Conquest Earth

Data Design / Eidos Interactive

Real-time Strategy

• Pentium 90
• 16 MB RAM
• quad-speed CD
• ROM
• SVGA graphics card
• Sound Blaster or other major sound card

Quintin Stone

Data Design (with Eidos Interactive) has jumped on the band wagon with what could have been a decent little RTS game. However, in an effort to make their particular game distinctly different from the real-time strategy games that have come before, they have brought forth a badly flawed game system that is little fun to play and seems to pose little challenge.

The plot of the game is simple: aliens from Jupiter want to wipe out the humans because a human Jupiter probe killed a good number of aliens. The aliens are really gaseous, making them capable of morphing, turning invisible, and merging together to form more powerful entities. They come to Earth and begin attacking everyone, filling the air with their sulphur clouds.

Missions

The big problem with this game is the micromanagement that is necessary to survive. You have to babysit your units or they will die. Because of this, I generally had to lump all of my units into one group, and move them en masse. These have got to be some of the dumbest units I've ever seen in a real-time strategy game. Conquest Earth boasts "advanced orders" for defense and offense, but they were, for the most part, useless. "Standard" defense mode means sit there and get killed. The instruction booklet says they will attack an enemy in range... which doesn't do any good if their enemy has longer range. Which they almost always did. So my units got shot and shot and would sit on their asses and die.

You can upgrade them to "Guard" defense mode, which works only slightly better. Infantry refuses to sit in one place, so you can't set up a nice defensive line. In Guard mode, they will move towards an enemy without provocation, if it is just outside of their range. It should have been coded so that units attack anything within range, but also move towards the enemy when attacked. But it wasn't done this way, so you can't place a line of troops and expect them to handle everything that comes their way. The only way to keep them alive is to fire for them. Why? Because grenadiers and bazooka men have small area-of-effect weapons, yet only fired them when the enemy was in the center of the area of effect, not the far edge. This means the enemy can get closer than they should be able to, and can get a few shots off. In addition, it takes a noticeable amount of time for rockets and especially grenades to reach the target, so the enemy gets even closer by the time your unit actually damages them. To guarantee no casualties, you have to fire on your own. Which gets painfully old real fast.

Which brings up another sore point. The folks at Data Design apparently thought that existing RTS interface controls were not good enough, and their system was superior. How kind to those of us who have been raised on C&C and WarCraft! Instead of the left mouse button selecting units, now the right mouse button does it! Instead of the left mouse button to move, now the right mouse button does it! Instead of the right mouse button to deselect, now a key board key does it. To attack, you use the left mouse button, and what this does is direct all of your units currently selected to fire on that spot, even if it is out of range. They don't move and then fire, they just fire. If you want them to move within range before firing, you have to use the "Hunt" or "Seek & Destroy" advanced offensive modes. Unfortunately, your units are still incredibly stupid little shits, and hesitate before firing, getting the crap knocked out of them when they do.

And how do you define a "group" from selected units? Shift and a number key. Not control and a number key, like C&C. That would be too simple! And how do you center on a selected unit? Through a complicated (and silly) "communications" system, where you tag a unit with the right control key (yes, it has to be the right control key) and that unit is displayed in one of the small maps on the right side of the screen. There are 2 windows there, and you can "tag" only 2 units in this manner. You can only view them if they are near a comm-sat (a silly device dropped by trikes) or if you have a communications building. To center on one of these two tagged units, use page-up or page-down. Otherwise, you can't immediately center on any unit, which further forces you to contain all of your units in 1 or 2 huge groups.

Vehicle movement is the worst I've ever seen. Complicated movement is slower than it was in Dune 2. In Command & Conquer, vehicles make graceful, elegant turns, resulting in speedy, unbroken movement. Not in Conquest Earth, and in addition, the vehicles have to accelerate. This means that any non-90 or 45 degree turn forces the vehicle to stop, turn, accelerate, stop, turn, accelerate, ad nauseum, resulting in incredibly slow vehicle movement. It was a nice idea in theory, may have seemed more "realistic", but ended up being the poorest system I've ever seen. Remember, realism doesn't always make a good game. Which brings us to the next problem...

Conquest Earth has made the fatal mistake of giving certain units expendable ammo and fuel. So tanks, flamethrowers, and mortar men have only so many shots before they need a chopper to air lift ammo to them.

Oh my.

Look, there's a very very good reason why this hasn't been done already. It's simply because in a real-time strategy game, you have to do the thinking for dozens of units at once. It is simply not feasible to have to double-check each of them to make sure their ammo supply is adequate or that they have enough fuel. Your units are much much too stupid in this game for a limited ammo/fuel system to work. They don't alert you when they are low, as they would in the real world. They don't call for an airdrop, as they would in the real world. And when you are trying to worry about 25 infantry men and tanks at once, directing their every movement and attack, when do you find the time to check your units to see how much ammo they have left? To make matters worse, mortars are rather inaccurate, and flamethrower troops start firing before they are even facing their target! Argh! Stupid idea, guys. Leave that sort of thing for the true Strategy games, or implement it better.

I didn't even completely understand base building in this game. You started out with a power plant already built, and you couldn't make another one. Machine gun bunkers and SAMs have to be built very near the power plant, and other buildings could be further away, but not too far. You could build an addition to your plant, which probably was needed if you had too many other buildings, but I wasn't sure. None of this stuff was very intuitive, and it was incredibly irksome that the location of my power plant was chosen for me, considering I couldn't make another one. Humans get all their money at one time, while aliens have to mine for resources, and you can build any number of buildings all at once, while infantry and vehicles can only be built one at a time. You also apparently need one landing pad for each air unit, which can get costly and bothersome when afforded only limited land for building.

And finally, every single human mission went the same way: defend your base from attacks until the aliens run out of resources, then blow up their buildings. Every single mission. The only way I could tell the last mission from the first was because when I finished, it said I was finished. Sure, the aliens had some tougher stuff, and I had some tougher stuff, but the game is all the same, making it incredibly boring.

Campagin Mode

This has got to be the worst excuse for a "strategy" game I have ever seen in my life. The interface is atrocious in all respects, the game play is horrendous, and the entire thing is a complete waste of time. They time slider is impossible to fine tune; status reports are incredibly slow to scroll, making them useless; you can't get an overall report on all of your cities in a single menu; the idea of the entire planet having only a single comm satellite is ridiculous to the extreme; the campaign main screen is the ugliest, shoddiest piece of programming I've ever seen produced in the past 5 years; the R&D interface is irritatingly slow when your choices spin around in a circle, especially when you have only 2 choices to pick from; you can't pick individual units to move from one city to another... you have to move them all together.

All in all, this is a very bad game. It has some good graphics: the explosions are very cool, semi-transparent to show the ground and/or units beneath them. The animations in human menus between missions look nice, but can be slow and tend to take too long. The harrier jet is nicely done and looks very cool. But it seems the designers of Conquest Earth thought that neat pictures would compensate the awful interface and play of this game. They were wrong. Very very wrong. I desperately want my money back.