Let’s eXplore | Songs of Conquest: Roots

eXplorminate note: Magnus at Lavapotion was kind enough to reach out with review keys for the Songs of Conquest expansion Roots. And so, ofcourse we had to get our resident Songs of Conquest expert Boho to do a let’s eXplore. Almost exactly a year ago, Boho did a review of the base game, so this seems fitting. Our podcast team is also playing Songs of Conquest, and will post an episode soon.

Songs of Conquest’s second DLC, Roots, has burst forth from the earth, bringing with it a faction of necromantic plants called the Wyldwood, a massive, spreading forested biome that’s not-so-secretly a single interconnected organism. Though these vine-animated corpses are gruesome and absolutely freak humans out (or, if they’re from Loth, thrill them), the Roots isn’t a sinister force, nor is it as simple minded as nature’s vengeance upon civilization. It will engage in diplomacy and trade with its neighbors, and even warn them in advance if it needs to expand.

If it feels like it.

A Necromancer By Any Other Name

The problem is, it can’t do any of this without a Vessel: essentially, an avatar of the Roots. As far as I’ve been able to tell – we’ll get into what I mean by that later – Vessels are the animated corpses of Wielders. Somehow, a part of their consciousness is preserved when the Roots animate their bodies, and that small degree of free will is just enough to provide the reasoning required to serve the Roots’ purpose without being so cumbersome as to make the Vessel want to fight the control of the hivemind.

The Roots attempts to convert all corpses of intelligent life it can in hopes of discovering a new Vessel – but the vast majority of the time, this process fails, creating what is essentially a corpse puppet. And, it turns out, what will be your rank and file foot soldier.

Bone is back on the menu boys.

Any time you fight humans as Roots and win, the remains will attempt to be converted to new Vessels. From a gameplay perspective, this never actually works – Vessels are your Wielders and are hired from your town center like every other faction – but it’s the narrative excuse for giving you the failed results: Broken Vessels, the skeletal remains of intelligent life animated into crude bipedal forms by vines.

Some Wielders can actually learn a skill that improves the conversion process called “Reap the Harvest,” which increases the number of Broken Vessels raised after combat – and, at max rank, immediately raises them as their substantially upgraded version for free (instead of requiring a trip back to town to upgrade).

This is, of course, just like HoMM’s Necromancy skill, with the major exception that not every single one of Roots Wielders has access to it by default. The fact that Wielders aren’t guaranteed to become good at making more Broken Vessels, combined with Songs’ pre-existing stack size limits puts some much needed limiters on HoMM3’s problem with Necropolis snowballing. At the same time, Lavapotion knows this type of gameplay was and is beloved, so research and smart Wielder building can see you raising more Broken Vessels than you lose each fight – just not right away, and not as mindlessly easily as it is in HoMM3.

Leveraging Synergies

Of course the Roots army is not all about plant skeletons – at least, only half of it is. Like the other factions, the Roots roster is split into two broad categories: Nurtured Roots, plant-fungi hybrids that are grown from seeds and spores, and Embraced Roots, corpses of various creatures the Roots animated with its pseudo-necromancy.

Before the meet and greet there’s one other unique Roots mechanic that we need to cover: Symbiosis. Roots potentially has access to all five essences, but as a result the essences are spread pretty thin – especially Chaos, which has only one source prior to their ultimate unit. This would normally lock them into casting a variety of low power spells – a weak strategy for using magic.

Symbiosis works around that, but it requires a tactical commitment. At its simplest level, as long as two Roots units are standing next to each other, Symbiosis allows them to share a single one of their essences with the other (which one is pre-defined with little rhyme or reason), potentially doubling the overall essence the two units generate. Things get more complicated when a unit is adjacent to multiple other units: while a given unit can “broadcast” its own essence to an unlimited number of units, it can only “receive” one unit’s essence at a time.

How ties are handled – when three units stand in a line, which essence is the middle unit getting? –  is not explained. From testing, Symbiosis is an inspectable buff that’s applied to other units, and the rule seems to be that Symbiosis simply can’t be overwritten by a different Symbiosis. Further, for units with multiple essences, all essences aren’t broadcast, just an arbitrarily defined one. For instance the Roots ultimate unit has one essence of each type, but then only shares Order over Symbiosis.

The Roots is a bit more direct when it comes to converting towns you conquer.

This is all well and good, however it’s important to keep in mind you only get a unit’s essence when its turn starts. This means if you want to maximize your essence gain from Symbiosis, your units need to begin their turns next to each other. In short, the bonus essence from Symbiosis is inversely correlated with how agile you want your army to be on the battlefield. The roster actually speaks to this dichotomy pretty well, giving you a selection of quick, hard-hitting, fragile units and slower, defense-skewed units.

