Conquest of Elysium 5 Review

Conquest of Elysium 5 (CoE5) is the latest installment in a venerable series of adventure strategy games by Swedish developer Illwinter Game Design, a small team headed by Johan Karlsson (designer/programmer) and Kristoffer Osterman (designer/artist) with additional writing from Daniel Serra and music by Adrian von Zeigler. The first version was released way back in 1993 for the Atari Falcon home computer, and regular iterative revisions for PC have been released since then. Illwinter is predominantly known for their epic magnum opus Dominions, which is also enjoying a resplendent fifth incarnation and probably the most credentialed contender for the title of “Most Complex Strategy Game of All Time”, with nothing remotely coming close to it in terms of sheer volume of content. While some superficial graphical and thematic similarities may be observed between the two titles, Conquest of Elysium is a very different beast, a many-tentacled chimera blending the 4X, survival-strategy and roguelike genres together with almost seamless stitching. Where Dominions is a heavyweight war-focused fantasy 4X grounded in real-world historical cultures and mythology (Kristoffer has an academic background in comparative religion and history), Conquest of Elysium is a faster-paced, lighter-hearted adventure game with its roots reaching deep into a pool of more conventional low-fantasy media and the table-top role-playing games so beloved of its development team.

CoE5‘s goal is stated in its title: two or more fantasy-themed characters set out to explore and tame the procedurally generated lands of Elysium, squaring off against their rivals and dealing with the occasional demon-invasion or ant-apocalypse in the process. The grid-based map harkens back to the misty days of early computer roleplaying games, a design choice familiar to players of traditional roguelikes and wargames instead of the hexagonal boards more commonly found in use today. Players navigate their forces in the eight cardinal/ordinal directions using either the mouse or keyboard, again much like a traditional roguelike (this word will come up a lot in this review: the term roguelike here exclusively refers to the original ASCII dungeon-crawling games based on the original Rogue, and not the myriad other games using that horribly misused title more accurately described as roguelites, such as The Binding of Isaac, FTL, Spelunky, etc).

Wild and ancient forests, treacherous mountain ranges, dark mines infested with dwarves, goblins, and dragons (the dwarves are the worst), frozen lakes, wind-blasted tundra, scorched deserts, citadels bristling with heavily armed soldiers and ruled by petty warlords, mysterious mages in their arcane towers, vicious deer that roam the wilds in search of unwary victims, vast oceans surrounding the mainland brimming with sea-monsters, fish-men and giant crabs, and even strange and wonderful planes of existence lying beyond the five senses, home to terrible mind-warping denizens. All this and more can be found within the wild and wonderful world of Elysium!

As can expected with a 4X-like game, the world is procedurally generated afresh with each new playthrough, although pre-made maps can be loaded in as desired. Options for tailoring the world’s generation are limited to the size of the map (the upper-end sized playing fields are genuinely intimidating), setting the bounds of the northern ice and southern desert areas, and the Society setting: this is the CoE equivalent of the nation eras in Dominions with six different configurations that determine many of the map features, challenges, and factions that will appear in a playthrough. Be warned that some classes can be difficult to play in certain Society settings: the Druid and Dryad Queen need forests, and lots of them, but the Empire Society can sometimes have very little forest, and classes that require towns and villages to generate Gold or some other faction-specific resource might struggle in the Dark Ages when there are scant human settlements. New to CoE5 are islands off the coast of the main landmass which can be reached with recruitable ships and often home to interesting settlements whose exploration can prove profitable for a brave adventurer, if they can face down the pirates, giant crab and deer.

Next, the player and AI factions are either manually chosen or set to be determined randomly, with an option that ensures that each one appears only once in-game. Known as Classes, each faction is represented by a singular character usually based around fantasy staples like Dungeons & Dragons and other pen & paper RPG settings. Illwinter do recycle art assets and concepts from their other game Dominions, and players familiar with that behemoth of a title will feel right at home as several of their favourite nation troops are replicated, always with a twist, into Conquest of Elysium; from the Pale Ones of Agartha, the Airya of Caelum, the Bakemono of Yomi and many other non-class specific units that crop up as summons, independents, denizens of the outer-worldly planes of existence and more. A Difficulty modifier may be applied to AI factions to increase or reduce the resources available to them, and they can be formed into teams. The challenge of the game, beyond the map and Society settings, is largely controlled with the Difficulty and Team settings: often it can be more fun for a strong player to face off against a team of enemies instead of individuals with a huge resource bonus, and exploration with these options yields a wide, and quite honestly, sometimes unpredictable consistency in difficulty from game to game.

