Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 3-5 hours
Difficulty: 5 (of 10)
Since Conquest of the Empire really does contain two different games, I've decided it deserves two different reviews (though they'll overlap a fair amount in the Components section). This is a review of Conquest of the Empire II, the Wallace/Drover game. If you're not a Euro gamer or prefer Axis & Allies or Risk, you'll probably want to instead read my Conquest of the Empire Classic review.
The Components
Conquest of the Empire contains, quite literally, 9 pounds of gaming goodness. I know because I weighed it before I tossed it into my shoulder bag and dragged it to my local gaming spot. Here's what you get that's of relevance to the II game:
- 1 gameboard
- 396 miniatures
- 120 control markers
- many chaos tokens
- many province tokens
- many conquest cards
- 75 coins
- 12 dice
- 1 rulebook
Game Board: The gameboard is, quite simply, massive. It's printed on very thick cardboard in three pieces, each of which has three panels. The front is a beautiful full-color representation of the areas controlled by the Roman Empire, centering on the Mediterranean. The edges of the map show a victory point track (bottom), a turn track (left), and an alliance listing (right) which all are easy to use. 11 key territories in the game show some numbers (e.g., "15 / 5"), which list victory points that you can earn from that space. There are also some gold and silver coins on the province that aren't used in this version of the game. Overall, the map is well done.
To a certain extent, though it looks very nice, a gameboard this size can be troublesome. If I set it up on my regular gaming table there wouldn't be any space at the table for the rest of the pieces. However I instead brought it up to my local game score and was able to hijack one of the miniatures tables for my use (both times I played the game, actually). This was a good thing, and there was happily plenty of space all around. I also learned that the board size wasn't entirely flash. Some of the spaces got entirely filled with plastic miniatures during the game, and a smaller board would have been pretty troublesome. So, if you've got the space to play it, this huge board is a good thing.
On the downside: the huge board isn't entirely used during the game, because most of the action takes place in the spaces immediately surrounding the Mediterranean, as the nearby pictures show. I suppose players might drop individual pieces in some of the outlaying provinces to block movement, but that never happened in our CotE II game, and thus we only used the bottom two-thirds of the map.
Miniatures: Each player gets: 1 Caesar, 4 generals, 20 infantry, 20 cavalry, 6 catapults, and 8 galleys in his color (red, blue, green, yellow, black, or a beautiful purple). There's also some ivory-colored pieces for cities (16), fortifications (16), and roads (20), but these largely aren't used in this version of the game, as there are a only few cities that can come into the game, and no fortifications or roads.
The pieces are all well-molded amd attractive. The catapults are particularly neat because they come in two pieces and because they were molded in such a way to act as if they're spring-loaded. If you pull the catapult arm back, it springs up. Very cool. Beyond that the ships in particular were one piece that was quite stunning.
It's also worth noting that these pieces all come neatly bagged when you receive them: no cutting pieces off of sprues!
I have troubles distinguishing between different pieces in some miniatures games like these. These ones were pretty good, with each of the pieces being very distinctive. The one exception was the generals and the infantry, which were distinct, but slightly similar. I swapped one for the other by mistake when I played Conquest of the Empire Classic with these same pieces, and then one other player tried to do the same thing in our Conquest of the Empire II game.
Cardboard Markers: The control markers, province tokens, and chaos tokens are all printed on heavy cardboard. The control markers are in the six player colors, each with a unique icon for that player as well. They're used to mark control of provinces and also are used on the tracks around the board. Province markers are labelled with province names, and are otherwise similar to control markers. Chaos markers simply show a "I", "V", or "X". These are all attractive and easy to use.
Cards: The Conquest Cards offer players various bonuses throughout the game. They're all printed on very sturdy, linen-textured cards in full-color. They have a finish on them that unfortunately causes them to stick to each other a tiny bit, but I'm hopefully that'll go away through use. The cards are overall quite attractive, and feature a lot of nice artwork. They clearly show costs on the card, and also have icons that mark how they're used. Some of the icons are context-free (e.g., a purple diamond means "multi-use" and a green circle means "return at the end of the campaign"), but once you learn the secret code, they're very nice to have.
Coins: 50 silver coins and 25 gold coins. Each of these is a huge plastic disc with beautiful, embossed artwork on the front and back. They're usefully marked "V" (for the silver) and "X" (for the gold). I suppose you could say that they're overproduced, but they're just so darned cool and keeping with the general production values of the game that I'm happy with them. These are the nicest pieces in the game, with the possible exception of those bouncy catapults.
