SpellForce: Conquest of Eo Review
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Introduction
Released back in 2003 hot on the heels of WarCraft III, SpellForce: The Order of Dawn was following what was supposed to become this big trend of combining the RPG and RTS genres. Far from a mere clone, the original SpellForce tipped the design scales closer to the RPG side of things, offering entire sections that played like a more traditional action-RPG in a fantasy setting that gladly embraced all the cheesy clichés.
The game was followed by several expansions and a proper sequel that had its own share of post-launch content. Afterward, the series laid dormant until THQ Nordic and Grimlore Games resurrected it in late 2017 with SpellForce III. The new entry experimented with a more grounded tone and acted as a prequel to the first SpellForce.
But seeing how, unlike in the early 2000s, it's the turn-based games that get people going these days, THQ Nordic has apparently decided to hedge their bets. Enter Owned by Gravity and SpellForce: Conquest of Eo - a turn-based take on the long-running series.
Set after the events of SpellForce III but prior to the original SpellForce, Conquest of Eo is in effect a sequel to the prequel taking place after The Circle of Mages was established, but before they managed to shatter the world into loosely connected bits, and chainmail bikini was agreed upon as the requisite uniform for the resident female warriors.
A Wizard's Tower Has a Knob on the End
In Conquest of Eo, you'll be playing as an ambitious young mage whose master ran afoul of The Circle and ended up getting destroyed for meddling with powers beyond the ken of your common spell slinger.
Upon learning of this development, you take it upon yourself to discover what it was that got your master in trouble, and pick up where he left off. Because naturally, where a powerful mage with an army of apprentices and a grand old tower fails, a neophyte with the keys to a pile of rubble is simply destined to succeed.
But before you set out on your quest for knowledge and power, you will first need to decide just what kind of wizard you are. The game offers us three presets here - an Alchemist, a Necromancer, and an Artificer. These, for lack of a better word, classes determine your approach to crafting and the schools of magic available to you. You're also free to mix and match these and make your own custom preset.
Now, some of you may already be planning a hasty retreat on account of crafting being positioned as such a prominent thing during character creation. Rest assured, here it's not some superfluous system that exists purely to annoy you with heaps of pointless busywork, but an integral part of the whole experience that determines your entire playstyle.
The game is set up in such a way that the regular units you'll be recruiting from towns, assorted settlements, and through random events won't generally cut it. You'll need something extra to get ahead. And crafting will help you do just that.
Alchemists are a nightmare for all those suffering from the too-good-to-use syndrome. They distill various plants, ores, and other reagents down to their basic essences and then use those to brew potions ranging from simple healing rations to flasks housing elemental summons, mind-control elixirs, and bombs capable of wiping out half an army in one good throw. Properly brewing and using these potions can turn hopeless defeats into easy victories.
Necromancers, on the other hand, utilize essences and the souls of their fallen enemies to bolster their ranks with the undead. These lifeless units are cheap, numerous, and powerful, but they don't regenerate health, forcing you to either use them as expendable fodder or go to great lengths to keep them operational.
Artificers mine ores in order to craft glyphs for their units and artifacts for their heroes, resulting in smaller armies that can punch way above their weight class. But on the flip side, losing a single unit can be a mighty blow to their entire strategy. The glyphs you can craft range from simple, but very noticeable, attribute boosts to entirely new abilities that are much stronger than any skill you can develop naturally.
Once you decide on your crafting style, you get to choose your primary and secondary magic schools. There's a total of six of them in the game - Death Magic, Nature Magic, Earthmaster, Enchantment, Guardian, and Mentalism. The primary one gives you access to two pages worth of spells, while the secondary school gets you just one. However, you can also pick the same school twice and get access to the full three pages.
You will also be able to cast a number of universal spells available to everyone. These generally include utility spells that let you exchange resources or move your units around the map. And once your campaign gets going, you'll be able to discover some new spell pages even from those schools you didn't originally pick.
Next comes the choice of your starting location. Conquest of Eo takes place on this huge open map with several distinct regions, each with its own geography, factions, challenges, and common enemy types. So this choice will pretty much determine what you'll be doing during the early-to-mid sections of the game.
Finally, you get to decide on a difficulty level. The game offers five presets there. In a refreshing change of pace, the default level is far from a cakewalk. It punishes your mistakes and doesn't go easy on you, provided you don't know how to properly beeline for all the best upgrades and unlocks right out of the gate. Which you shouldn't during your first playthrough. What would be welcome there, though, is the ability to customize these presets, decoupling the economic challenges from the combat ones.
Master of Your Domain
Once you're done setting up your character, you can start your journey. If you ever played the older Heroes of Might and Magic campaigns, you might remember being somewhat frustrated by them essentially being a few short, mostly self-contained scenarios strung together by a loose plot.
If you'd like to play something like that, but significantly more robust, Conquest of Eo is precisely the game for you. In general terms, the game's campaign is essentially an open-world take on the earlier Disciples titles with a combat system inspired by Age of Wonders.