All of this is clever, but much like the magic system in general it ultimately feels clever for the sake of being clever. There’s not a hard and fast rule for Symbiosis that always applies, just a long list of exceptions to a rule that never really was a rule.

It’s also not particularly intuitive. In its current incarnation, If I want to cast a given spell as soon as possible it isn’t hard to plan what should stand where, but the inverse problem – prioritizing my units in a certain formation and trying to figure out what my magic options will be based on that – is where I start daydreaming about magic schools and mana points.

I suspect Symbiosis probably started simple (everybody shares everything with everybody adjacent), but that proved overpowered, and it was eventually hacked and slashed into its current form. That’s inevitably a sign that an idea, cool as it might be, just doesn’t work. Symbiosis’s heart was in the right place, but this incarnation of the system should have wound up on the cutting room floor.

Roots and Shoots

The Roots’ lowliest unit is the Fungi Cluster, a Nurtured unit that serves as a weak but numerous melee fighter with bonus essence generation when upgraded. They fill a similar role as the Broken Vessels, but are equal or inferior in all ways save three: they have much higher initiative meaning they act sooner, have twice the stack size, and, when upgraded, generate two total essence (Order and Creation) versus an upgraded Broken Vessel’s one. Fungi share Order via Symbiosis.

In other factions this type of combat-weak, essence-heavy unit is generally a bard of some sort, singing battle-wide songs to influence entire armies at once. Fungi don’t follow this pattern – instead, their upgrade, the Spawn, has the ability to disperse a cloud of spores dealing half their melee damage to all surrounding hexes.

The effect is just like Acid Cloud – it lingers for a round and creatures will take damage every time they step on a new clouded hex. It’s not a bad ability if used strategically with Fog and/or Dimension Door, but Spawn are far too fragile to stay around and survive a beating.

Since my Fungi never managed to survive to do anything, here’s a picture of a nearly maxed out Roots town instead. Pretty, right?

The Tier 2 unit is an Embraced unit we’ve already talked about – the Broken Vessel. These units are decent fodder to buy time: their extremely low initiative makes sure they go after almost everything else has moved, letting them plug gaps in lines or serve as decoy targets for the enemy’s next turn. When upgraded to the Blighted Vessel, many of their stats get a healthy bump, including tripling their initiative (to 15, which is still pretty bad). A substantial boost to HP (over 50%) also greatly boosts a stack’s staying power. Broken Vessels share Arcana via Symbiosis.

Their special power, Lunge, gives the slow Blighted Vessels some help getting into melee range. Lunge chooses a random enemy up to one hex outside of their movement range and automatically moves to attack it for an additional +1 damage (so a 25% boost to their usual range of 1-4). It can’t be used if already in melee, nor can it be used if there are no targets in range. The target chosen is truly random, so your Blighted Vessel may run through opportunity attacks to reach its target. This makes it very useful for engaging while a gamble to use once multiple targets are in range.

I myself am more of a slow zombie fan, but in this case I can’t complain.

While upgraded Broken Vessels are much better units, they do come with a downside to carefully consider: by default, Roots only raises basic Broken Vessels. These don’t stack with upgraded ones, meaning you’ll either need to leave a precious army slot dedicated to the basic form or abandon the ones raised after combat.

At Tier 3 is another Embraced unit, the Spiker. I believe these are animated insect carapaces, but honestly it’s unclear. This is the first Roots unit to have more than 3 Movement, and the only Roots unit to offer Chaos Essence on Symbiosis.

Spikers are essentially light cavalry – good for picking off weak stacks for the Momentum buff or harassing archers, but quickly crumpling in a pitched fight. This puts their role at odds with their unique Symbiosis: if you want to be sharing Chaos, they’ll either need to be in the thick of things where they’re an easy target, or sitting in the back line while not really functioning as a unit. A potential third option is to bring two stacks of Spikers who move together, letting them fill their combat role while also reliably producing extra Chaos.

Spikers upgrade into Piercers, getting almost twice their previous Offense, 50% more HP, and ~35% more Defense. They also get the ability Leap, which lets them leap to a hex in their normal movement range, ignoring any obstacles or zones of control in the way.

Leap works even if stuck in melee, allowing me to evade a mismatch and close in on the infinitely annoying Nornors.

