Conquest Forums – Simultaneous Turn-Based Strategy Game

[PhilCK]

Hi,

thanks Rok for getting me started on the game.

Firstly I'm not really a Turn based geek, Most of the TB games I've come accross are so daunting to get started, but saying that, I'm a big fan of Xcom and UFO.

I've only played with myself (sounds bad). but a couple of things I've noticed.

1. More of a usablity thing. cancling orders can be a bit of a pain. If I have 5 soldiers going to 3 different hexagons, and change my mind about one of the hexs, I might have to cancel all the orders to stop them moving to that hex.

2. Perhaps its my lack of experience with TB games, but sometimes I dont know what happened. like if I move a bunch of units to a hex, end of the round. I might of been killed / or killed units, and I'm left a bit confused to what happend. I might have had 3 units then only 2, or they might have been killed. And I have ether forgotten about them or simply not realised what happend. A little marker in a hex to show that a conflict happend would sufice.

Cant wait to play the game with some real people :)

[PhilCK]

3. seeing the route that units take. If you order a unit to go long distance seeing the route might be benificial. a straight line to that hex can lead to some queries to which route it will go

[SephiRok]

1. More of a usablity thing. cancling orders can be a bit of a pain. If I have 5 soldiers going to 3 different hexagons, and change my mind about one of the hexs, I might have to cancel all the orders to stop them moving to that hex.

There is no other way, unless we design more complex ways to move units. Since Conquest is supposed to be fast, we want players to have a full overview at all times and not have to click additional (unnecessary) buttons. After playing some more you'll see that this is not such a big issue anyway.

2. Perhaps its my lack of experience with TB games, but sometimes I dont know what happened. like if I move a bunch of units to a hex, end of the round. I might of been killed / or killed units, and I'm left a bit confused to what happend. I might have had 3 units then only 2, or they might have been killed. And I have ether forgotten about them or simply not realised what happend. A little marker in a hex to show that a conflict happend would sufice.

That's why there is the Events Panel. For analyzing battles, a panel will slide out of the events panel when you hover over a battle event. You can also click on an event to center where the event happened. Also, everything has coordinates written by it's name.

We've discussed a bit about making a different glow around a hex where a specific event happened, but it's still in the air.

3. seeing the route that units take. If you order a unit to go long distance seeing the route might be benificial. a straight line to that hex can lead to some queries to which route it will go

I think that came up a few times in our discussions as well, but we haven't bothered so far. It might also turn out that it becomes even more confusing when you have more than a few units moving. I believe that atm, it always takes the upper path.

In practice you'll rarely move units by more than 1/2 hexagons though.

[dpc]

2. Perhaps its my lack of experience with TB games, but sometimes I dont know what happened. like if I move a bunch of units to a hex, end of the round. I might of been killed / or killed units, and I'm left a bit confused to what happend. I might have had 3 units then only 2, or they might have been killed. And I have ether forgotten about them or simply not realised what happend. A little marker in a hex to show that a conflict happend would sufice.

That's why there is the Events Panel. For analyzing battles, a panel will slide out of the events panel when you hover over a battle event. You can also click on an event to center where the event happened. Also, everything has coordinates written by it's name.

We've discussed a bit about making a different glow around a hex where a specific event happened, but it's still in the air.

Or a mark.

However when I point the cursor on the location it could show me same "casualties" box as when above event item.

[Bianary]

I hope this isn't hijacking the thread too much, but I just took my first playthrough the game as well (vs. an AI) and had some thoughts, and this seemed like a decent thread to add my observations to.

Combat was a bit confusing to me, and if possible a way to describe (Briefly) in-game how it's determined if a unit catches another to engage it would be excellent. I couldn't quite figure out what ensured I'd catch the enemy or not, or if there was even a way I could tell if it would be likely.

I also noticed that the operations appeared to be rewarded semi-randomly -- I may have missed a count, but it felt like the AI received an extra missile attack than I was given (The game may have ended with the same amount, but it used its final one three or four turns before I received my final one). That made it feel quite random for whether I'd suffer retribution for a successful mass assault or not, because I couldn't keep track of what they might have in reserve. If I'm off and it's not random at all, then it was just me being unfamiliar with the game :) Otherwise though, it felt like an unwelcome element of randomness.

Finally, an explanation of the score (And possibly a new scoring system for determining the winner) in-game would be good. During combat the numbers were flipping back and forth fairly wildly, and then at the end I was a few points behind on the second to last turn -- and then the AI took a couple megacities deep in its territory back, and even though I had blasted away a tile with 3 soldiers and 2 tanks with a mssile and possessed a troop advantage in place near a number of border cities, its score jumped into the lead and the game ended. So while I'm sure it was a case of me simply not massing my forces to claim the cities as the game ended, the game also was far from determined and the scoring system didn't seem to reflect the troop counts as much as it did cities held at the moment of ending. Possibly a variable ending system could be put into place as a setting -- get X point advantage for enough turns to end the game, or something similar (With a round limit on top of it to prevent games from running far too long).

In any case, except for those minor hiccups it was fun. Maybe I'll get a chance to play against people sometime in the future :)

Edit: As the previous post suggests, I would also have found it useful to have a small "combat occurred" mark in tiles that I could have moused over to see the same window as the events log displayed. It would have helped provide more of a feel for the combat results in the region I was looking at.