SpellForce: Conquest of Eo Review - Page 2
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Article Index
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.