Though Leap is pretty straightforward, I ran into an issue where leaping to the maximum range immediately ended the Piercer’s turn. In other words, if I wanted to jump next to something and attack it, I had to have one point of movement left when landing next to the target. However, this behavior was either patched during the process of review or was occurring for a different reason I didn’t understand, as it suddenly seemed to work as I expected it to in a later game.

Tier 4 brings us the third Embraced unit: the Lob, Roots’ only projectile-based ranged unit. Exactly what has been Embraced here is not entirely clear – the Lob is just a crawling mass of plants, fungus, and, presumably, decay. It provides Creation essence via symbiosis.

Overall a modest archer in all respects, there’s little to recommend this unit short of the fact it leads to its upgrade, the Chucker. These are a huge upgrade in terms of potential damage (the old maximum is the new minimum), along with a boost to Ranged Offense, hit points, and modest increases to Range and Defense.

You of course unlock their special ability as well: the appetizingly named Mucus Blast, which bombards a 1-hex radius anywhere on the battlefield for 25% total damage and additionally debuffs Movement by -1 and Initiative by -5 for a troop turn. It’s an excellent use of your first turn if you don’t need to reposition to high ground, as well as being great for finishing off clumps of nearly dead stacks.

Finally back to Nurtured at Tier 5 is the Lasher, a melee unit that hits all adjacent hexes when it attacks (with no friendly fire, fortunately). While this should make it perfect for dropping in the middle of a pack of enemy units, it sadly does not get the Frontline Fighter ability, meaning there’s no scaling survivability and damage buff to aid in diving. And while they have respectable Initiative, they are painfully slow, with a Movement of only 2 hexes a turn. Notably, Lashers offer Destruction on their Symbiosis, the only Roots unit to do so.

While perfectly competent without an upgrade, those who live to dive will want the upgrade to Flayer. Health, Defense, and Damage all get healthy buffs, greatly increasing their ability to endure a salvo of retaliation attacks. Sadly Movement remains unchanged, but given Order and Arcana are easily accessible, movement is a problem you can rapidly solve.

There’s also a third option for movement – Burrow, the Flayer special ability. This lets the Flayer vanish from battle for the rest of the round, only to emerge at a hex of your choosing: however, when it emerges, it will have no movement points, though it will still be able to attack. This can greatly aid Wielders without much skill in Arcana or Order magic, meaning their Dimension Door range and/or number of charges of Quicken they can apply per cast is low.

However, there’s a downside to using Burrow: if your chosen hex destination is occupied when your Flayer would emerge, the entire process fails and your Flayer is spit out of the ground at its starting point with zero movement. Frankly I think it’s rather punitive for being too correct about where the enemy would wind up after a round since Burrow is quite an investment (essentially costing two full moves).

We continue on with Nurture units in Tier 6 with the Heart, the Roots’ bard and other ranged unit. It’s an extremely dangerous unit, both to the enemy and you, on account of its only attack: a penetrating laser that hits all hexes of the same height in front of it. It lacks the ability to actually aim this attack, so it must always move to position itself on the same horizontal row as the target(s) it’s attempting to hit. To compensate, it has the “Mobile” trait, meaning moving does not reduce its ranged attack damage. The Heart provides Arcana via Symbiosis.

Just to explicitly spell it out, the fact the laser is piercing means it has full friendly fire. And a special weakness of the Heart means it’s not a matter of if you’ll cook your own army, but when.

Hearts have the ability “Reactive,” which means they will fire their laser in the direction they’re facing every time they take damage. Not “get hit,” but “take damage.” Hit in melee? They fire. Archer shoots them? They fire. Damage over time ticks? They fire. Enemy Wielder throw a Psychic Arrow? You get the idea. Each pseudo-retaliation burns a movement point, which I believe is to limit antics where you poke your own Hearts to get multiple shots out of them. To the AI’s credit, it actually seems to try to take advantage of a Heart being in a bad position by pelting it with little attacks so it’ll cook your own army with friendly fire.

And cook it will. Despite its massive range and area of effect, this is the Roots’ second highest damage unit. If you choose to risk using Hearts and the enemy is forced to line up for some reason, you can cause horrible losses in just a single attack. Whether the green juice is worth the squeeze or not is up to you.

Hearts rapidly teach you the importance of not standing downrange.

As I mentioned, Hearts are also the Roots’ bard. Their song raises Spell Damage Power and Spell Damage Resistance. Hearts raise each by 5%, while their upgrade, the Pulse, raises each by 10%. The upgrade to Pulse greatly increases their damage and Health while granting a modest bonus to Ranged Offense and a tiny bonus to Defense and Initiative. The upgrade also adds a Creation Essence to the Pulse, though not its Symbiosis.