Once the map has generated and the adventure has begun, new players will notice the game’s unashamedly low resolution graphics: the map tiles for CoE5 are somewhat improved over its prequel but are still basic compared to contemporary titles. That aside, they are clear and easy to read, do not hamper decision making and they’re not ugly. Like Dominions, with which it shares an artistic aesthetic and assets, each unit has just two frames of animation, a resting frame and an attacking frame, and that’s it. Despite this low resolution style, the artwork is actually very detailed and consistent, and considering that there are over 1500 different units in-game, other than ASCII there probably is no reasonable way for just one artist to represent such an incredibly large amount of content, something Illwinter state outright on their website. The fact that Kristoffer has made such an incredible amount of unit animations for both this and Dominions together is mind-blowing, to say the least.

Conquest of Elysium 5 has excellent in-game music, courtesy of composer Adrian von Zeigler: his work for CoE4 was of high quality but exclusively rather folky and I expect not to everybody’s taste. For this iteration, he has created a much more varied range of music and each faction has its own theme tune: Adrian’s versatility as an artist really shows in these tracks. These are the stand-out pieces, and I particularly liked the theme tunes for the Enchanter and the Scourge Lord, which are very different from the rest.

Like its sister project, CoE weaves its background story from the threads of information gleaned from its unit descriptions, of which there are so many that there is naturally generated a tremendous amount of lore: fortunately it is neither a chore to read nor entirely necessary to do so. Each faction is written from its own perspective, in many cases a comedic poke at a rather stuffy, ethnocentric Victorian-era anthropological style. The quality of the writing shines with inspired, good-natured humour that ranges from subtle to silly, but is usually restrained enough not to ruin immersion. Where Dominions is played with a straight face, Conquest of Elysium is served with a smile.

Players, human or AI, all start with a commander (usually a mage or leader of great power), a somewhat less powerful lieutenant, and a small initial force of soldiers garrisoning a class-specific settlement, most of which are fortified to allow easy defence from rampaging deer, soulless zombies, and other, more dangerous natives found roaming Elysium. Vision is limited to held settlements, units, and commanders, and exploration reveals the map à la traditional 4X games; a fog of war falls over previously explored territory no longer under line-of-sight and ensures that scouting forces and a liberal garrisoning of important tiles is required to prevent your enemies, whether other player-characters or independent factions, from sneaking in and relieving you of your hard-won gains. All factions make use of Gold to purchase regular troops from any of the settlements that allow recruitment and for certain special class abilities known as Rituals. Gold is generated on a turn-by-turn basis from certain captured tiles such as mines and human settlements, which vary in size from small hamlets to the massive four-tile Capital (available on the Empire and Fallen Empire Society settings only). A second major resource for many characters is Iron, which is found in mines, both surface-based and under mountains. Each class also utilises a special currency in their Rituals that can be generated from various other tiles: the Druid harvests Herbs from Forest tiles, the Demonologist, High Cultist and High Priestess all collect Sacrifices from villages and towns, several classes require gems found in mines and other exotic locations like Agartha and the Elemental Plane. Herbs can be used to call in animal allies, Sacrifices are made to summon Demons from the plane of Inferno, and so on with each character class and their own specific resource. Competition over these special currencies between neighbouring belligerents, or sometimes even between allies playing cooperatively, stimulates much in-game conflict and the very best units for each player require larger and larger stockpiles: each map can be either resource-rich or poor, occasionally making a playthrough rather easy, or very challenging.

There is a simple trade mechanic that functions in a rather unusual way compared to other games of its ilk: certain settlements give Trade points, each of which gives a cumulative chance each turn to trade one of your resources. The more trade points you have, the more consistently these items will be traded and in increased quantity. Options are limited to buying or selling just one type, at either a normal or an “overprice” rate where the volume of purchase or sale is increased, but at a significantly inflated cost. Players may not trade resources, a strange design decision presumably made to prevent exploitative multiplayer shenanigans or odd AI behaviour. The main purpose of trade seems to be to either sell an excessive surplus for increased Gold or to spend away stored riches on Iron or the player class’s main resource to quickly muster elite forces that require them.

