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PC|MAC Songs of Conquest

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PC|MAC Songs of Conquest

Unread postby icycalm » 26 Mar 2022 18:55

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https://www.songsofconquest.com

https://store.steampowered.com/app/8672 ... f_Conquest

Lavapotion wrote:A turn-based strategy adventure game that fuses RPG, tactical combat and kingdom management. Raise mighty armies, wield ancient magic and conquer distant lands to build an empire that bards will sing about for centuries!


I can't believe none of you except schaden have this on their wishlists. It's a new Heroes of Might & Magic-like with cutting-edge low-res 2D spritework that zooms in and out A LOT to great effect. Two campaigns and up to four-player multiplayer, which from what I remember from HoMM is a lot lower, so that's not good. But everything else looks great. It even has some city-building. The Total War: Warhammer fans should rather be checking this out.

It basically looks to me like a cross between Heroes of Might & Magic and Master of Magic, taking the MP aspect and quasi-adventuring from the former, and adding some of the strategic depth of the latter. It's quite a promising little game. Lots of D&D references too, like "fey" and "Lloth".

I don't like that the scope is much smaller than Master of Magic's, so it can't really supplant it. Master of Magic will still be better when all is said and done. But at least we have its remake [ > ] to look forward too soon, and this one should tide people over nicely until then. Maybe our people who've been playing For The King for years now could try this for a change? It's 4P instead of 3P, so that's an improvement. Not that FTK isn't great in its own right. But this one is certainly far superior aesthetically.

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Release Date Overview Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg7PEjT ... XVyolQO3wj

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The publisher is Coffee Stain by the way, the developers of Satisfactory, and publishers of the recent success story Valheim. Before that they published the 2D side-view action title Huntdown and Deep Rock Galactic, of which I am not a fan, and before that the stupid goat simulators and the Sanctum franchise that doesn't look interesting to me. So they've gotten much better with their latest releases. They are Swedish and I think most if not all these games are made by Swedish studios.

Early Access starts May 10.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2022 12:14

Game has no randomly generated maps at present, which is a huge fail for this genre. Ciaróg was saying recently that he doesn't see the point of randomly generated maps, but for some genres it's crucial, and this is one of them. Rust is another, with its monthly wipes. Alpha Centauri another (and one of the reasons it beats Civ, which by its nature is inimical to non-Earth maps). Factorio another. There's just nothing that can beat the excitement of dropping onto a map you know nothing about, and for games that are made to be replayed countless times, especially in multiplayer, you need the random generator.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/867210/d ... 0991304652

ItsRay wrote:I cant believe the devs, where is RMG ?!
Ive only watched the trailers, and theyre talking about different campaigns and lots of different skirmishes.

real talk right here, delete all the campaigns and every single skirmish if that means you bring in a random map generator. You are missing the most crucial feature of a game like this.

In Heroes you played the campaign 0-1 times. Maybe a rerun after several years. All in all, I would wager that time spent playing the campaign in HoMM3 amounted to less than 1% of total playtime. "Pre-made" skirmishes you would only play like 20% of all of them, and then maybe have one favorite map that you play like 5 times. Thats it, no one cares about skirmishes anymore.

Of course no one has concrete numbers, but I would wager that im being very generous towards campaign and pre-made skirmishes if I said that playing on Random generated maps amounted to AT LEAST 95% of playtime.


It's another case of programmers not knowing how to design the game, because they don't play games, so they wait for players to tell them how to design it. Problem is, there are casuals in this thread too who say they never play on random maps and just "finish" the game in a weekend by playing the campaign, so the question is which players will the programmers listen to? They themselves obviously prefer the casual solution, which is why they programmed the casual solution in the game and not the real gamer's solution.

I've no idea how playable the game will be to us at launch without a random generator. I think I heard that there IS a map editor in there, so we COULD make our own maps probably, as we do with PA (unless I heard wrong and there isn't a map editor yet). I wonder if in that case the game at least randomizes the starting positions.

In any case, they HAVE said they will put random maps in there during Early Access, and the game will only be like $30 at launch, so I still believe it's worth buying it and giving the devs the money, and then checking it out, and worst case scenario just waiting until the generator and other stuff are added in, just like we wait with so many cool niche games these days.
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CULT LIVE: Songs of Conquest

Unread postby icycalm » 11 May 2022 01:02

Make sure you select 1080p60 because by default it gives 360p because it's a new upload.

Songs of Conquest (The Song of Stoutheart) with icycalm 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR_rGaFrcLw

So I played the first part of the first campaign, and it's very promising so far. It looks and sounds fantastic, and there's even quite a bit of challenge for what is essentially a tutorial. I lost almost all my units in the three main battles, and I'd be interested in replaying them to see how many I could save. I read in the Steam forum that the entire campaigns currently offered take 25-30 hours, and that sounds like a good adventure, if true. I am definitely interested in playing more.