As a final note, try shooting an enemy Heart with one of your Hearts. The result is hilarious, and if your Hearts are left standing in the aftermath, there’s an achievement in it for you.

Tier 7 is my favorite: the final Embraced unit, the Dread. These things absolutely live up to their name, starting as six-legged animated deer skeletons that eventually become something so much worse. For the record, the Dread shares Order via symbiosis.

The Dread is a Charger unit, meaning it gains additional Melee Offense for each hex it moves before attacking a target. Its stat block fits the profile of a light lancer, with very high Melee Offense (even before Charger), high damage and movement, but low health and defense. Its animation is fantastic – like a baby deer it seems constantly off-balance, one miscalculation away from all six of its legs sliding out from under it. It clumsily rushes a target, rears up, and brings its two extra legs down on their chest. Though an effective killer, it’s still very fragile at this stage, and you’ll absolutely want to preserve as many as you can for the upgrade to come.

The upgrade will make you understand where the Dread’s name comes from: these are Terrors, the thing the enemy was dreading when it saw your Dreads. These are horrific creatures, Dreads which figured out how to sprint – and that its two additional limbs aren’t extra legs, but arms. The result is a centaur-like creature with four legs and two “arms” ending in huge, blade-like thorns. There’s nothing clumsy about these things at all anymore: they sprint to their target, cross the blades on their chest, then throw their arms wide in an attempt to cut them clean in half with a double swoop of their thorn-blade-arms.

They call them Dreads because they grow up to be this.

On top of the Charger ability, Terrors get two very nasty extra abilities: Front Line Fighter, a stacking +10 Melee Offense, Defense, and Initiative for each adjacent enemy, and Intimidating, a 1-hex aura that inflicts -10 Defense and Initiative on enemies. The Terror’s stat boosts are primarily to Damage, HP, and Defense, elevating them from light lancers to something closer to medium cavalry. They’ll be able to survive a round or two in the thick of it with minor losses, but do expect some losses without magical intervention.

Tier 8, the final and weirdest unit, is the Nurtured “Seed of the Mother.” This is supposed to be a seed of a Mother Tree – the thing at the center of a Roots base – and it’s pretty unique in that it has no means of directly attacking the enemy. Indeed, it doesn’t even have Range or Melee Offense stat. Seeds provide Order via Symbiosis, and provide one of each essence as a regular unit.

The Seed is a mobile support platform: while painfully slow (1 Movement), it has huge Defense and HP and is outright immune to magic, saving it from the fate of getting Justice’d like so many top-end brawlers. The Seed is constantly projecting roots in a small radius – just 1 hex prior to research – that have a very interesting effect: any friendly unit standing on the roots redirects half the damage it takes to the Seed via the ability Mother’s Embrace. Meanwhile, if an enemy winds up on the roots, the Mother’s Scorn ability kicks in, and they’ll take a small amount of damage at the start of the Seed’s turn. Finally, it has the Grasping Roots ability, which causes an enemy standing on the roots to lose all movement points for a single troop turn, rendering them immobile.

A late game stack of Roots of the Mother moves forward and engulfs nearly all the enemy units.

The upgrade, Roots of the Mother, adds no new special abilities. Instead it expands the default size of the root carpet to a radius of 2 instead of 1, meaning a single enemy stack can be kept at arm’s length indefinitely while being slowly “digested” via Scorn of the Mother. If it’s a melee unit, that’s as good as a death sentence without magical support. Additionally the Roots of the Mother sees a big upgrade to HP and Defense, more damage on Scorn, and doubles its movement from 1 to 2.

Overall the roster is interesting and challenging to use. Players who enjoy slower, defense-oriented or unconventional factions will probably enjoy Roots, but players who prioritize speed and power will likely get frustrated by the fragility of Roots’ aggressive units and the overall indirect playstyle.

The Root of the Problem

While the faction itself is the plant-based meat of the DLC, that’s not all there is to it. Unfortunately, the rest of the DLC is defined more by what’s missing than by what’s present.

Along with the new faction comes six handmade “Conquest” maps – aka scenarios/skirmish maps – and two “Challenge” maps – aka, story maps. One of those story maps is essentially an introduction to the faction, then you get another that attempts to palm slam the faction into the greater narrative space. And then the story is done. Once again, there is no campaign. Go play Roots in those skirmish maps, I guess?

Remember way at the top when I said we’d get to what I meant later about “as far as I can tell?” It’s later. What I’ve told you about the Roots has mostly been educated guesses, because beyond those two maps, there’s just not much to go on.