Most factions will expand from their starting location in a race to take settlements and the best resource generating tiles early, engaging both the wildlife of Elysium and any independent factions in play, and will quickly run into their rivals frantically doing the same. Certain classes have attributes or abilities that allow them to build their strength with less early exploration required, and CoE5 is unique in that it does often allow players to take the game at their own pace rather than engage in a mad rush to eXpand as fast as possible, as with most 4X titles. AI players will kill one another off quickly or are killed by independent factions or wildlife, and new players are advised to set the Difficulty of their opponents to Knight or above to minimise this happening. Even so, it is usual for an eight-player game to become a four-player one within just twenty or thirty turns as the less successful characters are removed from the board in defeat. An occasional problem with Conquest of Elysium occurs when the AI players, usually configured to the easier difficulty settings, die off early and leave the player with a victory that feels very unearned, often having sunk several hours into their adventure. While this seems to happen much less often in CoE5 (I saw this in CoE4 a lot but it has not happened to me in this version in nearly 100 hours of gameplay, although I play on at least Knight difficulty) this is a commonly reported issue by newer players and a source of much frustration for them.

As with Dominions, Illwinter has put a lot of effort into the user interface in CoE5, which is unassumingly basic looking at first glance but thoroughly bolstered with a consistent design. Most game screens can be controlled via keyboard hotkeys, a list of which can be displayed with the “?” key, and once learned ensure the game can be played very quickly and without much need for the mouse. There are a few odd choices though: game saves are removed in the “Load Game” by mousing over the save and hitting the “Delete” key, and this screen is one of the few without a keyboard shortcut list to tell you how to do it. Also, the combat resolution speed hotkeys are different from the ones used in Dominions, which can be confusing for players of both games.

Conquest of Elysium is remarkable for its hidden complexity: the player has relatively few actions to choose from each turn, compared to other 4X-like games, and certainly many less than Dominions 5, the micromanagement of which can occasionally become overwhelming even for veteran players. This stripped-down decision-making process facilitates a fast gameplay experience and in this, CoE5 is successful as it can be played very quickly. A game turn typically involves purchasing new troops, moving commanders and their subordinate forces, performing Rituals to summon elite units (and for many other nefarious purposes), and engaging in combat with enemies met in the field. Where the game shines is in the sheer amount of content available to explore, and the many interactions between these drastically different player classes. Let’s start with the battle simulation.

Combat is a core component of the game and is quite distinct from any other title on the market. The player has no control over battle once it is initiated and, unlike in Dominions, limited options for the deployment or positioning of forces beforehand: the choices available are to set which spells are memorised by mages (which the AI then randomly picks from each combat round) and who holds which magic items, and that is it. This might sound terribly limited but by the end of a game there might be half a dozen large battles being fought across Elysium and its planes each turn, and this hands-off approach suddenly becomes easier to appreciate. Such a lack of direct interaction also means that force composition is absolutely paramount, and this is where the fun is to be found in the warfare of CoE5: just as with Dominions, once your battle lines are set and the turn is ended, you’re in for the ride and the choices you make unfold in front of you in inexorable fashion. Battles play out with the two forces squaring off against one another on a grid, each turn advancing towards one another, attacking with ranged weapons and spells and then finally closing to fight toe-to-toe in close combat, all the while with arrows, crossbow bolts, boulders and fireballs peppering troops engaged in the melee. Thus preparation is everything and the stakes are high, and even very small, early battles can be nail-biting as the exploding dice “DRN” random-number generation system Illwinter use ensures that even very weak troops have a small chance to hurt very strong ones. Combat mechanics are surprisingly complex and detailed, and will not be discussed here for sake of brevity, but a thorough read of the concise manual is highly recommended to get the most fun out of it all.

New to CoE5 are battlefield obstacles such as rocks, trees, mushrooms, and other flora, all of which can break up formations as they advance and fight, are destructible and many of which can be directly manipulated by certain spells and abilities. The spell “Animate Tree” in the school of Forest Magic transforms a static tree obstacle into a murderous Ent-like monster that can make a real mess of squishy spearmen with its flailing branches, whilst the Scourge Lord can drain the vitality from plants to power his own twisted brand of magic, wounding his own poor soldiers when other sources of life-force are unavailable to him. Furthermore, there are all new fortification types and citadel map layouts that make storming settlements even more dangerous and exciting: drawbridges channel attacking forces into a narrow formation where they can be devastated en masse with cone-shaped blasts of magic or herded into the waiting arms of something large and multi-limbed and that attackers would have preferred to have gone around instead of facing directly. Certain units can now burrow under the ground only to burst up and out behind the walls, decimating unprepared archer formations hoping to pepper your advancing troops before they reach the castle.

