A refined, successful Fleet-Based take on the RTS genre.
The latest efforts in the Real-Time Strategy genre may be to push the proven formula into a more creative state, but there is still a lot to be said for simple polish and refinement. Over the past few years Fever Pitch Studios has been hard at work creating a fleet-based RTS that didn’t overcomplicate the process with wild new additions, but instead borrowed a little from the past while adding a few new ideas of their own.
Set in an era where beings travel the stars in very intimidating battleships, the Human race finds itself caught in a Mantis civil war. The energy-based Celareons, a long time enemy of the Mantis, seek to aid the humans in the fight for their survival against the aggressive insect-like host. If this story seems familiar it should. It borrows bits and pieces from storylines used in many science fiction based computer games.
The single-player campaign presents the story in a traditional fashion. Sparing the player of briefings, the missions use healthy amounts of scripting to set the stage for important events and points of focus. Conquest also utilizes a healthy amount of voice work, which is above average and well scripted. Still, the story will most likely not provide much surprise, as the plot is generic and in the end not very engaging.
Conquest offers a long Terran Campaign with the early missions being tutorials that walk the player through the act of building platforms and maintaining fleets. Those who don’t care for the babysitting should sit tight as the later missions are pretty challenging and lengthy. Opportunities to practice with the other two races are made available via the smaller tutorial missions design specifically for the Mantis and Celareons. It is a bit disappointing that these two groups didn’t get campaigns as long as the Terran’s, but the massive size of the Terran campaign makes up for this.
Frontier Wars is presented in a psuedo-3D environment that is full of all sorts of little details and animations. The stars cape backgrounds can look a little out of place as they are either a bit blurry at low resolutions, or their seams between tiles are visible at high resolutions. Each unit and building has its own unique animations, complete with bridge lights, engine trails, and recoil action on guns of larger Terran ships. The Mantis and Celareon units and buildings are animated just as well in terms of quality, and are quite unique to each race. Conquest also runs pretty well even with all of these highly detailed units on the screen at once. These visuals may not make the jaws on the jaded drop, but the keen attention to detail has made sure people will at least take a second look.
As always gameplay is the fundamental aspect of what makes or breaks a real-time strategy game, and this is where the polish starts to show. A person won’t find too many radical changes, but there are a few things that were pulled off so well that they cannot go without notice. The concept of unit supply, for example, has never been successfully tackled. Some have tried but the results tend to be over-complicated and cumbersome. Fever Pitch Studios has created a smart but simple supply system that has become an important part of how the game is played.
Each map is divided into a series of sectors. These sectors are connected via wormholes. Each sector has its own group of planets and other resources. The planets provide crew, gas, and metals as well as provide the backbone of planetary platforms that are responsible for unit production, researching, and the distribution of supplies.
The platform you start with is your hub. You can build more along the way to make supply lines more stable, but they are rather expensive. By building your own gates around the wormholes you provide a connection between this hub and the next system. The platforms in the next system cannot function if the wormhole connecting the two sectors is destroyed, save the possibility of a second hub being built in this section.
The units and defensive platforms found in combat situations use up supplies and in order to keep them supplied, supply ships built by the hub. Once out of supplies these ships also need to re-supply by moving into range of certain planetary platforms.
What this system introduces is a new kind of strategy that goes beyond simply rushing your enemy. Fever Pitch has give gamers the chance to win with fewer ships and smarter tactics. By destroying wormhole gates and cutting off their supply line, the act of taking a system is easier. By going after supply ships in an opposing fleet the player make their stay in the system that much shorter. What has been explained above is the most important part of what makes Conquest: Frontier Wars stand out as more than just a polished clone boasting successful ideas from previous real-time strategy games.
The combat itself isn’t as important, but by no means any less remarkable. The three races are, in general terms, balanced in terms of defense, offense, and balance. Most of the Terran units boast some fantastic abilities in any type of situation. The Mantis’ fleet utilizes mostly carrier class ships, so their combat involves more long-range cunning. The Celareons excel in stealth as well as defensive platforms. Their ships being fairly weak, the player must use the units’ special abilities to exploit the opposition’s weaknesses. On the topic of special abilities, each race’s fleet has a wonderful array of extremely useful special weapons that are as fun to watch, as they are to use. These special abilities further cement the idea that this is a ‘fleet-combat’ game as most fleets perform best as a mixture of many different ship types.
So how does one manage their fleet? Conquest’s interface is extremely intuitive offering up a very organized way of giving the player access to pretty much every aspect of the game. Controlling a large fleet of different ships, each with their own special weapon that could be needed at any moment, requires something a bit different. Each side comes with their own roster of experienced Admirals. Not only does each Admiral have their own personality, but they also provide various stat-boosts against other units, for other units, and against particular races. Once produced the Admiral unit can take its place and form the fleet. Once the fleet is formed the Admiral unit’s interface allows the player to access all of the special weapons the many ships in the fleet offer. All the additional commands are relayed to the entire fleet. Using the Admiral units to their full potential is essential to victory as their presence in a fleet can make victory seem that much closer.
Speaking to fans of Conquest it is important to take note how many gamers bought the game based on their experiences with the excellent demo that was released. The demo featured a multiplayer compatible skirmish system allowing players to take control of the entire Terran fleet and enjoy combat across many different maps. The strength of the demo is also the strength of the final product. Conquest: Frontier War’s skirmish and multiplayer modes boast all kinds of configurations allowing gamers to create all sorts of scenarios. Multiplayer maps are provided, but the option to create a ‘Pure Random’ map is my favorite. With this option the game will create a map that is not only random, but might place the players at an advantage or disadvantage. The net code is also extremely clean allowing people on the archaic modem devices to enjoy battles involving large numbers of units across sixteen different sectors. Very impressive.
Fever Pitch’s Conquest: Frontier Wars may borrow a bit much in terms of the settings and conditions, but it is hard to fault them for it when they have managed to bring some excellent Fleet-Based combat to a genre where games like Star Trek: Armada II have failed. Those who demand something radically new from a real-time strategy title will probably end up wanting a bit more, but those who appreciate refinement over evolution will no doubt want to check this title out.
