Conquest: Frontier Wars Review

For all of you who had the word "Starcraft!" in the back of your head ever since you started reading this article, here's something to prove how close you were: Base construction and resource gathering are very much like in Starcraft: you have to exploit several types of resource: gas, crew, and ore. Ore, crew, and gas come in harvestable forms from asteroids, planets, and nebulae. The entire base building scheme takes place entirely around planets. Each planet is awarded points in terms of ore, gas, and crew and also has a set number of cells "slots" that run a ring around the equator. These cells accommodate buildings, some taking one slot, some two or more. Once a planet's building space has been filled, you must go and find another planet. This causes certain consequences... It focuses the gameplay around critical points and decreases the amount of searching players must perform while looking for useful stuff but even with this centralization, it will often become difficult to realize instantly which buildings are around which planets, and which buildings you already built. There is a danger of creating repeat structures and the remedy for that is checking the technology tree (if you can build a structure that requires something before it, you already have that something built, right?).

Any map in the game can possess multiple wormholes and can be simultaneously linked with multiple maps. Navigating between systems is simple and well thought out. On the display, in addition to the map of the current system which you are viewing, there is a map showing the systems and their connections to one another. This concept efficiently allows viewing systems and transferring units to other systems by simply clicking the desired target system and sending your units there, or clicking on the wormhole itself.

Still the most important gameplay feature is the workable supply line functionality. Every map starts out with a home base for your race. As the mission progresses, you'll be able to expand onto other maps and systems via gates - wormholes, but without other headquarters established in these colonized systems you will be unable to have access to supplies coming in and out of your headquarters. In order to establish a supply line you can either build a completely new headquarters in each system you find yourself, or connect these systems to your home system by constructing jumpgates atop the wormholes themselves. This solution is better because it prevents your enemies from using the same wormhole. The other solution requires you to maneuver your ships in the radius of a supply depot, a planetary confined structure that must have a working supply line to the home system in order to be functional, or to use the supply ships.

Massing up units and trying to rush at the enemy is a good way to die here. In this game you will have to use cunning strategic planning if you want to get anywhere. This approach has downsides to it, and the most obvious of them is that it drastically slows the game down - it will take you two to three minutes to fully load empty supply ships. Some aspects of the mission design are also a little tedious. Planets are occasionally used as mere stepping-stones, requiring you to inch across a sector with too much repetitive base building and resource gathering, and too little action.

The game has several more good features, like the fleet system, where instead of individually controlling every single unit in the game, you can assign an admiral to a fleet of ships. When you normally order your ships to attack the enemy they will attack the one pointed at, but then will try to find their next best target unless specifically ordered otherwise. With an admiral, your fleets will react intelligently to the opposition, prioritizing targets, covering one another, and falling back when necessary. Just drop them in a zone, give them a general order, and let them go, as you can focus your attention elsewhere.