Battles can become very large, with huge numbers of units taking part on each side and complex combinations of attacks, resistances, counters for spells, and magic items all contributing towards victory. Magic items are easier to get hold of than they were in CoE4: certain classes can purchase them as they would heroes and commanders, and so super-combatant and thug tactics from Dominions (see below) might well be viable in Conquest of Elysium, where a single well-armed commander makes herself invincible to less well-equipped armies and stomps around the map ruining the day of anybody lacking the correct counter-spells to defeat her, which in multiplayer might feel incredibly unfair for unprepared opponents but in a single-player game brings immense satisfaction. Large battles can take a long time to play out, so there is a handy multi-speed fast-forwards control that doesn’t seem to have a maximum setting, meaning the player has great control over how quickly playback is resolved and can be paused at any time to facilitate examination of the combat log to see exactly what is happening blow-by-blow.

Both in battle and on the strategic map, Conquest of Elysium 5 offers up a huge toolbox with which the player can achieve his goals and each character class has a unique approach to victory. Summoning type classes such as the Necromancer or Demonologist spend their class currencies performing rituals, granting them access to high-tiered summoned units but risking insanity or loosing an uncontrolled demon on the world respectively. Their most powerful troops are literally pulled from either Hades or Inferno, which means that when you summon that big scary Demon Lord from the depths of hell, the depths of hell are now missing a Demon Lord, and if you happen to be standing next to his infernal citadel when he’s summoned, you’ll see he is no longer there. Demons can also be banished in combat, and if they belong to you, after the combat is ended you’ll now be controlling some rather confused-looking units in Inferno (where they’ll eventually be pounced on and killed by the slavering denizens patrolling around down there). This is just one example of the wonderful fine detail that underpins this deceptively simple-looking adventure game.

Other classes can take and hold settlements without much help from subordinate troops: the Troll King class has two units that work as a thug, or with some extra gear, a super-combatant: both terms refer to a singular commander so powerful that they can go toe-to-toe with many opponents, with a super-combatant able to take on an entire army all on their lonesome because of inherent abilities such as strong armour, Regeneration, Luck, being Ethereal or various magic spells and protective devices that ward away harm. Experimentation with other characters can yield similar results: large animals like moose and bears can tear through your starting force like paper, and I quickly learned to avoid them until I had more archers to take them down at range as casualties can cripple your early expansion. But the Dryad Queen armed with one of several Charm spells has a good chance of converting such dangerous creatures to your side before they ever reach her, and sending her alone into small groups of such animals can quickly raise a powerful army without risking your Satyr front-line. Of course, if a lucky animal passes its magic resistance roll enough times to get in head-butting range, she might well end up spitted on the end of a large antler. A high risk, high reward endeavour, but in CoE5 experimentation is usually rewarded and situations like this provide ample fuel for the imagination as you picture the beautifully serene Dryad Queen, resplendent in her fancy tie-dye frock with a hula-hoop in hand, tip-toe through the glade in careful approach to the frothing beast and calming it with soothing words. The image of her impaled on the antlers of a raging moose, as sadly witnessed on those occasions she wasn’t quite appealing enough or was wearing too cheap a perfume that offended the delicate nose of the beast approached, I shall leave to the reader’s own imagination…

