Permit me, if you will, a bit of reminiscing as a lead-in to this review. Go back, oh, twelve years or so to the days of the Atari 800, Commodore 64, and Apple II. Electronic Arts, with their funky record-album packaging, releases Seven Cities of Gold and wham! This then-high school student loses many hours to exploring both real and imaginary "new worlds." After some extensive gameplay, however, a bit of boredom sets in - things just began to blur into sameness. Zoom forward to the present (skipping over the release of an updated Seven Cities a few years back) and discover the release of Conquest of the New World by Interplay. Technically far beyond Seven Cities, the gameplay, while more involved, is remarkably similar in spirit to Seven Cities. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your point of view. If you loved Seven Cities, you'll love Conquest; if you didn't, you still may love Conquest, or you may not; there are some wonderful facets to the game, but for me the gameplay did drag a bit in the long run. But then, I'm getting ahead of myself.
In the game you take on the role of one of five European colonial nations or an imaginary native nation (sort of an amalgam of several different cultures). As the Europeans, you explore and settle the new world, both trying to out-perform your fellow Europeans and deal with the mother country while struggling to carve out your new home. As the Native player you try to form an alliance of tribes (usually by conquest) to form a Native nation that can stand up against the invading Europeans. One great thing about this game is the huge variety of options it gives you (I love options), especially in the custom games: focus on exploration, colony building, combat, or diplomacy; choose a world that is mostly land or mostly water; give yourself a time limit (or not) or race towards a final score (or not); even turn on or off time-penalties during gameplay. Two options I wish had been included: the ability to limit the size of your world and the ability to start out with viable colonies already up-and-running (useful if you want to focus on conquest over exploration).
Game sessions start with the arrival of your first ship and its cargo of explorers and leaders. You use these to search out likely spots for colonization, looking for the best combination of farm-land, forests, nearness to hills/mountains (for mining), and contact with the sea (for trade). You also want to map out the location of nearby native villages-often these are hostile (gee, wonder why...), and building too close to them is just asking for raids. Some time several turns later your colony ship arrives - it's time to plant your colony. To get an idea of how things develop from here, imagine a game where your towns are more complex than those in Civilization but less so than those in Caesar II. Placement of individual buildings can be important (some produce better in some types of terrain), but city layout means little otherwise (except that it must be confined to a certain distance from your colony HQ). A warning: as your colony city grows (and as you add more colonies), it gets tough to micromanage your city in the time limits imposed if you are playing with the Play Time Bonus turned on, so I suggest turning it off.
Your towns are graphically stunning, especially when zoomed in up close, much more so than any other city-building game I've seen. The problem is that this beauty is pure eye-candy; there's no functionality to it. If you're hoping for a strategic city building game along the lines of Caesar II, you won't find it here. If you're hardly interested in the city building aspect, you're in luck - the designers give you the option to have the computer manage your colonies completely, leaving you to explore and conquer, spy and trade. A warning: the computer will do as it sees fit, up to and including the removal of buildings you've placed. You can always countermand its orders, but by the time you've checked everything, you've spent as much time mucking about in the city as if you'd been managing it directly all along.
Exploration is a big part of the game and was, for me, the weakest part. While any units can explore, you'll use (big surprise here) your Explorer units for most of the leg work. Out they go, uncovering the darkness and all that it hides. Your units can discover rivers, mountains, and new regions; if your claim is accepted you get extra victory points. To help "roll back the darkness" you can set your explorer units to continuous auto-explore, wherein they'll methodically mow down darkened areas. Finding a river or mountain range doesn't automatically "discover" it; you often have to trace it to a particular point (not always the head of the river or the tallest point of the mountain) before it's "discovered." Unfortunately, your explorers aren't very adept at autoexploring a feature once they've come across hints of it. They do follow rivers automatically, but can get distracted easily, and they don't seem to follow mountain areas well at all; in both cases you'll need to direct their movements by hand to try to discover any features. Also, there's no guarantee there's anything there; apparently, not all rivers or ranges are important enough to count as discoveries.
