Need For Conquest

[h1]TL;DR:[/h1] The visuals may be basic, but the AI is very well done, which creates tension-filled moments as you try to decide where to allocate your limited troops. You need patience and attention to accomplish anything, which makes things rewarding and addictive (serious case of "one more turn" syndrome for me). [h1]Full review[/h1] I'm a veteran strategy game player (my favorites include Civilization, Total War, Company of Heroes and Age of Empires). I was asked to try out Need for Conquest by the developer, who I know personally. I thought I would only check out the game for an hour or two, but then the most unexpected thing happened – I got hooked! This simple Risk clone gave me the biggest "one more turn" syndrome since I played Civilization. I have put off meals and personal hygiene just so I could find out what would happen next turn: Will I finally be able to complete my conquest of South America (and get a nice draft bonus)? Will my defenses in Indochina hold? Will my two AI neighbors fight each other or will they turn their attention to my not-quite-well-defended eastern border? You get the picture. My playtime is now at 60+ hours. [h2]Some war stories...[/h2] What …

Took me a while to figure out how to play but once I did it was quite fun. Couple of things I wish were in the game: - skipping opponent moves (the animations), just let it happen instantly - more intuitive controls: sometimes clicking the arrows is difficult and clicking the buttons when drafting armies becomes tedious quickly when one has a lot of territories - achievements

A stock basic RISK like game, whose strength, I imagine, is in the variety of the maps. I played one game, and while the AI was pretty weak, everything worked. The controls were pretty solid, and the music and sound effects were fine. There was no animation. Obviously it cannot be a total RISK clone. This game does not have cards to collect, or turn ins, and there is no plus to taking out a fellow player. The game does seem to be trying to work new ideas in to the mix, for example some territories can have a resource called Stones that gives armies in that territory armor. Not sure how that works into the game yet, but it does show creativity. You don't see any dice rolls, but in the game I played I never ran into an attack that fell totally against expectations, odds wise. Not a bad thing, in my book. The game is explanation lite, sad to say. There are two modes, but the rule differences have to be sort of guessed at. Some territories have extra resources or something on them, aside from the standard coins you use to buy armies, but nothing explains what they might be. I suspect an artifact for a feature that was dropped. EDIT: I had posted that the map editor was a mystery, bu…