Two heroes are freely available in the game. The first is, of course, Conan, an alternative to his life love, warrior Valeria. In the campaign, before each of the five missions, or a separate game with custom settings, you choose one of these characters and that's it.
Five missions in the campaign are not many. In addition, you will find that they do not contain any story, and not at all the traditional process, where you could reach a key goal. But you will also find that there is no need for a classic campaign. The game tends to be tower defense style and each map is based on the fact that you have to withstand multiple waves of enemies. If you survive the last onslaught, you will win. And believe it takes much longer than you would expect and it takes a lot of effort and art. Especially the last mission is extremely difficult and it is likely that the enemy will repeatedly burn you to the press. Still, the game will need more content sooner or later to keep it from hitting.
Conan Unconquered is not limited to defensive turrets, traps and fortifications. Although this is one of the basic pillars of the game. First of all, you need to build a self-sufficient base with a functioning economy and plenty of raw materials. And if you have a little time, which you will not be, you can fly the more remote parts of the map and win chests from neutral creatures, which often have nests. Or go straight into the mega-strong guardians to get some artifacts. In most cases, however, you only look around to find places to extract wood, stone, iron and stellar metal from meteorites. The maps are randomly generated, so the distribution of raw materials varies.
There are no workers in the game. You choose a building and place it within easy reach of flags - the standard that extends territory and increases your command points. These are necessary for the production of units and further development of the settlement. The construction is completed spontaneously, and if it is a mine, a quarry for minerals, a hunter's dwelling, or a food field, usually animal, the increments are automatically generated. In addition, there is gold generated by the central building, which must not be destroyed and shacks, which can be upgraded to more elegant houses. You can build barracks to produce soldiers and you can do it for a while. But then you have to think about buildings to research new technologies, definitely place a marketplace for the exchange of raw materials, add various types of defense towers and traps, advanced units and ideally an elite avatar.
There is a lot of it and connected into production chains, but you can hardly make use of everything in a mission. Finance and resources must be invested in the army, which is dying in the battle and to repair the defensive walls, otherwise the next wave of enemies will overwhelm you. In addition, building objects and recruiting soldiers your investment in them does not end. For virtually everything, you are constantly deducted maintenance costs and pay. And it's not just money. For example, you pay regularly for light cavalry with gold and animals, for better dwellings you deduct wood and so on. At first glance, the mundane construction of the base is actually very speculated and the individual components and buildings are very interdependent. As soon as you miss something, it will affect the stability of the entire base. For example, if enemies destroy your standards, you don't have command points, you can't recruit units, or build missing homes. This can be a critical situation that you can no longer escape from.
The supply of raw materials, money and army capacity can be seen on the bottom bar. Ideally, there are numbers with a plus, which means that at regular intervals (after every one cycle on the circle shown) you will be given a given number of resources. However, if you have high maintenance costs and a lack of the necessary production buildings, these can also be negative figures, at which time the raw materials are systematically declining. And when you run out of supplies, objects that depend on them simply stop performing their function.
Prosecuting to manage the base while reflecting enemy attacks, which are commonly conducted from multiple sides at once, is a chore especially in the advanced stage. Especially when the necromancers evoking skeletons, catapults, giant snakes and spiders join ordinary soldiers and already more dangerous riders, which calmly crawl barriers, flying monsters, fire demons and sometimes tough bosses. Therefore, you will appreciate the possibility to pause the game at any time and in a frozen time you comfortably click everything you need. Set up production, move units, assess the situation, and customize your tactics as needed. However, it will grow over your head in moments, and if you want to have more fun overall, you may want to work with other players. In this mode side by side with other participants you defend your headquarters, explore the map and face opponents.
At first, you can fully rely on the hero you chose when you started the map. He is strong, he can withstand a lot, he will put down the first two waves of enemies himself. Gradually, however, we need to think of reinforcements. Immediately after the barracks are built, you have close combatants with swords and spear throwers that will serve well later. Especially when you place them in towers. Soon you can add a ride, wizards, rhinoceros, priestess-healer, archers. Given the above maintenance costs, however, you will have a lower number of soldiers. However, they are effective in combat, especially when they gain experience and gain veteran status with a significantly stronger attack. The hero also improves, is more resilient and unlocks a special devastation attack.