My main complaint with exploration is that it gets tedious. Sure, at first there's excitement in discovering some new feature and giving it your own wacky name, but after the tenth river or fifteenth mountain, things all begin to feel the same. The graphics detail lavished on the buildings in colonies and villages is generally missing in the larger, zoomed-out terrain views. Terrain consists of plains, forests, rough hill country, and rock-and-stone mountains. No desert, no jungle, no special features to discover like waterfalls, the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake. After a while, exploration loses its adventure and becomes instead a chore to be performed in pursuit of points or to check out the dispositions of potential enemies.
Ah, potential enemies! If you'd like, conquest can play a much bigger role in your games than exploration or colony building. You can either do the typical colonial action and beat up on the local natives (or, if you are playing as the natives, beat up on weaker tribes or, when you get strong enough, move - ahistorically - in force against the invading Europeans), or you can go after any other European colonies. When I mentioned above my desire for the ability to start with either smaller maps and/or established colonies, it was conquest-oriented gaming that I had in mind. Even if you set the computer to building your colony, there is often a long period of turn-cranking before you even find enemy colonies, let alone have the forces to send out to conquer them. Smaller maps would mean less travel time, and existing colonies would mean a jump-start on unit production; we have neither. Of course, if you're interested only in the tactical combat (and not the larger strategic maneuvering), there's always the combat demo mode, accessible from the main menu; forget exploration! Let's go right to the battlefield. I can't praise the developers enough for including this feature; it lets you practice the combat mode before you ever have to put your colonial forces at risk and, if you're not in the mood for a whole hours-long (days-long?) session of exploration and colonization, it gives you access to a quick dose of gameplay. This feature alone elevates the game above other games in the genre.
The abstracted combat mode - sort of a cross between chess and Stratego - is easy, and surprisingly fun. You have three on-field unit types: infantry, cavalry, and cannon. Your main forces may also be supplemented with militia forces from your colony (defensive only; you can't take your militia to use against another colony or Native village/unit) and possibly by friendly Native warriors (if a Native village is nearby). Each side also has a leader "unit"- your leader sits to the side of the battle and, while not actually a combatant, has a major effect on the performance of your units and on the enemy. Your goal is to either wipe out the enemy units or to capture their flag, while at the same time preventing them from doing the same to you. The battlefield consists of a 3x3 grid backed on each side by a "rear area." From the rear area you deploy your forces: artillery only to the rear-most rank (although able to fire to the enemy's rear-most rank), with cavalry and infantry as your main offensive tools (especially cavalry; they can move farther, and get a bonus in combat for "charging"). Combat is quick - battles can be completed in minutes - but fun nonetheless. In the demo mode, you can whip up another battle immediately, but in the main game mode it might be quite a while before you can move forces into position for another fight (this depends a lot on the positioning of the colonies and on your force levels).
Diplomacy and trade can also play important roles in the game. Your mother country may be friendly with the mother country of a colony you feel is a rival; attack it and risk the ire of your superiors. Of course, dealing with the mother country becomes a pain; eventually, massive taxation will lead you to declare independence, and other actions which will call down the military wrath of the homeland. Survive it, however, and you have a much freer hand to do what you will in the New World. Even if you're ostensibly friendly with another European nation, you can always use spies and saboteurs, an aspect of the game I was barely interested in but which others may find of use. I found trade to be more important than diplomacy (at least with my style of play), and it remained so throughout all periods of gameplay. The computer isn't particularly cagey in its dealings; it will sometimes take what appear to me to be outrageous deals. One part about trade I didn't care for is that, if a computer player rejects your offer, you aren't notified with a message like "What? You're crazy!" Instead, the trade just doesn't happen. Also, the computer players don't seem to be particularly active in trade or diplomacy; I never had one offer trade, and I never knew them to be engaging in spying or sabotage. In fact, I'm not even certain that this is in the design of the game, but it should be.
Overall, I guess I'd give Conquest a definite "yes" for gamers who love the "explore the blackness" genre, and a definite "maybe" for other strategy gamers. No matter what you think about the game, there's sure to be something in it you'll particularly enjoy (for me, it was the combat mode and the huge variety of options); whether that something is enough to justify purchasing the game will depend on the taste of the individual. I do recommend that you check out the demo; while it doesn't have the mix of options the full game does, it'll probably give you enough of a feel for the game that you can decide if you want to look further.