Each class plays rather differently from the others: the Voice of El provides the player with a rather weak starting force, but rituals to “break the seals” of the Celestial Plane allow an increasingly powerful series of AI-controlled units to periodically spawn on the map and attack his enemies of their own accord, which is actually a lot more fun than it sounds because breaking too many seals can actually work against the player’s best efforts, with the final seal bringing on a literal end of days situation that might be more than they can deal with. Other classes such as the Japanese-themed Bakemono, the insufferable Dwarf Queen, and the new Kobold King provide the player with “free-spawn” units: every turn in certain owned settlements, new units will be automatically recruited at no cost, with varying ways to boost their power in character-dependent fashion. The High Priestess can sacrifice the populations of conquered villages to summon in terrifyingly powerful, blood-drinking giants; as a playable character, she poses an interesting conundrum in figuring out the correct momentum required to win the game: eat all your villages too early and you starve yourself of Gold, and so any subsequent loss of these precious elite units can be catastrophic, but they are your best units… As an opponent, the High Priestess is a ticking timebomb, especially for classes that rely on villages to provide either gold or some other class-specific currency, such as Sacrifices, Hands of Glory, or Hoburg Weed because if left to her own devices too long, her giants will have eaten all the population of Elysium and her army becomes an unstoppable wrecking ball of Gibbors and Anakites, and now you’ve no fuel in the tank left to fight it with.

The Warlock calls forces from the Elemental planes to fight for him: with four different types of Warlock, each with their own units and spells, this feels like four classes rolled into one and is one of the better choices if you’re planning an excursion into the other planes of existence that lie above and around Elysium. The Illusionist projects phantasmal warriors and bedazzling cantrips from pre-prepared magical mirrors, while the Enchanter fashions powerful moving constructs from wood, stone, corpses, and other materials, providing them with heavy armour and massive hit-points but no way of healing damage. The Baron gets large bonuses to gold output taxed from the population of the towns under his dominion, a varied selection of professional military troops available for recruitment, and powerful free-spawn knights from his settlements, at the expense of requiring a library to begin attracting mages to his faction and lacking some of the big, game-ending Rituals that the other classes have access to.

CoE5 has three new classes to play: the aforementioned Kobold King, who fields hordes of weak, free-spawn kobolds but has easy access to some very powerful magic users and the ability to coax dragons into their mountain lairs: these monsters roam the map of their own accord attacking the King’s enemies and generally being a massive scaly pest; the Scourge Lord, a vaguely Arabian-themed class of evil sorcerer (that Kristoffer told me was inspired by the incredibly popular 1990’s AD&D campaign setting Dark Sun) who builds terrible monuments that drain the lifeforce from the world around them to fuel his evil magic rituals and gradually desiccates Elysium into a desert wasteland, and the air-magic wielding birdmen of the Cloud Lord class, who live in a citadel in the Sky (one of three new planes of existence in CoE5) and can freely fly up and down between there and Elysium, and who seem to thrive on surprise raids on unsuspecting victims. With twenty-four classes available there are too many to discuss individually but hopefully, the reader now has some inkling of how the possible permutations of their endless combination can generate exciting stories, adventures, and challenges beyond count.

In one particularly memorable game as the Dryad Queen, I was able to take and hold most of the forests of Elysium despite fighting a constant guerrilla war with encroaching neighbours far stronger than I was, from which I could harvest the Herb resource for summoning the elite nature-based forces I needed for victory. But the High Priestess was running a bloody rampage through Elysium in her own attempt to tame the wilds, and though my outnumbered forces could hide in the forests to pick the best engagements, I couldn’t do enough to stop her exterminating the population of the world in her ghastly, blood-drenched rituals. After one of her sacred groves burned to the ground in a random forest fire event, the Dryad Queen was pushed back from one forest into the westernmost portion of the map, and still not strong enough to face her opponents, had to lie silent for several years, rekindling her strength, waiting and watching the world burn around her and plotting vengeance on her foe. I was most distinctly reminded of the Elves of Middle Earth in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, tied to an ever-dwindling forest realm and watching the folly of mortal men destroy their world around them, and I realised at that moment just what an incredibly good game Conquest of Elysium 5 really is.

What we are dealing with here is not just any old strategy game: the fantasy adventure might just be more important than the player-versus-player conflict. This does require an active imagination and some willingness to see past the rather simple presentation, but I know I’m not the only person to have experiences like this with Conquest of Elysium. I recounted this story to Johan and Kristoffer just after our interview for eXplorminate was recorded, and their surprise and delight at its telling was most informative in revealing their motivations as videogame developers.

