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Conquest of Elysium 4 is a quick turn based fantasy strategy game with a touch of rogue-like. The game might appear simple at first, but it is full of depth, details and of course monsters.
or, it's kind of like Civilization V but instead of building things, you conqer what's there and build giant doomstacks of armies made of bears.
The goal of the game is to survive in a map full of hostile things and crush the other factions by either killing all of their commanders or conquering their bases.
The goal of this LP is to win at least one game on Baron difficulty. I don't care who I win it with, I don't care how, I just want to win one of these games for once, and I think the process of LPing and explaining what I'm doing to an audience will help me get better at this game.
I am StrixNebulosa, your erstwhile LPer, and I've put roughly seven hours into this game, trying the huge variety of classes and splatting my armies up against guarded towns like a fool. I am not great at this genre, and rarely beat strategy games or roguelikes, so this should be...fun?
Okay, onto the game!
First stop, mods. I'm using the set from here, the goon-made mods that add a defender to my base so that a random deer can't end my game prematurely, along with a few other tweaks. I am not using the mod that adds a commander to the base guard, as that feels like it's cheating.
Second stop, what kind of map am I playing on? Every new map is randomly generated, and you can choose what kind of theme it has - whether there are more cities or haunted ruins or what have you. For now I'm playing with medium and random - small is too cramped, and I'm not ready for the huge maps yet.
As for my choice of random, the faction I'm gonna play with first isn't as resource starved as some of the other ones, so I should be good with anything. I hope.
The toggles on the bottom are essentially useless to me - I don't have allies, so we can't share a cluster or a common cause. The score graph toggle lets you look at how well everyone in the game is doing, which would be cheating. You can normally see them at the end of games, anyways. And Wilder just makes the game harder.
My enemies. I've shoved in a bunch of them, so there's a good chance they'll run into each other and kill off the weaker ones for me. They're all set to Baron difficulty, which gives them no tweaks to their AI, just boosts to their resources. The AIs are all cheating, but, well, their AI isn't very good so they need it. I'm going to have to out-smart and out-muscle all of them!
Classes, or factions. Here's the whole list. They all play differently, need different resources, and there's lore for everyone. I've played as the Baron, Markgraf, Troll King, and High Priestess before. The Baron are the most normal of the factions, as they're humans, they collect taxes, and you can recruit knights and soldiers.
I admit I found them kind of boring. Easy to understand, but boring.
So instead I'll be playing as these guys:
You get a giant chunky troll king and a herd of goblins at the start, and you can wreck almost anything immediately. The challenge comes from overestimating how strong your king is, and from how squishy your other commanders are by comparison. Also, your mom can show up to help you out for a few turns! She's great!
Resource-wise, we need gold, iron, and fungi. That means we need to conquer villages, mines, and swamps in order to fuel getting more units and casting spells. Seems simple enough!
Final choice before starting the game: name our faction. Beef seems like the kind of name a troll would pick, so!
With all of that in order, let's start the game and see what kind of map we get:
Hey, not bad. We're the giant troll in the center, and those pale blue edges around the tile mean we have flagged that square. Flagging a square means you own it, and we're gonna do a lot of that as the game goes on. All you need to do to flag a sqaure is stand on it!
To the east is ocean, which means we don't have to worry about armies coming from that direction. The other directions seem clear enough - I don't know what the fairy ring (mushrooms) do yet, and hovering over them doesn't reveal anything exciting.
Here's what we see if we hover over the square we're standing on and the square to the north respectively:
Troll Pit! This is our home. The Crown icon indicates that it's our base (termed a Citadel by the manual), which means we can recruit units here, and if we lose it, game over. The boots indicate that standing on this square consumes two action points - and most commanders only have two to three action points.
Those thirteen units are our starting army and the defenders the Homeland Security mod gives - they can't move, which is fine. They're here to beat off anyone who comes by, and they can hold off most invaders. They just can't handle proper enemy armies, so don't get too complacent about reinforcing them with other units!
And to the north is a Tent Village. The coins indicate that if you have this place flagged, you'll get +2 gold to your income.
There's also a pair of enemies. We can squish them easy, and I'll do that in a moment.
So, now to some nitty-gritty about how the game works. It's turn based. Every turn is a month in-game, and seasons will change as the years pass. You get income every turn, which... well, as you can see, we're not getting any. No gold, no iron (the hammer icon), and that weird brown apple icon indicates how many trade routes we have. Which is none, at the moment, so we can't even buy any new resources.
Down the list:
Next Commander: pick the next commander with action points left. In this case, there's just Beef the Troll King.
Recruit Units: Takes you to the shopping screen where you can buy more units. Now, I could buy a cheap ogre this turn or the next, or some goblins, but I'd like to buy another commander as soon as I can, so I'll be saving my gold for when they're available.
Trade Admin: If we had a trade route, I could buy or sell resources here.
Messages: Every turn there's a chance for a commander to become available for purchase, or for a group of units to be available for purchase with a discount. The messages are shown at the start of the turn, and in here. I won't be showing most of these unless we actually buy or covet what we see - or if it's a special message.
End Turn: Obvious!
The second box of menus only shows up if you're selecting a commander. In this case, Beef. Right now he has these special actions available:
Sentry: Park Beef wherever he's standing and ignore him. When I hit Next Commander it'll skip over him. I'd have to manually reselect him to reactivate him. Why do this? So you can park a commander on an important place and they'll act as a guard. Sometimes I park commanders I hired but I'm not yet ready to do anything with on my base, then forget about them, so I, uh, won't be doing that anymore.
Transfer Units: Commanders can lead around armies - see, you can hire a goblin, but he won't leave without a commander. This is how you attach units to your commanders, or detach, or whathaveyou.
I have been talking a lot about armies. This is what they look like! That's Beef in the middle, with the guardians to his sides, and everyone else is a goblin. We can't take the guardians with us, and I'll leave the goblins behind for now, but here's everyone's descriptions - the flavor text in this game is really good.
We are crazy overpowered, but weak to fire, and while we can regenerate health every turn, we can be overwhelmed and killed. We're just one giant slab of beef that's good for steamrolling the earlygame, but we'll need backup for anything armed with a mage, a flamethrower, or just plain too many enemies for us to keep up with.
And here is a piece of paper. There's, uh, not much point to these guys yet. Or at all. I'm not sure what you use them for outside of being alternate targets for enemy archers - and they die in one hit, so you need a lot of them for that to be a useful tactic.
...So here we are, turn one! I'm going to immediately head north and get into battle so we can start up some gold generation - which means that I'll be wasting any extra AP Beef has, as stepping onto a square with an enemy in it immediately puts them into battle - and battles only play out when you end the turn.