Songs of Conquest Preview - Page 2
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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.