This leads to some thoughts on just how to approach this strange and wonderful game. CoE allows for strategies that generally do not work in other 4X-like games: it is often required to fall back from unfavourable situations and turtle up in your secured territory, sometimes for many, many turns, in order to recover from a beating, sustained at the hands of one of your stronger rivals. The AI can be merciful, especially if there are other targets on its radar, and so a tactical retreat can often save your skin. Being an isolationist for much of the game is perfectly possible for some classes: it is a rare strategy game that rewards tardiness in expansion, but turtling is a viable option in Conquest of Elysium, particularly when there are still too many AI factions on the map and the player might profit from allowing them to wear one another down: several classes have tools to support this defensive approach, particularly the verminous Dwarf Queen and the Kobold King. A handful of characters, such as the Pale One and Cloud Lord, tend to be slow off the mark, and racing to victory would be quite a challenge even if you wanted to. There is an unpredictable and rather uneven power curve at play, one that can vary wildly depending on the Society option chosen, on which opponents are currently on the map, whether certain Events are running, and so forth. Where a traditional 4X like Civ or Endless Legend would have a relatively predictable set of challenges and enemy force composition for a given turn of a game, CoE does not so much. At the start, the AI will mostly be fielding early-game units but it’s not uncommon to be surprised by a late-midgame unit or two in an enemy’s force composition that you wouldn’t perhaps be expecting so early on, or for the player to carefully mass an unstoppable, game-ending steamroller of an army and march towards their last remaining opponent only to find the AI is left with nothing but a puny contingent of its lowest tier trash, having presumably been all but defeated by something else that beat you to the punch. Forces hidden in the fog of war can leap out at you and initiate a battle with insurmountable odds favouring them: scouting is essential and some classes have rituals that specifically create spies for exactly this job but the frequency with which this can happen can initially feel quite overwhelming until the player develops habits to minimise the issue.

There are certain Armageddon-like events that can trigger just a few dozen turns into a playthrough that can drastically alter everybody’s plans until they are dealt with and I expect that many players will not appreciate having their nice, fun game derailed in this way. That said, they can provide an exciting challenge to overcome to both the player, and the AI alike. Conquest of Elysium 5 leans heavily into randomly generated content, and so before the game map is generated it is practically impossible to plan anything in advance beyond some understanding of how to deal with the specific AI factions chosen for that run. Knowing the High Priestess is one of the last of three opponents left to face lends the conflict a sense of urgency for reasons stated previously, and other classes can be just as dangerous in different ways: a Cloud Lord’s ability to drop out of the sky on any of your settlements at a moment’s notice means a strong garrison is all but essential to avoid a quick game-over screen.

All in all, there is no correct approach to a game like this beyond a certain telemetry that appears during the course of the playthrough, where the player will read the signs from events and actions around them, and begin to chart a course through that particular game to achieve victory, or whatever goal it is that they have set themselves, whilst frantically reacting to threats as and when they appear. There can also be long periods where the player is left in relative peace, particularly on the occasions they are lucky enough to start on an island off the coast of the main continent, leaving the player to explore, treasure hunt, and engage their opponents at their leisure.

Conquest of Elysium 5 is difficult to score precisely because it’s difficult to know exactly what to compare it to. It bobs between genres just as one of its eldritch Horrors drifts through the Void around Elysium, and it may be a mistake to analyse it as a standard strategy game since features that would be violently rejected in a more pedestrian 4X stand firmly as its cornerstones. It can be played as a straight wargame, like Dominions, where you overcome the world of Elysium merely as a function of your attempt to defeat the AI (or player) opponents, but this is not its forte and there is so much more to the whole escapade than that. CoE5 is also a survival game, perhaps a little reminiscent of the excellent Thea series, although much less scripted. It has a strong exploration element too, as a much D&D-inspired fantasy adventure as it is a classic PC strategy game.

After some reflection, I feel the best way to regard it is just as Illwinter describes it themselves: a fantasy 4X/roguelike hybrid intended to generate challenging, tumultuous, and exciting fantasy adventures for the right kind of fine-detail obsessed strategy fan to explore. At the same time, it can be a competent strategy wargame that will delight fans of the genre with its seemingly endless content and bridges the gap between those two personalities in a way that no other game has ever tried.

But do not mistake this critique for some kind of wishy-washy It’s good because it’s weird and its flaws are beautiful man! kind of jive, intended to hand-wave away serious complaints, because CoE5 does have issues.