I have a couple of minor complaints so far. You can't go wherever you want in the map, and large sections are off-limits even though there are no obstacles in your way, so it feels artificial. I don't remember how this was in Heroes of Might & Magic. Note that I've only played the first couple of games all the way back in the mid-'90s, and not for long either. Just a few big MP games with people in my university, and it was a riot back then. Not a serious strategy game, but very fun with a big group for an evening. If you've played Age of Wonders: Planetfall, it's the same thing, just simpler since it was 30 years ago; that's why I say that Planetfall isn't 4X, and neither is HoMM, or this. Another way to think of them is like Super Mario Kart as opposed to hardcore racing games.

So I can't draw direct comparisons with the series because I only played the first installments, but I can tell you that this is going in the right direction, with the introduction of city-building, which however I haven't seen so far in the campaign. But the adventuring is fun (with quite a bit of storytelling in there, kinda like the 2D Fire Emblems, but not as charming; though of course nothing is), and the tactical scenes are fast and quite furious, like a 3D version of Fire Emblem, with all the cool animations and whatnot. I only dislike the pixelated zoom-ins at the end of the battle, but someone on Steam told me you can turn them off in the options.

The tactical mechanics are interesting, though some aspects are somewhat goofy, as you'd expect of a system made by programmers. E.g. they tie your spellcaster's "essence" to how your combat units are stacked in the map lol. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever, as it ties spells to melee, which is the opposite of how spells should work. Spells should be a DIFFERENT thing to melee. And they say that you get more essence if your melee units aren't grouped up, which forces you to split them up, which results in inferior melee tactics. BUT listen: ALL videogames are like this. The Divinity: Original Sin games are even worse: they don't even have any classes, and anyone can do everything. So it's really nitpicking if you expect the tactics to make sense in a videogame made by programmers. What they have here is anyway better than Fire Emblem's rock-paper-scissors mechanics, so I can't complain. It looks like a solid system by videogame standards.

There is an "experimental co-op" mode that needs to be investigated. Is it for the campaigns? Then it'd be worth playing all of them with a friend. Can it also be used to set up teams in MP? We'll need to find that out. The biggest map in MP right now accommodates 6 players, but I've heard 8 are allowed, so maybe 6 is the recommended and you can pile on more anyway. Plus there is a mapmaker and people are already sharing maps. We should be able to make a mega-map ourselves for huge games.

I'll end this by commenting on something Diamond wrote on Steam:

Diamond Dawg wrote:No simultaneous or asynchronous modes. If you're interested in multiplayer, stay away from this for now.


He's basically trashing the entire history of hotseat games here. I've been playing such games since the '90s, and this has never been an issue. Turns go super-fast here; this isn't Civ. So sure, if you have friends who are willing to wait months to play this with you, you may as well wait for simultaneous turns, that the devs are saying they want to put in. But if you know people who are interested in playing NOW, I'd say give it a try and see how it goes, because if they play without you, you'll have no one to play with half a year later. I will certainly be checking out the MP options soon and reporting back on them.
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 May 2022 22:30

Prototyping Co-op / Team gameplay and more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN7740HseTs

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That tells me there's no co-op campaign. They mean teams in multiplayer, which is even better. So I'll continue the campaigns on my own.
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 May 2022 23:08

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I am streaming right now. This pic is mine, and THIS is the moment when the game's complexity hit me: when I got a second general (they are called "Wielders"), and the management of a town. This is certainly way deeper than the first couple of HoMMs I've played.

It's not Civ, but for a HoMM-like, it's complex. It's probably about as complex as Planetfall, give or take, but I enjoy its exploration and combat considerably more. We'll see about the town-building.
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Unread postby Some guy » 21 Jun 2022 11:53

Patch notes for version 0.75.7
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 1840649451

Added difficulty levels Normal and Hard to Song of Stoutheart campaign (Easy and Very hard will be added later and difficulties to Rise of Ashes will be added)
Added ability to replay a Quick battle in Manual battle if you didn’t like the results


Might as well wait for Very hard to be added before jumping back into this.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2022 20:28

Roadmap reveal
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 0863262344

https://www.songsofconquest.com/roadmap

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Since simultaneous turns are imminent, we might as well scrap our game Chev, and try a new one, perhaps with more people, when the update hits.

I look forward to setting up a bigger game.

And btw, it sounds like they'll let viewers "control hostiles during combat". That might be a game-changer. Should certainly up the challenge.
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