RPGWatch Feature: Expeditions: Conquistador - Review
 

GhanBuriGhan jumped on the review copy I had to offer for Expeditions: Conquistador and came back with a lot of things to tell us about the game.
More information.

This must be one of the longest reviews we ever had on RPGWatch, but it remains to be interesting throughout the entire review.
Very well done GhanBuriGhan and thanks for doing this for RPGWatch.

Thank you GhanBuriGhan - very informative :thumbsup:

I hope you'll review some more games for us in future.

If it wasn't for my loyalty to Codexia, I would say your review is definetly superior to ours. Good job bro.

Well done, especially the two-forked commentary about what some are cheerleading as "finally no high fantasy" (as if that was a quality in itself) but then highlighting some of the problems that come with such a setting.

"Finally no high fantasy" is no quality in itself, but it is certainly refreshing after playing 100+x tolkienesque fantasy games.

it's refreshing if it's well done. The difficulties of which our reviewer pointed out eloquently.

Nice review GBG. I was originally going to pass on this due to lack of interest in the setting. After reading your review though, I might have to give it a try.

Great review. One thing though, there is an option to speed up animation (combat speed).

Thanks for the review, GBG! Very well done and covers the important RPG bases.

Nice review, and it's worth noting the first patch is due tomorrow, which will sort out a few bugs.

Daniel.

This is an awsome review. If I didn't play the game already, after this read I'd definetly buy it. And that game deserves to be bought.
GBG, I'm looking forward to more work of yours!

Nice job, leader of the Wild Men.

What a review. Eye popping, jaw dropping good! :)

This is exactly what I look for in a review - especially when the subject is a game that I know very little about but have an interest in. Informative, easy to read, very thorough, and objective. Nice work GhanBuriGhan, and congratulations on a great first review!

After reading this review and a few others, I think I'll give Conquistador a go. It seems pretty stable (with post-release support apparently on the way to iron out the smaller problems) and refreshingly unique.

Thanks all for the kind words, I am glad and a little relieved that you enjoyed it. And apologies to Myrthos and the other editors for the length - he may have regretted that fateful " there is no word limit" in an email to me…

What a kindness towards you, aint it lovely :)
Anyways, great piece of text!
Something to read at work..

Definitely a top-notch review with plenty of relevant depth and detail.

Much appreciated!

Despite all the praise this game seems to be getting, I'm just not interested in it at all. I wonder why… Not quite sure.

It's even by struggling Danish developers! I should get it just to support them.

Great review! I found it very detailed and it had a lot of depth to it. I have been meaning to pick the game up, but was willing to wait a bit. But, after reading your review, i'm not going to wait. I am picking it up after work today. Hope you write more reviews for the site.

Outstanding work!
An excellent review indeed.
The game seems very interesting. Thank you for the insight and the effort put into the text!

Now that was a great review!! Packed with info, it was a sheer joy to read. Thanks for the effort.



-Carn

Great review, I was waiting for it to decide if I should get the game or not. Now, I'm thinking I will. Hello weekend.

Nice review - on the whole matches my experience so far playing the game. I'm looking forward to future products from the devs.

I disagree. Speaking purely about settings and lore, it is certainly MUCH harder to do tolkienesque high fantasy well, than it is a low fantasy or history inspired setting, simply because experienced audience members have already seen it all. To someone like me, who has experienced tens or even hundreds of various high fantasy settings over the years in all kinds of media, another copycat high fantasy setting without a clever twist is an instant turnoff.

Great review, well-written and informative. Would read again.

I don't see where you disagree with my point.

Also lol if you think fantasy is overdone

The review was long, but it was Fellowship-of-the-Ring long, not Hobbit-long. :)
Good work!

I just finished the game. I liked the first campaign, but the second campaign not so much…
1- My characters were already high level. Only got to do like 2 advancements in the 2nd campaign. I like having things to look forward to.
2- I had already completed all invention research so again, nothing to look forward there.
3- Too much back&forth. being so far to the west, having to go back to it to add another thing was a chore (in the end I just skipped this)

But nothing to take away from the game. I liked it a lot, and didn't feel the battles were repetitive. Yes, there isn't much enemy variety, but this is not an RPG with battles every 10 seconds. There aren't many battles and usually enough time passes between one fight and the next that it doesn't feel repetitive.

Yes, the traveling can be a bit tedious. However, almost always when I was just about to get a bit bored by it, one of these random events or conversations happened, or I did find something intersting out there after all, so it just so worked OK for me.
I did not explore Hispaniola fully and left several sidequests unfinished in my playthrough, so I had a less fully developed expedition when I went to the mainland than you did. But I can easily imagine that that can be a problem. Glad you enjoyed it anyway.

