Producer Vince DeNardo and the Quicksilver Software, Inc. team are in the midst of putting the finishing touches on Interplay Production's upcoming Conquest of the New World. As you might expect from the title, Conquest of the New World is a game of exploration and colony building. Broadly speaking, it can be grouped into the same category as MicroProse's Colonization or Interactive Magic's Exploration, but Conquest of the New World puts a lot more emphasis on the human side of the equation, both in terms of being a solidly multiplayer game, and in giving the population of the game world goals beyond slaughtering all opponents.
Conquest uses a starting seed to generate a realistic and believable world. The same seed will always generate the same world, so you if you get a continent that looks like Elvis, you can share it with your friends. An algorithm based loosely on plate tectonic theory places continents and islands, mountain ranges and rivers. To the North and South are polar icecaps, and between these lie appropriate climate zones. The maps re huge. When European explorers first crossed the Atlantic to explore the Western Hemisphere, they faced an area so impossibly large that û had they known the extent of it û they might have thrown up their hands in dismay and sailed on home. Send one of your ships to follow the coastline in Conquest û you'll get the same feeling as you see the sheer bulk of unexplored terrain facing you! Happily, the title is somewhat figurative. You don't have to actually conquer the entire new world in order to win!
The game world is quite attractive. Quicksilver has provided us with a range of zoom options, from an anachronistic satellite view of the entire world, down to a view that is so close its only purpose is your viewing pleasure. The fact that objects in this view reveal previously unseen details is a tribute to the devotion of the team. If objects didn't have this level of detail, it wouldn't have affected game play one whit, but it would've lessened the beauty of the product.
So we've established that Conquest has a pretty and realistic map. What about the game?! Unlike many "explore the hidden world" games, the path to victory here is through accumulation of the most points (though we'll admit that dead opponents don't offer much competition). What's more, you can determine exactly what sorts of actions will give you the most points, and how many they'll give you. The game grants you victory points in four categories: colony building, exploration, diplomacy, and conquest. The catch is, you only get a certain percentage of the points in each of these categories.
Each player starts with a base victory-point utilization of 5% in each category, with 20 additional percentage points to distribute between them. If you play these games for the joy of exploration, you'll want to put most of your additional points in exploration. Warmongers will put their points in conquest, negotiators in diplomacy and builders in colony building. Of course, you can distribute your points evenly as well.
In addition, you can spend five percentage points to buy various special abilities, abilities which grant you bonus victory points for specific actions. Knowledge of which (if any) abilities you've purchased is kept from your opponents. The trick, then, is to perform actions gaining you victory points, while fooling other players into thinking they're getting the best of you. The designers have thus deliberately fostered an air of uneasy paranoia between players. Players of the boardgame Diplomacy will understand this aspect of the design quite well.
Once you've set up your personal victory conditions, the game begins. You start out û as seems so often the case in these games û with a ship or two and a completely unexplored world. On your ships are the explorers, armies and settlers you'll need to tame the vast wilderness before you. Movement is as simple as dragging a path from the ship, or holding <CTRL> and clicking on a spot you want the ship to sail to. Double-clicking on the ship will pop up a menu which allows you to examine the "cargo" (settlers, explorers and armies), disembark all units or order the ship to explore.
This last function bears closer study. When you tell a ship to explore it will sail off on its own. If there's a coastline nearby, the ship will follow it, revealing the outline of the island or continent in question. If there isn't a coastline, the ship will strike out randomly into the darkness. This same function is available on land with explorer units, who make a concerted effort to reveal any hidden areas they find. Such auto-exploration is a nice touch, because it eases the micro-management demands on the player. Early in the game, when you have only a handful of units, you'll probably enjoy telling each unit exactly where to go. But as the frontier expands and you have other demands placed on you, you'll appreciate this ability to automate units. Make no mistake, though, there will still be times when a unit requires your personal attention.
Once one of your ships makes landfall, you'll debark explorer units and set them to revealing the mysterious interior of this unknown world. During their journeys they'll discover the highest mountains, the longest rivers and the best settlement areas. Each of these discoveries results in earning points (the amount depending on how high/long/wide the mountain/river/area is and what percentage of exploration points the player has set himself up to get). The owning player also gets to exercise his narcissistic tendencies and name these geologic features. Thereafter these names will appear on the map, once uncovered. There's nothing quite so frustrating as sending an explorer to the top of a mountain peak, only to discover an opponent has beaten you to it and left a "Kilroy was here" sign!