Some of Conquest of Eo's promotional materials might have led you to believe that this was a 4X game, but that's not entirely correct. So, while you'll be doing plenty of exploring, expanding, exterminating, and exploiting in Conquest of Eo, you won't be building and developing cities, advancing through complex tech trees, or creating a vast empire here. And your AI opponents, be it in the form of The Circle mages or various neutral factions, won't be playing the same game as you do, which is usually the case for 4X titles.
The mages especially start the game with vast territories and resources, and the ability to spawn entire armies out of thin air if you annoy them too much. And seeing how mages, as a general rule, are a fairly irritable bunch, the opportunities to cozy up to them will be few and far between, leading to frequent clashes and constantly escalating tensions between you and The Circle. This makes them into more of a dynamic challenge as opposed to other players on the board.
There's actually a curious system in place where once your relationship with a certain mage deteriorates enough, you enter a Cold War phase where they deem it fit to launch probing raids into your territory to deprive you of resources, but without trying to wipe you out for good.
In the meantime, and before things come to that, you'll be rebuilding a collapsed tower, as mages are known to do, and gradually deciphering your master's grimoire. That tower will be your main source of Domain - an area of influence allowing you to extract resources from surrounding lands and take control of special structures that allow you to recruit new units or grant production bonuses.
The game's resources come in the form of gold, mana, and research points. And then there's the Allfire, a special resource that you can spread around to boost your mana and research output, but also gradually increase your mastery over magic, allowing you to cast more and more powerful spells. Reaching certain mastery thresholds also makes your tower grow, unlocks additional construction slots, and grants other useful boons.
The thing to keep in mind when it comes to Domain is that the resource-producing structures within it have the rather annoying tendency to run out. This means eventually, you'll need to research a spell that allows you to move your tower to a different location.
This leads us to the game's basic loop where you'll be working on unlocking the secrets of the grimoire by researching new spells and performing various arcane tasks while scouring the world for rare and precious ingredients or ancient secrets. You know, your standard mage fair. But in order to not fall behind and become easy prey for your foes, you'll need to be on the move, in constant pursuit of easy-to-defend resource-rich spots.
But you won't be able to just consolidate your forces in one area, because you'll also have to claim and protect the precious Allfire nodes scattered all over the map that act as a magnet for just about every monster and mage in the area. And if that wasn't enough, you'll need to keep harvesting all sorts of resources required for your crafting. The special worker units you'll have for that, as you might imagine, tend to be really bad at fighting, necessitating an armed escort more often than not.
And once you start looking to recruit some units that are not the basic goblins, you'll need to keep sending your minions out into the world in search of towns that sell useful goods and offer powerful troops, but only to those they trust. And that means building lasting relationships and undertaking side quests from those towns and their surrounding villages. And as you're doing that, you'll also want to explore the numerous points of interest dotting the map.
The game basically pulls you in every direction imaginable, doing everything in its power to not let you become a scholarly hermit in your cozy tower.
The one thing making it all possible are the heroes and apprentices that can join you on your quest. They can lead your armies, equip powerful artifacts, and possess unique powerful abilities. Heroes also come with elaborate personal quests, while an apprentice can construct a lodge that acts as a little piece of Domain away from home but requires constant protection.
You put all of this together and you get a game that's overwhelming in the best way possible. There are so many systems, so many things to consider, so many neat little interactions. And seeing how vast and open the game's world is, it's easy to get so absorbed in the whole experience of going with the flow while juggling ten different things, to completely lose track of time.
The game doesn't hold your hand too much either. Playing as an alchemist, at some point you'll be tasked with procuring three philosopher's stones. And it's up to you to figure out what those even are and where to get them.
Maybe you'll find one as a random drop and start scouring the world for other such treasures. But then you'll be experimenting with your cauldron, and just stumble onto a recipe to create one. Then, of course, you'll need to have the resources to actually do it.
All of this really does make you feel like you're engaging in something arcane and mysterious and not just following a checklist, even though that's exactly what you're doing. It's just a magic checklist, and that makes it much better.
This gradual progression also helps keep things fresh, as you'll be discovering new systems, like the ability to build extensions for the rooms in your tower, a good dozen hours into your first campaign.
Then, there are the neat little touches that make the whole experience that much deeper. Like how most regular units can't cross rivers. But if you have the right spell page, you can freeze said river and just walk over it. Or how The Circle mages don't necessarily see eye to eye with the neutral factions, and so, even though neither of them like you very much, they can fight among each other, in the process saving your holdings from getting pillaged.
The one area that could've used a bit more love are the game's narrative sections. The main quest is interesting enough, sure, but the vast majority of side content tends to be rather simplistic.
And that big main quest itself is somewhat incongruent with some of the game's design philosophies. Like how you're incentivized to do multiple playthroughs thanks to the vastly different playstyles and starting locations the game offers. But while that gives you a fresh experience and challenges, all the story events stay exactly the same.