As previously hinted, consistency in the level of challenge is not one of the games strong points and that might be off-putting to some, but that is a feature of the roguelike genre in general and arguably part of what makes them so replayable, although CoE5 is a lot wilder, and looser, in this regard. Roguelikes often facilitate the player to pick the level of challenge they will face after the initial setup: as one example, Moria-descended games like ADOM have a partially preset structure in their overworld game-map, where an experienced player can choose the level of challenge by picking the order in which to approach a series of dungeons. Conquest of Elysium does not have such a feature beyond its starting options. Once the map is generated you survive it or you die, but each class provides many tools to help you achieve the former and so the game rarely feels like it has boxed you into an unwinnable corner, which is helped by the fact that the AI executes its own conquest in an explorative way, rather than directly homing in on you like The Terminator to stamp out your existence at the exclusion of everything else. The same game mechanics that allow for the player to wait and watch his opponents kill one another until he is ready to take them on can occasionally frustrate when the game ends just as things are starting to get exciting as the last AI player blunders its last army into the lair of a Beholder (and boy do those things hurt in this game!).

Illwinter do not plan their titles in meticulous fashion from start to finish but it is clear that their own explorative, iterative approach to game design is backed up by decades of experience and a flair for tight, interlocking mechanics, and the sandbox they have created is large, deep and wonderful: many of the criticisms you see coming from new players, approaching the title as they might a game like Master of Magic or Endless Legend and generally lamenting the growing pains of learning such a huge procedurally generated labyrinth filled full of pitfalls, might equally well apply to established ASCII roguelikes such as Nethack, Angband, and ToME, and the more I examine CoE5 in that light the more I appreciate those design decisions Illwinter have taken that might rub others up the wrong way when they mistake it for a classic 4X.

To address one common complaint of the series from this perspective, the class asymmetry and unapologetic focus on randomly generated world-building prevent that most odious of single-player strategy hobgoblins, “balance”, from ever sinking its tiresome claws in. Read this as “over-balance” if you like: during our recent interview with Illwinter, YouTube strategy gaming legend DasTactic, a man with a Ph.D. in Dwarf Fortress and that knows his stuff when it comes to procedurally-generated games, noted that CoE5 was actually far better balanced across the classes, and across its mechanics in general, than the previous game: this is a point with which I can agree. While some players occasionally report situations so difficult as to appear to be unwinnable from time to time, aside from the odd impossible start where something large and terrifying strolls into your citadel and paints the walls red with the sad remains of your starting force within the first couple of turns, I have yet to find a situation that I could not win using save-scumming even after hundreds of combined hours immersed in this game and its prequel. That said, I would caution that the sheer volume of content buried within is so huge that this does not mean such scenarios cannot happen, particularly the ones that are designed to be literally game-ending, and those frantic horror stories are reported somewhat frequently by fresh-faced adventurers, unaccustomed to the difficulty of acclimatising to plane of Elysium. Most roguelike games avoid putting high-level threats close to the player in the opening moments of play but Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead fans won’t bat an eyelid if their ‘@’ spawns a few short screens distant of a game-ending horror. For this to happen in Civilization would be unforgivable, however, and with CoE so close to both of these two different genres, whether this happens often enough to it to be a problem for you here will be a matter of personal taste. Some classes can handle such situations better than others: the incredibly tanky, regenerating super-combatant Troll King popping up close to your Burgomeister’s Fortified Hoburg hometown could be difficult to deal with, whereas the otherwise fragile Illusionist would have no trouble seeing him off with spells like Fear, to which the low magic resistance of the Troll King is particularly vulnerable.

Some players dislike what they consider to be a constant fire-fighting action in protecting hard-earned settlements from the seemingly never-ending hordes of wildlife, monsters, and independent factions that do their damnedest to recover their own lost territories. This issue is more prominent in the early and midgame: Elysium can usually be tamed, although some Society settings are easier to do so than others (the Dark Ages is particularly brutal due to the number of Ancient Forests and other monster-spawning sites that must be dealt with) and there are certain “good practices” that need to be developed in order to minimise such frustration. Less wild strategy games generally let you keep what you’ve taken with minimal effort: it is possible here, but it does require you to keep a few small “sweeper” forces back in your own territory, to pick up lost holdings as and when they’re taken by independents or other pretenders to the throne. It is advisable to leave a decent garrison on important tiles as well. Towards the endgame, usually, the player will have most of Elysium under control, barring the occasional unexpected demon invasion from Inferno, and it will only be the remaining AI factions that stand between them and victory.

