just wander into a unguarded enemy community and capture it. .

Like all other PBM games, RSI usually runs the game with 80% capacity meaning to say that 20% of the total positions are unplayed. For FR100, only 38 Orc positions are played, with at least 10 to 15 positions out of the 38 played, are inactive or stopped bothering to play by now. A clear weakness of a prepaid game is that, inactive players are not dropped, and there are no new standby players coming in. Also, RSI service to a prepaid game is suspect. Why bother so much as the entire game has been paid for, what can players do even if they complain (Oh sure, they can always drop. Ha! Ha!)

My suggestions is that OSD needs to get back to the drawing board. Get it back to the normal pay per turn game. Allow drops, and standbys. Allow team or individual victories. Allow players to form their alliance but restrict them to their races. Also, get back to a 50 player position map setting with starting communities. Finally, make an exception to the rule, that their Main Character is the best in class for the class they choose and allow them to choose their own name and realm name, and maybe their own alignment and not let us get stuck with cheesy default names as in FR100.

Well there is Drizzt Do' Urden a Lawful Good Drow Warrior, he is an exception isn't he? Our realm characters should be like that ... an extraordinary person thats an exception.