Let’s take a closer look at Lords of Conquest’s brilliant gameplay! I may or may not occasionally plug comparisons to Iron Ruler during the description. Read on to find out!
This is the startup screen. If you’d like to hear the brilliant music you’ll have to check out the video when I publish it 😉
Your first setup options. New Game is a common choice. I don’t think I ever saved a game or used the map builder in 40 years I’ve known this game. (I remember trying it once and quitting before completion, but do not remember why).
Difficulty setting is interesting to know more about if you’ve been looking for Lords of Conquest content on Youtube.
Most of the videos you’ll find only involve gold as a resource and the game is sorely simplified. That means the player chose Beginner difficulty. A surefire tell that the youtuber never played the game before. Lords of Conquest is only interesting on Expert difficluty. It does not make the AI smarter. It just unlocks all the options.
The game settings are, for the most part, pretty self-explanatory.
- Build the number of required cities to win by TKO (killing everyone isn’t always possible for reasons I’ll get into below).
- Low chance: defense wins on tie. Medium means dice roll if there’s a tie and high is completely bonkers.
There’s a map generator but I cut a corner here and went straight to the list of available maps.
Once you’ve chosen a map, you finish preparing the game by taking turns to select territories.
You’ll be happy to know that Iron Ruler has a quick and convenient automatic distribution option for quicker setup.
The game finally begins with a passive run of production (each territory with resources contributes to the player stockpile, or horses). Every year that follows begins with development, but since the devs have chosen to have it first there’s nothing to develop on year 1 since resources haven’t been harvested yet.
Production ends with choosing the safest possible spot for your stockpile (year 1). You can move it later but it comes in lieu of doing other things, so a wise territory selection here saves you a possible headache (humiliating defeat) later.
I replaced Stockpiles with Capitals in Iron Ruler. The Capitals contain all the resources and have a couple more attributes. For one, if you take someone’s Capital, they lose and you get all their stuff (land, resources, units… Everything).
Prepare for attack! Move your units toward your desired target… Conquest comes next! (Only one movement)
Iron Ruler allows unlimited number of movements, but any given unit can only move once per year (either during logistics or conquest seasons).
The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Subdue! Kill! Rule!
Once you’ve selected a target you can opt for bringing in “forces”, or reinforcements (only one movement). You might need them to win, or you might just want to advance your troops to make them available for the next target.
You get two conquests a year in Lords of Conquest. I opted to make it three in Iron Ruler because conquering is fun, for one, and the map space being larger it made sense to have a little bit more movement.
You can also bring in as many unit as you like, given they qualify (no prior movement, proximity).
Boats and horses are also troop transportation vehicles (both Lords of Conquest and Iron Ruler). The change I made is units working together in synergy. Too long to explain here, but it’s my big innovation and I’m darn proud of it 😉
You can opt to move your stockpile instead of conquering a second territory. Potentially lifesaving.
The year ends with conquest, unless you play against multiple hotseat humans, in which case there is an extra season: Trade. So the second year begins with development.
Player order changes with every new year.
Here you build units using either gold or a combination of the other resources (Timber, Coal, Iron).
Available units to produce are Weapon, Boat or City (horses are “harvested” during production.
In Iron Ruler I replaced coal with stone (it felt more medieval) and had a different set of units: Knight, Archer, Catapult, Boat or City. I also have horses harvested during production. I skipped trade entirely because it always leads to getting ganged up on and that brought back painful memories.
Lords of Conquest was best played with friends or siblings to avoid staring at this for hours on end. I’m only slightly exagerating. Also my setup wasn’t the best but this was an Apple IIe game.
