Topic: Castle Conqueror impressions

Post your questions and impressions for Castle Conqueror

I've played a few free similar games on PC, and even bought one, so I'm getting this and seeing how it goes. I usually prefer symmetrical maps without upgrades, but hopefully this shall be fun.

Is this game sort of like the old board game Risk? How's the difficulty? Are the controls responsive? Is the AI fair? That's about it.

I do't understand it

Cute art style. Seems repetitive though.

I'm interested in this. Anyone brave enough to take the leap of faith with this one?

It's gameplay is similar to Galcon http://www.galcon.com/games/ (I had the demo of I think the classic version, it's definitely worth trying if you like numbers)
and Konquest (a Linux game that usually comes with KDE.)
Phage Wars is a flash version but I didn't like it: http://phagewars.com/
Edit: Found another flash game Nano Wars: http://www.thisisgameplay.com/my-games/nano-war/
And there's at least a few others.
I think they're based on an old MS-DOS game (Galactic Conquest?).

The basic gameplay works by: You and your opponent(s) each start with forts. Every second each fort generates soldiers. Therefore, if you can control over half the forts, you'll eventually be able to overwhelm your opponent. To make it more fun, you're rewarded with a larger gold bonus if you beat the stage faster. Bigger forts generate soldiers faster, but in CC the difference is never enough to bother thinking about. Neutral forts have no guard (walls) so they're extremely easy to take over, but they do generate neutral soldiers so attacking earlier is better.

Attacking: At the start of the game you can send troops of five soldiers each. You send them to a target and they kamikaze and hack away at it. You can have five troops sent at a time. The strategy is choosing the targets that'll allow you to build your army up faster. For example, attacking forts that are weak and close shall reward you with the army generation benefits faster.

Cards: You can choose male or female character. The difference is male has attack cards and female has defense cards. You can use cards asap and about once per minute. I always use the same card, the siege stat bonus card for the male.

Stats: There are eight different stats. I think attack and defense are actually the least important --excluding "lead" which increase fort capacity-- but I'm not exactly sure how effective most of the stats are. You level up stats by purchasing upgrades with gold. You can also purchase equipment with gold. From a technical point of view, using your gold to buy e.g. a sword seems to be the EXACT same as upgrading attack twice.

Attackers seem to have a 50% advantage --I wasn't able to figure out the stats so this is an in general estimate-- so in harder levels you'll want to play very aggressively, leaving your forts deserted to cause siege damage to opponent's walls.

So Castle Conquerors is like the free links above, but is less strategic and relies more on RPG leveling. There's strategy, but you'll basically keep repeating the same strategy. I didn't mind the lack of variation because it's very challenging. You still get a reasonable amount of gold when you lose, and you can go back a few levels if you need to quick level, so the grinding is alright. I'm at the beginning of my second play-through and I'm still always trying to level up my stats so that I can beat the level I'm currently trying. When you beat the game you can replay levels, but starting a new game with new character erases your save...

Art and Graphics: I think the YouTube video tells you everything you need to know. Gets the job done but other than that don't notice it. I wish I could make the music louder. I like the world map. There's some art of game over screen, shop screen, etc.

There's two characters, 50 stages, probably takes a few hours to play through. It's hard for me to say how good this game is, but I'll call it average: play it through once with each character, maybe a third if you want a low-stat challenge, then it won't be as fun as it should to keep playing. I guess it's a bit slow-paced, confusing and mindless for me (mentioning those as nit-pick reasons for why I called it average). Some players shall likely immediately find the repetition unbearable.

@Birdman If Risk didn't have the randomness of dice rolls, and was in real-time, it would be like this. The controls are the main feature of this type of game, and imo they're close to perfect here. The AI is designed to start with a huge advantage, and seems to have intentional flaws. I'll call it fair and fun for the way it's designed. My memory might be wrong, but I think Galcon the AI started with equal symmetrical land and colud be set to play like a smart human.

Since CC is a 500 point game, I'll also note Galcon had different play modes, and Castle Conqueror only has the standard (but that's definitely good enough.)

@jdarrel - Awesome. I may have to check this out then. I'm still waiting for the review though.

Having a bit more fun with it now that I'm able to annihilate everything in my path with ease.

(Edit: There's still a challenge to it though)

Update: I'm still playing this a lot. Obviously it's not epic, but it's even more fun than I thought it could be. Because of the replayability, I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys "win-more" games at all. The AI is very exploitable but otherwise fun and competitive to play against.