In an exciting week for the 4X community with the announcement of both Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations 4 and Slitherine’s Master of Magic remake, strategy gaming auteurs Illwinter also announced the fifth iteration of their venerable fantasy 4X Conquest of Elysium (CoE) series on Monday. Rob is rather pleased with himself that he called GC4’s announcement of a 2021 appearance and so I’m going to give myself a pat on the head and a gold star for loudly predicting the appearance of CoE5 this year too: Dominions 5 has been out for several years now but CoE4 was released way back in 2015.
Conquest of Elysium’s relation to Dominions has been likened to Tolkien’s treatment of The Hobbit compared to The Lord of the Rings: while it recycles art assets from their magnum opus series, with the lore and factions bearing more than a passing resemblance to many of the nations and units found in Dominions, it is lighter in tone with a fun sense of humour. Where Dominions is dark and full of death and demon worship, CoE is also dark and full of death and demon worship, but with irreverent Scandinavian humour thrown in. It is a truly bizarre and wonderful mix!
Intended as a quicker, simpler alternative to their flagship series, Conquest of Elysium 4 was certainly not light on content, with 21 character classes to choose from each with its own unique troop types, rules, and play styles, making this one of the stronger fantasy 4X games if faction asymmetry is your thing. Players explore a wild, dangerous world in one of several eras, taking and holding villages, towns, castles, mines, and more, all while fighting off both the wildlife of Elysium and factions controlled by the AI or other players.
Combat is automatically resolved but unlike Dominions, the player does not set anything up beforehand: troop, spell and item choice on your hero characters are the only input you have, and the combat mechanics are somewhat simpler too. While this sounds a little limited it works to the game’s benefit: there is enormous fun to be had experimenting with different combinations of troop types (just as in Dominions, the number and variety of units present is truly mind-boggling, far in excess of anything we usually see in a strategy game) and a good knowledge of their various abilities is critical to success.
CoE4 is not a perfect game and even hardcore fans complain about various aspects of the procedurally generated gameplay: it leans very heavily into the randomly generated content but as a result can often feel rather unbalanced with the AI factions occasionally being wiped out by the relentless, brutal wildlife that populates Elysium before the player ever meets them. Some found constantly patrolling their growing Empire to prevent wandering boars, bears, giant crabs and the occasional Void Horror sneaking in and taking over their towns to be tiring, particularly towards the end game: it can feel a little ridiculous that you might summon a demon king from the plane of Inferno to lead your armies, but then forgetting to garrison your home citadel can lead you to losing the game literally to a single ant.
So what new features will Conquest of Elysium 5 bring? From their website:
“New for the 5th version of Conquest of Elysium is four additional planes to interact with, boats and ports which enables players to travel to islands beyond the main continent of Elysium, three new factions, new rituals and summons for the existing factions, new battle maps for different fortifications, new independent factions that fight each other, new monsters, more and different random events, and much more.”
Conquest of Elysium 5 is tentatively scheduled for an August release; the developers are answering fan questions on the game’s Steam discussion forums too, and have asked for people’s wishlists for the game: it’s clear from these threads that Illwinter are very aware of the most prominent criticism about Conquest of Elysium 4. These same discussions highlight that fan criticism of the game is incredibly varied and there is by no means any kind of consensus on what works and what doesn’t, perhaps beyond the main points I’ve stated above. Some want less randomness, some more. Fortunately Illwinter are well known for their restraint against implementing everything their fans demand or suggest and I think a good portion of the community appreciate this because it gives the games a very strong, personal feel. But it is good to know that they are genuinely interested in community suggestions and feedback nonetheless, particularly with a series like CoE, which is a good game but could be truly incredible if the kinks could be ironed out.
CoE4 is currently on sale on Steam. If you want to see CoE4 in action, you could check out my Youtube Let’s Play series playing as the Demonologist.