By the way:

An answer to the spoiler:

I'm not much of an indie game fan, but this one sounded interesting so I bought it. While the period of the Conquistadors has minimal appeal to me, it's the overall exploration and strategy that's got me hooked. I've played quite a bit now, and I feel it's more than worth the $20 I paid.

There's enough depth to exploration to keep it interesting and the random RPG elements are really neat. I wonder how much replayability it will have though, as there are only a handful of characters to choose from and you do start seeing the same random events occur over time.

One thing that is really driving me batty is that you can't spin the camera or even tilt it— making exploration on the worldview and combat on some maps very difficult because you can't see many of the units or spaces to which they can move due to trees, buildings, etc. What's worse is that the game seems to take advantage of this at times, hiding enemies and such, which I think is a bit cheesy.

Ranged combat is all but worthless, and I have to think this mechanic is broken. Luckily you really don't need it if you level some of your other characters with "hunting" in mind.

It was also a tough game in the beginning, but I'm about 1/2 through it now and I've found it to have gotten very easy (normal difficulty) so balancing is an issue. I never lose characters in combat anymore, and rarely are they below half life at the end, despite facing greater odds. I'm also never running out of food while traveling, which happened quite frequently when I was still on the "tutorial" island of Hispaniola. With higher levels and tech, managing your army's mood later in the game is basically a nonfactor, which is too bad because the fear of imminent revolt added to the suspense in the early going.

All that said, it's got that "one more turn" appeal that's truly a special thing. Overall I'm very pleased with it and will likely buy the expansions.

You can spin or tilt the camera, hold middle mouse button (scroll wheel). IIRC, A and D also rotate the camera. I agree that ranged is probably underpowered, but I found it useful to always have one hunter on the field to mop up injured opponents that my melee soldiers couldn't quite finish - their high movement and range makes them great for that job. Agreed on the difficulty curve - I think the devs already mentioned they would address this in a patch.

Yeah, we have a content update coming out very soon that'll address some of the balancing in Mexico mostly, as well as a bunch of new events and some new features that we've had a lot of requests for. A slew of bugfixes as well.

Middle mouse button doesn't work, but I'll try A & D. That will help a lot, actually. Does that work on the world map, too?

As for the "mop up" range usage— since they hit less than 50% of the time on a good day for minimal damage at near point blank range, I've found that a scout is vastly more effective in this situation. They can move twice what anyone else can AND can contribute to overall combat because they hit hard. Ranged units literally just run around making noise with their boom sticks while everyone else fights and wonders why they brought them in the first place… LOL

Middle mouse button doesn't work? Maybe I'm confusing it with another game. But I think I remember correctly now that the buttons for camera rotation were Q and E, not A and D.

Well, Scouts hit hard, but they are also fairly vulnerable, and will often end the turn in an exposed position if used for mop up, while ranged units can do their work from behind the protection of the melee units. I typically used 3 soldiers, 1 doctor, one scout, one hunter.

That's what I'm currently using, too, but I'm about ready to replace my hunter with another soldier until ranged units are fixed. You know soldiers can shoot too, right? Obviously not as well, but missing shots during mop-up can be done with them provided you remember to switch back to melee weapon prior to ending your turn.

OK, I quickly confirmed the following:

Mouse:
Hold right mouse button and move mouse: turn camera
Mouse over edge of screen: pan camera
scroll wheel: zoom


Keyboard:
ADSW: pan camera
QE: turn camera

No way to tilt, AFAIK.

So I just finished the campaign, and for the most part I will hold steady with my initial thoughts. It should also be noted that I figured out how to rotate the camera, both on the tactical map and also the world map. Helped quite a bit, as you might expect…

My only other comment about the game itself is that it would be nice to have a fast travel option. Running back and forth to the keep really got old when you can only see about 6 inches in any direction. Another option would be to allow movement using the world map, with auto-camp enabled.

On a historical note, I'm kind of curious as to why the game seemed to ignore the Yucatan Mayan cities like Cozumel, Tulum, Chichen Itza. I realize the Mayans were not featured here (Aztecs) and that their civ had pretty much collapsed by the conquistador period, but many were still significant cities in Mexico. And then to include Masaya (modern day Nicaragua, 1300 miles south of Tenochtitlan!) as this vast volcanic landscape… It's just weird that they had that in there but left other stuff out.

Anyway, fun game to muck around with between other titles and worth the $20.