Dice: The rulebook says the game comes with 8 dice. Both sets I've seen come with 12. This is the perfect number of dice for this game, as most players use 3-5 in a combat, and thus there are enough for the players to roll simultaneously.
They're all dense orange dice with symbols for the different army units inlaid into them. They're sturdy, attractive, and easy to read (and will be familiar to fans of Eagle Games as Attack! uses very similar dice).
Rulebook: A 20-page full-color rulebook. The rules are well-organized and illustrated, but also a bit tough to learn, but that's more because the rules are littered with special cases than anything else. However, I did have about a half-dozen questions during the game that I felt weren't adequately answered in the rules, and thus we came up with a lot of our own interpretations during gameplay.
There's some helpful information summarized on the back, including sequence of play, player action list, and unit purchase costs (though I wish the actions & costs were on the board too, since they were frequently referenced at the start of the game).
Overall, the components for Conquest of the Empire II are entirely stunning. In addition, they're amazing for the price, which is $60 retail. The pieces are far more than I'd expect for that cost.
The Gameplay
The object of Conquest of the Empire II is to maintain control of certain key provinces in the Roman Empire, and through that achieve victory.
This game is replete with special case rules, and I don't try and list them all.
Setup: The board is laid out, then each player randomly four province tokens. He discards these and places his control markers in the appropriate spaces.
The five "Senate Vote" conquest cards are placed face up.
Each player gets 80 gold and three Senator cards (a I, a II, and a III).
And then play begins.
Order of Play: The game is played over four campaign seasons, each of which has four rounds of actions. During a campaign season, the following phases occur:
- Place Province Tokens
- Place Conquest Cards
- Determine Alliances & Player Order
- Place Starting Units (First Campaign Only)
- Take Actions
- Tax
- Take VPs
- End Season
Place Province Token: Each round a number of province tokens equal to 2x the number of players are drawn and placed on the board. These tokens each list one of the key provinces on them: Hispania, Narbonensis, Italia, Neapolis, Sicilia, Achaia, Asia, Galacia, Mesopotmaia, Egypt, or Numidia. They're what you're fighting for, since you can turn them into your control markers.
Place Conquest Cards: Now a number of cards equal to 2x the number of players are drawn and placed face-up near the board. These are cards that are available for purchase during the action phase. They include "immediate use" cards which give you some benefit (or your opponents some penalty), "senator" cards which provide votes, "diplomacy" cards which you can use for the duration of a campaign to increase your forces, "multi-use" cards which may be used once per campaign,and "permanent" cards which have constant effect. They're generally all thematic, and provide color in the game.
Determine Alliances & Player Order: Now comes one of the most innovative parts of the game: each campaign the players are organized into two alliances, and you can't war with the players in your own alliance.
This is done through a simple auction. Starting with the first player a player suggests a pair of players, one for alliance "A", and the other for alliance "B". Additional players can put in more money to suggest a different pair. This continues until someone puts up a pair, everyone else passes (because they don't want to pay more money), and it's made permanent. This process of auction is continued until every player is in either alliance A or alliance B. And, the order in which the players were put up determines turn order (which is clearly marked on the alliance track).
Place Starting Units: At the start of the first campaign only, players now place their starting units. This is 1 Caesar, 1 General, 8 Infantry, 2 Cavalry, and 1 Catapult, which can be put anywhere a player has influence tokens, and 1 Galley which can be placed in an adjacent sea space.
Take Actions: Now we come to the heart of the game. Four rounds are played out, with each player taking two actions in his player order in each round. These actions come from a palette of eight actions which a player selects from. They are:
Obtain a Conquest Card. Pay for a Conquest card, which costs between 0 and 40 gold.
Recruit. Buy troops. There are five types (infantry, cavalry, catapult, galley, and general) and they cost between 5 and 20 gold each. In addition you earn 2 chaos points (which are bad) whenever you recruit.
Special Tax. Take between 5-25 gold, but also 1-5 chaos.
Buy Influence. If there is a province token in a space containing a general you may buy it for 10 gold, replacing the province token with your own control marker. If there is a control marker belonging to an enemy, you may buy that too, but only if they have no troops there, meaning that you're going to have to drive them out first! Caesars can instead buy 1 or 2 markers, at a cost of 10 each.
This is the most important action in the game, and it's what everything else leads up to. You invade territories, then you drive troops out, solely so that you can swap these markers, to give yourself points and deny them to other players.