In fact, the game's very map is designed in a somewhat odd way where all the major landmarks and areas are set in stone, and only the random events and points of interest get shuffled around between playthroughs. You do also get a new cast of Circle mages to butt heads with, as there are more of them than fits in a single campaign, and that's a definite plus.
Still, the feeling remains that the game could've used a sandbox mode of some sort allowing you to eschew the big story and instead fine-tune the map's size and features, and maybe the number and identity of your AI opponents. Alternatively, it could offer some tighter custom scenarios for us to tackle.
Conquest of Wonders
As mentioned previously, Conquest of Eo's combat system feels strongly inspired by the Age of Wonders series. It takes place on a hex grid where one side moves its units, and then the other one gets a turn.
Each unit gets three action points, two of which they can use for movement, while the third one has to be spent on an attack or some ability. However, if you forego movement, a unit gets to attack up to three times per turn.
There's also a "paying it forward" retaliation system where units retaliate when attacked in melee, but they do it with action points of their following turn, resulting in them skipping entire turns at times.
Simple on the surface, there's a lot of nuance to Conquest of Eo's battles, with things like elevation, distance, line of sight obstructions, morale, and different damage types and resistances coming into play. The direction a unit is facing is also taken into account, which is always great to see.
Outside of combat, units of different factions have various bonuses, penalties, and skills associated with them. And each unit, except for certain arcane summons, can level up. Doing so, lets you choose between two new abilities randomly picked from a fairly large pool, but once again, these pools differ between units and factions. This results in you getting attached to your troops way more than if they were merely an assembly of set numbers and skills.
Most battles take place in randomized arenas determined by the area you're fighting in. These tend to be generally well-designed and offer a few ways to approach them. But what can be annoying is that whenever you reload, say if you want to retry some battle and refine your tactics for it, you frequently get another arena necessitating an entirely different approach. And that can be doubly frustrating because you can't rearrange your troops before a battle starts.
Whenever you attack a stack of enemies, you get a very general assessment of your chances to win. You also have a convenient auto-resolve button, but sadly, no option to click it, see the proposed results and then decide if you want to keep them or play the battle manually.
The game's unit variety keeps things from getting stale for a long time. You might be starting your adventure dealing with brigands and overgrown insects, and feeling overpowered, but then, following a string of mistakes and events not fully within your control, you'll have to relocate to a swamp swarming with powerful undead stacks where you'll be holding for dear life, slowly losing all your veteran units and frantically trying to come up with a plan to get out of this tailspin. And then you finally admit defeat and relocate once again, which now pits you against a faction of racist Dwarves and their pet moles that seem tailor-made to counter your favorite strategies. And that's exactly what makes the whole thing so satisfying.
Technical Information
Conquest of Eo's visuals are clean and crisp, and its maps, both the overworld and the combat arenas, are detailed and pleasant to look at. And its loading screens are simply fantastic. On the other hand, its unit portraits leave a lot to be desired, while all the items and crafting reagents look downright cheap and wouldn't seem out of place in a mobile game.
The trend continues with the game's audio where its soundtrack is an absolute joy to listen to, but the barks you get when you click on your units, especially those belonging to the human faction, are borderline laughable.
The options menu is robust and can put a lot of other options menus to shame with all the clearly described and handy options, like the ability to adjust the game's font size, but also a separate slider specifically for tooltips. You can speed up the game's animations to a ridiculous degree, but also you can differentiate between your own units and your opponents. However, certain attack animations take much longer than the rest of them, and this makes fine-tuning the animation speed more annoying than entirely necessary.
All in all, it's a great options menu. Except for the fact that not only can you not rebind the controls, but there also isn't even a tab listing them. Which, considering the rest of the menu, feels like some crazy oversight.
The game saves instantly and loads relatively fast, but could do with some optimization in the latter area. You do get manual and auto-saves, but unfortunately, the game doesn't let you load directly from combat for some reason.
Another point of contention is the game's UI which is more or less functional, but far from aesthetically pleasing. Some of its elements don't mix well with the rest of it, ending your turns can be way more hassle than you would expect, and occasionally you'll be able to enter the crafting menu thinking you can craft something when you actually can't. You also don't get anything in the way of a quest journal. And because of that, tracking your current tasks can be a real chore.
The above is made worse by the grimoire UI that's actually pretty impressive and looks exactly like you would expect it to look like in a game about powerful mages. Well, at least everything runs well and there aren't any apparent bugs. Though the way morale damage works is a bit suspect, but the system isn't transparent enough to know for sure.
Conclusion
A somewhat askew balance of narrative and sandbox content, a haphazard approach to combat arenas, and a far from stellar UI prevent SpellForce: Conquest of Eo from becoming an instant, probably cult, classic.
But even so, it's still easily one of the best and most engaging video games in recent memory thanks to its complex interconnected systems, satisfying level of challenge, emergent elements, and that hard-to-pin-down "just one more turn" feel.
