Lords of Conquest with an improved ruleset!
As mentioned in the Lords of Conquest game page, as great as it was it suffered from hardware limitations, with difficulty handling complicated games without freezing and only allowing 1v1 against the CPU. It was great to play against friends or siblings though.
So I made my own, with a few adaptations of course.
Much like Lords of Conquest, although with a few noteable differences (more on those in the Lords of Conquest gameplay page), Iron Ruler evolves around seasons :
- Production: A passive season during which each player’s holdings produce their annual output (timber, gold, stone, iron and horses).
- Development: Players use their resources to create units or cities.
- Conquest: Each have a turn at attempting to conquer their oponents’ territories, the ones with resources, an enemy city or capital or proximity to a strategic territory naturally having the most value.
- Logistics: Move units that haven’t been displaced yet.
- Then on to the next year, until only one remains!
While that is the gist of it, many little details make the game interesting. For example:
- Units only move once, and as many units can be sent to battle as you can (actually up to 5 of each type, and until the territory is entirely filled with belligerents).
- Hopeless battles can still have strategic value as each unit you send to battle will destroy an enemy counterpart(unless you are attacking a city fortification with insufficient numbers of catapults, in which case some or all units will be powerless).
A detailed manual covers all of Iron Ruler’s workings, as well as a built-in “advisor” that reminds you of your options along the way.
Iron Ruler is available on Steam but still needs some work. A couple aesthetic improvements and a networking system that will allow you to find opponents online and/or invite friends are in the works, as well as a couple bug fixes.