Once the explorers have found a suitable location, it's time to send in the settlers to form a colony. Each colony has certain commodities - gold, metal, goods, wood and crops. The player uses some of these (primarily metals and wood) to erect various buildings. Buildings include housing, farms, gold and metal mines, mills, taverns, churches, docks, commerce and forts. Once established, a colony will grow each turn (assuming sufficient housing and food; a church helps, too). Mines will produce gold or metals, mills produce wood, and so on. You must place each building in a suitable location. Mines do best near mountains, farms near rivers. Every building must be within the "command radius" of the colony center. If the perfect location for a colony exists, we haven't found it yet. Every early colony should have a dock. A dock allows trading with the "Mother Country," which is one of the few solid sources of income early in the game.
Along with the wonderful scenery, explorers may also stumble across native settlements. These can be friendly, neutral or hostile. If the latter, the explorer can usually avoid them. If he fails, well, you can always get more explorers, right? Friendly natives might trade with the player. They generally don't produce much, but can be a good source of extra food in a pinch. As players expand their knowledge of the region and begin to encounter each other's colonies, they may trade among themselves. This is a perfect opportunity for a player with the Trader special ability to rack up extra victory points!
If the player encounters hostile natives, it may be time to bring in the troops. Alternatively, at some point two players may come to blows. On board the ship are one or more leaders, and each leader has troops "attached" to him (many units in the game can contain others, insofar as their on-screen representations are concerned. This allows you to move armies across the map without showing dozens of sprites marching to and fro, obscuring everything else happening). Combat, which occurs at the end of a player's turn, has a completely different look from the rest of the game.
Combat played out on a stylized battlefield that looks something like a chessboard. There is a 3x4 grid, with a reserve area running along each of the shorter sides. Each army starts in one of these reserve areas; the central square in the last row of each side contains a flag. Battles are a capture-the-flag affair, if an army moves one of its units into the square containing the flag of its opponent, it wins the battle.
Units consist of infantry, cavalry and artillery. Infantry can move one space or fire at an adjacent square. Cavalry can move two spaces, or move one space and fire at an adjacent square, or make a charge attack. Artillery moves one space or fires at any square in a row. Artillery is the only unit with a ranged attack. Beyond these basics, there are more relationships that influence a unit's worth. For instance, at first glance infantry is quite weak. However, infantry attack artillery (arguably the strongest units) with devastating results. Units also get an attack bonus for flanking fire and combined arms attacks.
Each army has a leader that has an attack rating. An army can only attack a number of times equal to its leader's attack rating. Thus, an army with ten infantry units would need its leader to have at least a rating of ten if the player wanted every unit to attack in a given turn.
When you first look at the combat module of Conquest, it's easy to dismiss it as trivial. But once you start to play it, and learn its subtleties, you'll find that it stands pretty well as a game in its own right; a nice alternative for when you don't have enough time to play a full game.
Once you have your colonies firmly established, you can think about expanding. You can upgrade all your buildings, or increase trade with the Mother Country, the natives, or other players. You can produce more settlers to establish another colony, more explorers, or expand your military might.
Throughout this article, I've referred rather generically to "your opponents." Conquest of the New World was designed, from the start, as a multiplayer game. You can find opponents at the other end of a modem line, over a network, or through your e-mail box. Extensive diplomacy options are available; you can make friends by sending an opponent almost anything. You can even give him or her credit for a discovery!
But in case you can't round up a bunch of friends to play with, Quicksilver is devoting many resources to creating computer opponents that act as "human" as possible. In particular, the AI won't single you out as the only wetware, and therefore worthy of being every AI's primary target (I hate games that do that!). It seems that, finally, the game development community is starting to push back the barriers to realistic AI.
Conquest of the New World is a much anticipated product. It seems to provide something for everyone. The more military of us look forward to new continents to conquer. Others anticipate long hours of exploring uncharted regions, and still others just want to win bragging rights by beating all comers in network play.
My personal tastes run towards building empires. One aspect of Conquest of the New World I really like is the option for setting up victory conditions. You can decide to play a game for a set number of turns, or until someone reaches a certain number of victory points. These decisions can change the flavor of the game immensely. Longer games require careful planning for the future and reward colonizers, while shorter games result in a dash to uncover and name mountain ranges and rivers. These games reward the explorer.
Within the broad framework of the genre, Conquest is totally configurable. By tweaking game length, number of opponents and personal victory conditions, you can make it a game of exploration, or of diplomacy, or empire building ... whatever strikes your fancy. Conquest of the New World has beauty, brains and depth. If Vince DeNardo and Quicksilver can manage to weave all these aspects together correctly, while keeping the end result solid and playable, they will have set a new standard for all future "explore the hidden world" games to aspire to.
