Conquest

Conquest is an old game that’s about, well, conquering the world. It’s a lightweight creation that is based on a very simple gameplay that’s also very efficient if you’re looking for a casual yet demanding strategy experience.

In Conquest, you start on a world map, and your armies and territories are scattered all around. You have provinces on all the large continents, and it’s up to you to decide which one will be the center of your future modern-times empire.

Each turn you are given some armies that you can add to your territories. Using those troops you can then attack any adjacent territory and if you are lucky, conquer it. I say lucky because the victory conditions are not determined by how large or strong your army is, it all comes down to rolling the dice.

If you roll values greater than those of your opponents’, you can win that territory. However, the number of your troops counts because that dictates how many attempts or combat turns you get to use. It might sound a bit confusing, but the gameplay is very easy to pick up.

For a game that weights less than one megabyte, it puts you face to face with quite the challenge. In a very short time, the AI can muster large armies and defending your lands will become complicated. The latter also depends on which territories you want to focus, so some strategy is mandatory.

You can set a different difficulty level for the computers if you see no way of beating them, and you can also customize their individual traits such as aggression, nastiness, and paranoia. The last one is a bit odd but it makes sense, I would call it low morale. Nonetheless, even with this low level of complexity, Conquest is a decent strategy game.

To end, Conquest is a way too overpriced for what it has to offer. However, it is a nice game to play; more so since you can also play it with human opponents. It’s a tiny game with limited features, but it’s nice, in a casual way.