Expeditions: Conquistador Preview
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The game opens with the main character creation where you choose a name, portrait and five stats - Tactics, Healing, Diplomacy, Leadership and Hunting. These are not used in combat directly, but influence elements such as dialogue, the cost of healing, feeding your troops and so on. Next, players select a roster of followers from a selection available. There are 10 "slots" in your troop and you can choose from a range of Doctors, Hunters, Scholars, Scouts and Soldiers.
Each follower has Endurance, Defence, Ranged, Melee and Movement stats plus three traits, such as "Aggressive", "Proud" and "Adventurous". Since these units represent you in battle (the main character leads from off the battle field), these stats are directly used in combat. The combined troop also adds to the leader's stats - Scholars will increase your Diplomacy and Doctors increase Healing, for example. Obviously, part of the gameplay is choosing a play style - do you have more soldiers, or sacrifice outright strength to improve healing and hunting for provisions?
Once your troops have been finalised, the gameplay opens with an overhead view of the map replete with hex-grid and the main character and followers represented by a single mounted soldier. You start in a small port town, with half a dozen buildings. "Events" are represented by an icon hovering over one of the hex grids and you click on hexes to move about or encounter one of the events.
I was broadly reminded of Mount & Blade-meets-King's Bounty. There's an abstracted view of the game world coupled with hex movement and turn-based, "arena" combat.
The first event players encounter is a minor interaction at the docks, but you can immediately glimpse the potential depth of the dialogue system. There are choices, Diplomacy impacts your success and, sometimes, there are other actions; that first encounter sees local officials confiscating your equipment and supplies and one of the actions is to leave a man behind to make sure nothing is stolen. It's a small event but you can see the potential for bigger choice-and-consequence down the track. I also really appreciated the descriptive text; beyond the actual dialogue lines, you often get descriptions of NPCs' demeanour and reactions. It seems well-written and adds considerable flavour.