As it turns out, “Go play Roots in the skirmish maps” actually is the way forward: occasionally you’ll find small blips of background and lore in the six skirmish maps, and general object interaction when playing Roots can reveal a couple things. I’ll admit, once you discover there’s kind of a lore scavenger hunt hiding in the maps, trying to put together the storyline is kind of fun. But it wasn’t necessary to exclude campaigns to get this experience. The Roots’ background could have stayed disjointed and somewhat mysterious while the campaigns explored the Roots’ role in the present.

The cast of characters making up Roots’ Wielders are dripping with character (and, er, honey). Sadly we don’t learn more than the blurb about the vast majority of them.

Look, the DLC is ten dollars. And it’s more than fairly priced at ten dollars. But it’s also a bit like the experience of being hungry at a tapas bar: you’ll either leave dissatisfied because you didn’t like the food, or you’ll leave somehow more dissatisfied because the food was good but you’re still hungry.

I suspect the lack of a campaign is a case of a baby getting thrown out with the bathwater. Lavapotion pivoted hard from its DLC plans at the end of last year, shelving the Rise Eternal DLC after cold fan reception and breaking their Bleak East expansion into two DLC, Vanir and now Roots, to get new factions into players’ hands faster. This is, after all, what players were asking for – and I believe it was the correct choice.

That said, Bleak East was also supposed to come with at least one new campaign. New campaigns accompanying new factions is a longstanding norm in the HoMM series, its descendents, and its adjacent cousins such as the first three Age of Wonders titles. The extremely common criticism about Vanir’s lack of campaign was proof players believed “new faction” intrinsically meant “including new campaign for said faction.” No great surprise, the same feedback is already appearing for Roots.

Just to be completely clear, this isn’t to say a campaign should be included in the $10 price, but rather Roots would be so much better as a $20 product which included a campaign than it is as a $10 product without one. That is by far this DLC’s biggest flaw.

Rootin’ Around

Now that I’m done stating the obvious, aside from the faction itself, how is the rest of what you get? While I certainly wouldn’t recommend buying this just for the maps, they’re not bad. Creeping Borders, the headliner Conquest map, has quite a bit of lore hidden in it and is fun for a laid back adventure – just don’t expect too much in the way of difficulty.

The standouts to me in terms of gameplay were the heavy PVE maps that folded back on themselves in some way such as Two Forests or Portal Corners. It helps buy a little time for an AI that’s otherwise very vulnerable to being rushed or simply caught out of position.

Conversely, a small, linear map like Invasive was over before it started, with me running into the main enemy hero out of nowhere, winning a battle between armies of Tier 1 and 2 units, then walking into his empty base and capturing it.

Clicking the Roots banner in the upper right displays this popup, tracking which maps you have completed – and illustrating the DLC’s rather modest size.

The two “Challenge” (as a reminder, this really means “Story”) maps are good. Grow isn’t particularly hard, being the introduction to the Roots and their army, while Seed has a little bit more teeth, throwing larger scripted attacks at you before falling back into a typical battle royale – though it’s worth noting your opponents are relatively isolated from each other, meaning you’ll be taking the most heat.

Both Challenge maps are enjoyable from a writing angle up until their ends, at which point they convey a definite sense of being unfinished stories. For some reason both maps end on something of a cliff hanger, making each of them feel like the first mission in two different campaigns. Keeping in mind how much negative feedback Vanir got about its lack of a campaign, I’m left wondering if this was done intentionally, or whether it’s a case of being tone deaf.

Getting back to our Roots

So, is it worth it? Monetarily the answer is yes, but I’m going to stop short of giving it a full, unequivocable recommendation.

As long as you enjoy single player Conquest and Random maps, even if they’re not your #1 pick, I’d definitely recommend it. More variety is good.

If you enjoyed Songs primarily for the campaigns, there’s no rush, and I’d suggest waiting for a sale. Playing Roots is a fun change of pace, but you’ll be done with the bulk of the narrative content in a couple hours, if that.

If you primarily enjoy competitive multiplayer, I would wait and see. Right now it seems like Roots takes too long to come online to be playable in PvP.

And this one is probably obvious, but to be clear: if you didn’t like Songs to begin with, Roots won’t change that.

Ok, it’s about time I stopped shoehorning the word “roots” into headers. Until next time, may your Hearts and Pulses kill more of the enemy’s army than your own!

boho

A victim of Heroes of Might and Magic II in his formative years, Boho has been a rabid fan of tactical RPGs and turn-based strategy ever since. Truly a cautionary tale.