There are still a few areas of the game that feel somewhat limited or underdeveloped. The text-based combat reports that whiz by at high speed during combat are informative, if a little simplistic, and during very busy battles it can feel somewhat laborious scrolling up and down through them in order to find out just how it was your Great Warlock of Fire died a few rounds ago. The endgame on larger maps can see the player holding a lot of territories and owning a lot of commanders and subordinate units, and I would like to see a way to filter results in the F1 unit list screen to avoid the endless scrolling. These are minor points and I think a more casual player is unlikely to be bothered, as they will not be a problem on the smaller-sized maps.

Kristoffer states CoE was oriented more for a single gamer, but the underlying mechanics are solid and form foundations strong enough to support an excellent and varied multiplayer romp, especially as a cooperative experience shared between friends seeking camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel! (The stuff of legend, right Boo?). The asymmetric nature of the game can occasionally mean a restart or two to ensure your motley band of power-hungry warlords are all suitably satisfied with their initial positions, but experienced throne-seekers are likely to know within the first ten turns whether they are in for torture or a treat. The game can be played very quickly compared to most 4X games: an experienced player will typically complete a medium map anywhere between two to eight hours, although the heavy reliance on randomly generated content and an inquisitive gamer’s desire to explore everything can significantly increase this on occasion. My recent Let’s Play as the Warlock, played at a leisurely pace on a large map with nine AI opponents set to Baron difficulty, took around fourteen hours to complete and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Owners of the previous titles might ask if the game is different from its predecessor enough for it to be worth the purchase price? The short answer is yes. There were numerous changes made to the previous instalment, and on paper, there does not seem to be anything particularly game-changing about any of them. But there are many new and modified features that improve the game in small but meaningful ways, and their combination works to raise the overall quality of the title much higher than the impression that their individual summing might initially imply. Despite feeling a little unfinished in places, Conquest of Elysium 4 was a good game: Conquest of Elysium 5 is now a great game and many areas that felt under-baked in that previous title have been fleshed out enough that they feel more deliberate this time around. The easier access to magic items (and a hundred new ones created for this version include many that boost magic path levels to ensure that even the generic recruitable mages can become very powerful) has opened up a world of new possibilities for your commanders, and easier access to the various planes around Elysium allows more classes to be free to suicide themselves hunting Inferno and the Void for exotic treasures! The addition of battlefield obstacles and better maps to fight over makes combat feel like a fully-featured, and finished, part of the tactical game. Sailing the seas around Elysium in ships is a lot of fun: just be careful as the world is flat and sailing off the end… well, I’ll let you figure that one out! The new map graphics subtly improve its looks but this upgrade won’t win over the “I won’t play a game unless it has AAA 3D graphics” lot any time soon. The three new classes are all very different, and very fun, although currently, they lack the depth of content that the established classes have, something that Illwinter will no doubt continue to address during the cycle of the game’s post-release development as their track record for regular (and usually unexpected) free content updates is exemplary.

Examined from this perspective then, Conquest of Elysium 5 is a stunning success and such a huge improvement over CoE4 that returning to that previous version at this point feels like an unfathomable proposition. With such a lightweight design, despite the recent migration to a 64bit framework, the game is perfect for an old laptop, where a long train journey can pass by unnoticed as you treasure-hunt your way across Elysium, and it has proven to be an entertaining way to spend time with friends as a co-op game too. The wealth of setup options allows the game to be made incredibly easy for a chilled-out adventure or very challenging for hardcore strategy enthusiasts, although it is not always easy to know which of those two you are in for with the settings you have selected! That aside, CoE5 bursts with content and boasts a versatility that puts games with much larger budgets to shame, and for players that don’t have to win every single map they start will no doubt provide hours upon hours of enjoyment. I rate it “eXemplary” with little hesitation, and look forward to further updates to the game as Illwinter rolls them in!

Ben played Conquest of Elysium 5 for just under 100 hours on both a high-end desktop gaming rig and an old Thinkpad, and aside from slower turn-processing times on the laptop, otherwise found there to be little difference between the two. Many thanks to my friend Captain Oats for helping me test out the multiplayer game mode!

Benjamin D. Halford

Otherwise known as BATTLEMODE, Ben contributes to eXplorminate via the eXplorminate Podcast and through his excellent writing! He’s a great asset to us here at eXplorminate, and we’re happy to welcome him on board! His Shadow Empire review is known throughout the internet for its depth and incredible detail!