The effectiveness of units is expressed in a simple diagram, where you see the ratio between infantry for melee combat, shooters and cavalry.This is actually a system of stone - paper - scissors, where you see what enemy is the unit suitable or weak. We are satisfied with this, but it is worse with the intelligence of your but also the enemy units. When your soldiers get in the way, they attack and can set a few behavioral modes, including patrolling, but they are basically independent and unreliable. They often ignore the enemies who plunder the building a little further, occasionally getting stuck somewhere if they don't move, they will move away from the base where they are likely to fall. You just have to watch them all the time. And they could show more autonomy even when fighting fires.
Exactly, your soldiers extinguish a fire, but usually only when you mark them a building or any part of a wall that is on fire. This is an interesting feature of the game, but not fully tuned. Catapults and selected enemies are able to ignite your buildings (as well as soldiers and heroes) that need to be extinguished, otherwise they will gradually burn. In addition, the fire gradually spreads to all objects within range. In the case of houses and wooden walls we understand this, but it makes no sense that even stone walls can burn to you, even if they resist longer. And in recent waves, where you don't know where to jump and you don't have time to extinguish at all, she can literally break you when the entire wall that surrounds your city falls completely flaring. Maybe you will stop the enemy from flowing, but you will not be able to rebuild the whole defense until the next wave arrives and it will immediately attack your precious buildings and it's over.
Sometimes a single fire is enough to burn a whole, labor-intensive base. Although your soldiers do not need to carry water from a well to extinguish, but when they engage in fire, do not fight, and when extinguishing, you must mark them for each section. Ideally, following your instruction, the cells should extinguish the fire at and near the site, but they will not. And it is incredibly delaying and irritating when you have to crazy like crazy, because your mentors just stand up without repetition and calmly let the city burn to the press. Finally, the more practical solution is to simply demolish the burning part of the wall and rebuild it.
Building and repairing walls is also badly addressed. This is all the more frustrating because it is a very important part of the game and, unlike some other aspects, it is designed very awkwardly. In the construction of walls, it is particularly cumbersome to join individual walls, while repairing the filling of places that have been broken by enemies. On the map they are hard to see, sometimes you just do not notice the holes and when you see them, there is a problem hitting the mouse to fill the missing piece of the wall. You often realize a critical gap in defense only when the first enemies invade you to start making a galiba in the city. And believe that sometimes it is enough only once that your opponent will break through the walls, destroy several buildings and in a moment your entire defense will break up like a carat house. You just can't start your economy again, get the walls, buy units, and the next one - two waves arrive.
Despite these shortcomings, the game experience is particularly positive. Petroglyph in his latest RTS (especially the 8-bit series) showed that he would fit less extensive strategies with dynamic advancement, and this was confirmed in Conan Unconquered. The game system is functional and requires players to coordinate multiple activities and track their budget. Plus, there are some interesting components that you don't often encounter in RTS, such as the decaying bodies of the fallen, which spread the disease to your soldiers. Or a desert storm accompanying certain enemies, during which you will be covered, among other things, with a minimap, so you do not have an immediate overview of the overall situation. Apropo, you can save a game only when you jump out of it, so nothing like using save and if you do a foul you load an older position. In short, if you make a mistake, you have to get out of it or fall to your knees.
The graphics of the game are not totally top, but they are not even thrown away. It doesn't look bad, but you could do more, fine-tune the details, and make animations. For example, such catapults in the terrain move very unnatural to convulsive. He is pleased that the game runs in high definition on ultra-wide monitors and the music reminiscent of movie melodies is superb. With higher numbers of enemies and buildings, however, the PC gets busy and you may experience a significant drop in framerate.
The user interface is handled quite well. Most things are conveniently selected on the bar at the bottom of the screen. You switch between building, recruiting units and research. At minimap, there are icons to immediately repair all damaged objects if they are not currently burning or under attack. And another icon to enhance just selected buildings, such as shacks or walls. During a pause, you can do this by clicking the markers directly on the terrain objects. At the top of the screen you can see the planned waves of enemies, timekeeping and orientation range of opponents. The minimap also shows the direction from which they will go.
Conan Unconquered is a challenge worthy of a tough barbarian, even if some of the things in the game are not fair or untouched. The fire that spreads across walls and buildings is an interesting part. But even a small flame that you don't manage to extinguish can turn into a fire that destroys the entire base, and is often more of a problem than the adversaries themselves. Building walls is very clumsy, and the situation is complicated by the imbecility of your units. And yet it is a game that can fascinate and spend long hours while still avoiding bouncing off enemy attacks. Although you may be hit by a tendency to fall after hours of effort at the last, twenty-fifth wave. We evaluate Conan with narrowed eyes because there is something to improve, but it is really a very addictive thing. Especially for veterans, because less experienced strategists quickly put on the shoulder blades.
