Conquest!

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Finding this on steam took me back to the late 90's when I first started playing this game in the #conquest undernet irc channel. It's a fun multiplayer game that is built around strategy (alliances, betrayals, balancing armies, etc.). Think of it like a game where your goal is to reach the top rank by crushing your opponents (human or npc) by gaining land, managing troops, artifacts, heroes, and more. The creator of the game is friendly and kept this passion project going for over 30 years now which is an accomplishment in itself. You can ask people questions in the in-game chat or the discord and people are helpful, so what are you waiting for? To the victor go the spoils.

Conquest feels like a game from a different era—in a good way. Its roots go back to the early 1990s, and it reminds me of the classic MUDs and persistent online worlds that were built around strategy, diplomacy, and player interaction. Instead of jumping into a 20-minute match, you're building a kingdom, forming alliances, making enemies, and competing in a world that evolves over days and weeks. The modern client makes it much easier to get into than the games that inspired it, but it still has the depth and long-term thinking that made those old-school games so memorable. If you're looking for a hidden gem and miss the days when online games were more about community and strategy than monetization, give it a try.

"Conquest!" is a surprisingly non-P2W mobile app that's been dumped on Steam for no apparent reason... and even for a mobile app this is bottom of the barrel stuff, static screens... this might as well be a web page. Pretty sure Steam isn't here to compete with Safari on your iPhone. What do you do in the game? Tap, tap, tap on the static webpage to pretend you own a castle. This is bad, real bad. No wonder PC gamers widely rejected this. The graphics aren't great, just static images, beneath even what the mobile phones this was designed for can offer. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises. This is "free" enough, at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 6 concurr…

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I used to play this all the time with my brother. We used separate computers and it was a fun, free game to work together on. After we started making some headway in the game, people claimed we were the same person, and that it was not possible to be using 2 separate computers under the same internet. One of us fully quit, I stuck around a little bit, then stopped for a few years, and the other brother tried only to die again and again to strange balancing issues. He even added quotes/stories to all the characters in the game since he liked the idea behind it so much. He then quit for a year or 2 due to very unusual drama and getting teamed up on by the entire community except for a few others who were randomly shunned for playing a strategic game. I honestly don't blame him one bit given how long the game has been out, and the effort he put in to the game. He returned to the game recently only to have a red exclamation point pop up message except no message, he couldn't "X" out of the message, or select the green or red option to close it either. It seemed as if he was banned, likely for leaving an honest review a while back... Overall, it's a pretty messed up situation th…