Songs of Conquest Preview
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Introduction
Developed by Lavapotion, Songs of Conquest is described as a turn-based strategy adventure game that fuses RPG, tactical combat and kingdom management. Which, when you get right down to it, means a game that follows in the footsteps of the likes of Heroes of Might and Magic, Age of Wonders and Disciples.
And seeing how these days we're not getting any new HoMM games, Disciples is taking its cues from King's Bounty, and Age of Wonders is experimenting with various 4X mechanics, a new game of this type is very much welcome.
So, when Songs of Conquest launched into early access, we figured we simply had to check it out.
Wielders of Might and Magic
On the most basic level Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy game where you have an overworld map filled with settlements and points of interest. Your goal is to use several "heroes" called Wielders here to explore this map, gather resources, develop your settlements, produce and hire an army, and defeat your enemies.
Seeing how the game wears its inspirations on its sleeve, it's safe to say that if you know Heroes of Might and Magic, and HoMM III in particular, you'll figure out Songs of Conquest pretty much instantly. And if you're new to this particular genre, the early access version already has a series of tutorials that explain how things work.
In fact, a lot of the game's design decisions seem to stem from the developers' desire to fix this or that perceived issue with HoMM III or implement certain features introduced to that game by one of its many mods.
So, assuming you know your way around a HoMM game, let's go over some of the features that set Songs of Conquest apart from its predecessors.
When developing a settlement, you no longer have a town screen with a set selection of buildings, and instead, you have these building plots around your settlement that come in small, medium, and large. It's totally up to you what you build on these plots and in what order. If you fancy a particular unit, nothing is stopping you from just planting ten production buildings for it.
Certain buildings and building upgrades require other buildings to be constructed first, but you can simply build the prerequisite, upgrade your desired building, and then delete the prerequisite and build something else in its spot.
This new system leads to some interesting tactical considerations, especially when you throw the game's approach to resources into the mix.
You see, Songs of Conquest has six resources. Three of them are basic - gold, stone and wood. And three are more precious - glimmerweave, ancient amber and celestial ore. And instead of designing maps in such a way that you usually have easy access to stone and wood, here you can produce these basic resources right in your settlement, allowing the developers to be more creative with resource bottlenecks.
Depending on which resources you can easily access, you'll have to choose between building an army of somewhat weaker but easily amassed units or the rarer more expensive ones.
And this ties into the game's Command system where unit stacks have hard caps (that you can later increase through research) and each of your Wielders starts with only three stack slots (upgrading the Command skill and equipping certain artifacts can eventually unlock up to nine of these slots).
On the one hand, this neuters the cheesy strategy of endlessly splitting your units to bait retaliations. But on the other, this makes the power gap between low-level and high-level Wielders downright unbridgeable.
Moving on to the game's factions, the current early access build has four of them - an alliance between humans and fairies, the undead and the scholars raising them, a renaissance-age faction of merchants and mercenaries, and a faction of swamp-dwelling frog people that can evolve into dragons.
All of these factions are distinct and fun to play, maybe with the exception of the necromancers who the developers seem to hate due to some unresolved HoMM III PTSD. Right now, there are no plans to add any more factions during early access. But after the game gets a full release, we may get some more.
What spoils some of the fun, however, is how you go about conquering your enemies. Whenever you capture a settlement, you can either raze it, convert it, or occupy it. Razing a settlement clears out all of its buildings and lets you rebuild it anew. Occupying it provides you with extra income per turn. And converting turns an enemy settlement into one of your own, swapping unit-producing buildings as necessary.
This leads to two things. First - you can't ever own settlements of different factions or have armies with mixed units. Second - because you can convert settlements, while the units they produce are all unique, all factions have the exact same building progression, and that can be a bit boring. I don't know if there are any plans for this, but it would be cool if the developers added a few unique buildings to every faction with their own requirements and bonuses at some point.
When talking about a HoMM-style game, we should of course mention its heroes. Or Wielders, as they're called here. Songs of Conquest's Wielders have four basic attributes - offense, defense, movement, and view radius. Having movement as a separate attribute means you no longer suffer penalties for hiring a slow army. Beyond that, you also get plenty of artifacts, points of interest, and skills that adjust your movement points, meaning you don't just get Logistics, Boots of Speed, and win.
The game's skill system is fairly robust and more complex than it initially appears. Upon leveling up you can choose between learning or upgrading several skills, with your skill choices apparently influencing the options you will get further down the line. Higher skill tiers also tend to provide additional bonuses, as opposed to just making a skill stronger, and initially, you may not know about those. But to the game's credit, it has a Codex listing all of its skills, artifacts, and whatnot.
Beyond that, every eight levels you get to choose a Power, and those generally offer game-changing bonuses, like a blanket flat damage increase for your army or a global unit production bonus.
Another important thing to mention when talking about Wielders is that they're called Wielders because they wield magic, and that whole system is fairly interesting here.
Instead of a mana pool, your Wielders have access to five basic types of Essence, which translates into five magic schools. You also have a decent number of spells that combine several Essence types. You gain Essence through skills, artifacts, points of interest, and last but not least, your troops. Every time a unit gets a turn, it adds some Essence to your Wielder's pool, which results in some interesting considerations when assembling a magic-focused army, where you want to have a lot of unit stacks in order to maximize your Essence generation.
