Neat little gem!

Conquest! Medieval Realms, developed by Illustrious Software, is a turn-based game that combines the pure strategic gameplay of Chess and the key principles of military strategy in a historical setting. The objective is to conquer up to 7 opposing AI or human players by defeating their armies and capturing their lands. To gain supremacy, players will need to unite their spread out lands, build a roaring economy, and raise powerful armies to divide and conquer their enemies. Boost your income via markets and mines, upgrade your armies with stables and archery fields, or amass a large force, but sound strategy and careful thought will help you more than brute force.
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gingerbread
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Neat little gem!

Post by gingerbread »

Great way to spend 17 or so €'s, and lots of time.

Some comments/suggestions:

Need an "Exit to desktop" command.

I get a lot of render issues (hangs game); says "enumerated collection modified", pointer issue?

How about AI's with flavour (attack, defend, build)?

New unit type: Artillery. Can beat same level forts, but all of same level can beat when attacking. ZOC does not affect Art. Also means level 3 forts can be in game, and needs a building pre-requisite for Art.

Allow units to combine, i.e. 2 Spear1 = 1 Spear2.

g
LordJekky
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RE: Neat little gem!

Post by LordJekky »

Firstly, thanks for the post - we always like to hear what people think. I'll respond to each of your points below:

Quitting to the desktop directly from the middle of a game used to be possible (pressing ALT+F4) but it had to be blocked due to some issues it was causing with the game not shutting down properly.

We've received a few error reports on that issue, and have a pretty good idea of the cause, so it should be getting fixed in an update at some point.

If an AI focuses on a single thing like attack or defence, it generally ends up being a lot easier to predict and then to defeat - we've gone through a lot of tweaking and balancing of the AI to get one that plays the game as well as it does (although I'm sure it could be better) - I don't know if we would be able to put the amount of time required into getting multiple AIs to balance properly. In short, it's not a bad idea, but I don't think we could spare the time/effort to do it justice.

Not the first time we've hear a suggestion for artillery/siege of some sort, although we haven't really given it much thought - it's basically a low priority item since the existing unit types all seem to balance out very well anyway.

Units can already combine - just place them on top of each other (they must both be in the same territory, both be of the same type, and their combined level must be less than 4).
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gingerbread
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Location: Sweden

RE: Neat little gem!

Post by gingerbread »

Thanks for your reply (on a Sunday even, do remember to take a vacation sometime soon :) ).

Surrender/Quit takes only two clicks, so it is OK.

I look forward to the update (btw, nice & easy to use error report app).

AIs are good and I recognize that effort has been spent (see "vacation" above :) ).
They do not seem strategicaly aware in that when I get to 25%+, they should perhaps call a local truce and attack the leader. I also realize that introducing new units would take reprogramming AI for uncertain gain.

An aditional AI level where it gets +25% income for territories (rounded down so 1 gold per 2 hexes) should be rather easy to add; I suggest as a tick box to levels 4 & 5.

g
LordJekky
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RE: Neat little gem!

Post by LordJekky »

One of the things we were determined about from the start was that the AI in this game would not cheat - all too often i've seen a cheating AI used to cover up for the fact that it simple cannot play the game (and worse than that, in many cases it simply doesn't tell you that the AI cheats).

That said, i can see the reasoning for it to add extra challenge for people who already beat AI level 5.. certainly we can consider it as an option.

As for replying on a sunday, even if i'm not working i try to check the forums daily, it only takes 5 minutes and it means less posts to answer on monday [;)]
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gingerbread
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RE: Neat little gem!

Post by gingerbread »

ORIGINAL: LordJekky
<snip>
We've received a few error reports on that issue, and have a pretty good idea of the cause, so it should be getting fixed in an update at some point.

<snip>

Any ETA for this - it is getting very frustrating...

Q: How do I start as anything else than Player 1 in a skirmish?

/g
LordJekky
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RE: Neat little gem!

Post by LordJekky »

I would love to be able to give you an ETA, but at the moment we don't really know ourselves - we will try to get to this as soon as we can though.

As for starting as a different player, click the little colour/player number icon in the top left of the player info box, clicking a colour will change you to that colour, and clicking the "+" and "-" buttons lets you change your start position.
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