From: jj51@umail.umd.edu (Jeff Janoska) Subject: Review of Rise of West (aka Comp. Emp. of Mid Ages) A very quick review... Conquest and raiding are done by armies. A new endeavor is the "raise armY" endeavor. It costs $1 to raise an army. Armies require maintaince if in a low population area ... $1 per army in excess of the pop level. Armies add to defense of an Area. Conquest of an Area can take a minimum of 1 endeavor or a mximum of alot. Conquest is _NOT_ a function of the pop level of an Area, though higher Pop Areas will take longer to conquer since opposing Empires can keep more "free" armies in an Area with a larger population. Religious Conversion of an Area is accomplished by holding an Area for 5 or more consecutive rounds (Christian --> Christian is 5; Ch --> Pagan = 5, Christ --> Moslem is 10). If the player has a diplomatic tie during the turn in which the critical level is reached, the Area is converted. IF you lose control of an Area at all, the clock starts over. Colonization takes between 10 and 20 rounds depending on how differnet the language is in the target area. If at the end of the critical level you have a claim to the Area, then the language changes. There is no schism table - the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches always have religious differences. A serious flaw is that there is no benefit for holding Rome. The battles for control of the Pope won't happen in the game. The game allows for the appearance of "minor" powers, i.e. magnates, raiders and mongols. This is the least satisfying aspect of the game. There is NO (NADA, ZIP) way to prevent the appearance of a magnate in an Area (other than not playing with the minor power option). You can spend alot of money garrisoning an Area and building its Fortifications and the next turn, the Area is a Minor with a fort level of 3. Minors can be devestating to smaller empires since they don't pay money to raise armies or launch conquest endeavors. The Mongols also have a flaw. The game allows them to launch raids by sea. Sorry, but this should have been a no-no. They should only get to conquer adjacent land Areas. One plus is that the game includes a scenario editor, so you can create your own scenarios. Want to see what would happen if the Protestant Reformation occurred in he 1200's? Well the scenario editor allows you to try it out. There is one downside to the scenario editor - you can't edit on ongoing game file. So if you want to play the grand campaign scenario from the original game (700's to 1400's), you'll find that you'll need to write down the values for every Area and set-up the scenario by hand. (The Franks vs the Byzantine scenario is included with the game, but you have to do the manual edit when its time to split the Franks into 3 Empires.) All in all, I'm glad I forked over the $40 for the game, but there are some flaws in the game. I believe these flaws can be overlooked, but I hope they are corrected in later versions of the game. I will answer any specific questons if anyone asks... Jeff