And while initially, Songs of Conquest's magic may seem weak to the point of uselessness, once you figure out how it works, you realize that it's actually very powerful.
Right off the bat, it's important to mention that there are no global spells in the game. And in combat, the only limitation for how many spells you can cast at any given point is your Essence pool. Seeing how the game has plenty of powerful utility spells, using them creatively can win you many a battle.
And as for the damage-dealing spells, while they start off incredibly weak, a magic-focused Wielder can improve their magic damage in a variety of ways. And here's the part that took me a while to figure out. The game has a number of skills that initially give your Wielder +2 Essence of a certain type per combat turn. Which is really not a lot, to the point that those skills read as borderline useless.
What I didn't realize initially is that once you level those skills up to level 2 and higher, they start unlocking new tiers of spells, making your magic significantly more potent.
When it comes to battles, the general template here is once again taken from HoMM III with its hexagonal battlefields where two armies take turns to pummel one another, but with a good deal of twists.
For example, initiative is now decoupled from speed. You can't order your troops to wait, but instead, a lot of them have activatable skills that do something, like prepare an "overwatch" attack or grant some buff. You can position your troops before a battle, but without anything resembling a Tactics skill, the spots available for unit placement at times feel almost random.
Units in Songs of Conquest also have areas of control that grant them attacks of opportunity against enemies that try to move past them. On the flip side, you don't have anything like morale or luck bonuses here. But instead, you get momentum that makes your units fight better after you wipe out a full stack of enemies.
And seemingly straight from some mods, you get the fairly convenient option to first try a quick battle and then either accept its results or resolve the battle manually. Though usually going for the quick battle option is only advised against much weaker opponents, as the game's AI is currently nowhere near where it should be.
At this point, the game has two difficulty levels - easy and normal, and even on normal, you would need to actively be trying to lose when playing against the AI in a skirmish match.
Still, some of the currently-available skirmish maps do offer some nice challenges when it comes to dealing with the neutral monsters blocking your progress. Unfortunately, there aren't that many maps, and the random map generator is not available just yet.
But at the very least, there's already a heap of community-created maps available for download from within the game. A lot of them offer interesting challenges and showcase just how powerful the game's map editor can be.
When not playing against the AI, you can engage in some multiplayer, either online or using the good old hotseat approach. And on top of that, I should note that Songs of Conquest supports Steam's Remote Play Together feature.
I don't know if I'm late to the party, but this feature was mind-blowing to me. Basically, once you own the game, you can click a button and invite any of your Steam friends to play with you, even if they don't own the game. On their end, they don't need to download anything and just get a window where they can share your inputs and play with you as if you're sitting in the same room. Personally, I find this fascinating.
Beyond just skirmish, you can also engage in some campaign action. Right now, the game has two campaigns representing two of the game's four factions, with the intention to have a campaign for every faction before the game leaves early access.
These campaigns are really well-designed and are significantly more narrative-driven than their HoMM counterparts. The only negative thing there is that each campaign only has four missions, and they tend to end once things get really interesting. On top of just new campaigns, I really would like it if the developers expanded the existing ones with at least a couple of extra missions.
Technical Information
Despite this being an early access release, I haven't encountered any major bugs or issues while playing Songs of Conquest. It being a Unity game, once you reveal a large chunk of the map, you may experience some slowdowns (despite the game not using a lot of resources), but other than that, it runs pretty smooth and takes mere moments to save and load.
Initially, the game's pixelated visuals may seem too busy and even somewhat off-putting, but once you get used to them and learn to recognize what everything is, you start seeing them as charming.
The audio design, on the other hand, is unimpeachable. Both the soundtrack and the miscellaneous effects are great. You even get these quick little musical intermissions between campaign missions.
The game's UI could still use some work. While it's admirable that the game basically has four screens - the overworld, the combat arenas, the character sheet, and the spell book, recruiting and moving your troops around, and splitting and combining stacks, feels way more clunky than it needs to be.
And in general, things seem to be a bit too streamlined. It really saps a lot of flavor out of the whole experience when you claim some structure or pick up an item and only get a quick visual confirmation for that instead of some neat little story about a cranky old witch or an ancient idol. I once again blame the HoMM mods for that.
But on a more mechanical side, this streamlining also results in you frequently missing those quick popups telling you what exactly you just picked up, or what the structure you just claimed does. And with the game having points of interest you can visit at regular intervals, but no proper calendar and a team of astrologers to mark it, it can be really tough to keep track of that stuff.
Another thing that's mildly annoying and should be fixed before the game gets a full release is the fact that you can't load a game from a losing battle, and instead have to quit or lose first, and then reload.
Conclusion
I'm writing this preview after spending roughly 40 hours with Songs of Conquest, which includes beating the currently available campaigns, playing a few skirmish maps, and engaging in some hotseat multiplayer. And if you ask me, that's roughly what you would expect from a full game, not just an early access release.
What's currently in the game is familiar yet fresh, fairly well-polished, and most of all, fun. And in order to become truly great, the game simply needs more stuff - more factions, more neutral monsters, more unique combat scenarios and points of interest, more artifacts, more missions, and maps.
If the developers can deliver that, Songs of Conquest can become one of the finest representatives of its genre. And while it's still early, at this point, there's no reason to doubt the team.