Move Land Units. You can move land units freely on the board until they reach a space with non-allied troops. You can also convoy them by sea: as long as they start adjacent to the water you can move them to any space that is adjacent to one of your ships. This movement is really open, and you can often move a set of troops anywhere on a quarter, or a half of the board.
However when you take this action you can only move troops out of one space, and they must have a general (or Caesar) there.
Note that moving your troops into a space with other troops does not immediately trigger combat. They can in fact happily coexist.
Land Battle. In order to fight you must take the land battle option. You can then initiate a fight in a territory where you and a non-ally already have troops.
At the start of a battle you can ask allies in the same space for help and you can also decide whether to commit adjacent ships or not.
Then you fight. Each player rolls 3 dice (+1 if their army contains a general or Caesar; +1 if defending a city; +1 per special army training card they have). The dice show different units on each side (infantry, infantry, cavalry, catapult, ship, blank). Each die that a combatant can match up to one of their own troops represents a kill, which the other players allocates. After a round of combat each player has a chance to retreat, then the battle continues if not.
The losing side of a fight also takes 2 chaos.
Naval Move & Battle. Naval Move is the opposite of land move. In a land move you choose a space and then moved any troops out of there, while in a naval move you choose a space and then move any ships to there.
A naval battle may immediately follow a naval move, if the active player desires. This is fought sort of like a land battle, except it lasts exactly three rounds, and it uses a number of dice equal to the number of ships, and there's no option to retreat, and it's a lot harder to hit because only 1 side of each die shows a ship. (I think we may have used the wrong number of dice in at least some of our naval battles because it's pretty non-intuitive that it's not the same 3+ dice that you use ina land battle.)
Pass. Finally, a player may opt out of an action.
Multi-use Cards: As noted there are some multi-use conquest cards. These can be used by a player before or after one of his actions and don't count as an action. The most important are the Senate vote cards which can be bought for 15 gold. Each initiates a vote on a specific topic, e.g., "Winner earns 15 VPs". Players now bid around the table with their Senator cards until one of them has bid enough that everyone else passes. They then get the reward. And whoever controls Italia gets 1 of their Senators (randomly).
Multi-use cards are flipped to mark that they've been used, and then are made available again for the next campaign.
Tax: After players have taken all their actions, play now continues with the last few phases of the Campaign Season. In the tax phase each player earns 5 gold for each control marker he has on the board, 10 gold if he has a city in the same province. (Cities are only constructed via special Conquest Cards.)
Take VPs: Now all players get Victory Points. Each key province is marked with two numbers, mostly "10/5" or "15/5". The player with the most control markers in the province gets the first number of VPs, and the player with the second most gets the second. Ties are very friendly, allowing multiple people to earn both first and second place points. Italia is particularly valuable (25/15/10) and earns VPs for the top three players.
Now each player reveals his accumulated chaos points. Whoever has the most loses 10 VPs and whoever has the second most loses 5 VPs.
End Season: The campaign season is now ended. Multi-use cards become available again, and a new campaign begins (or the game ends after the fourth campaign).
Ending the Game: The game ends after four campaigns and the player with the most VPs is the winner.
Relationships to Other Games
Conquest of the Empire II is largely a redevelopment of Martin Wallace's Struggle of Empires (2004, recently rereleased by Eagle Games) using the Conquest of the Empire Classic map and pieces and some of its other ideas (such as requiring generals or Caesars for movement). It's a good blend of the two games, through it's largely Struggle of Empires, and I talk more about the ways in which the games vary in The Game Design, below.
Beyond that Conquest of the Empire II really isn't your average wargame. It's a strong mixture of American (clashing armies) & German (majority control & auction) mechanics, and it also features original features of its own (the alliances). I personally think it's a vastly superior game to the elimination-based Anglo-American wargames of the 1980s, but potential players should be aware that it's a lot more than just pushing armies around to kill each other.
The Game Design
Conquest of the Empire II starts off with the game mechanics of Struggle of Empires, which introduce a lot of great mechanics to the war game genre. The alliances are particularly innovate because they largely solve the problem of players teaming up against each other for the whole game; instead the game stays very fluid, with things changing a few times during the game. The idea of majority control means that you have to think about not just beating an enemy, but also how to protect your own control while eroding theirs. This goes well with the action system, which limits the number of things you can do pretty severaly, and results in some great tactics & strategy alike. The cards add color and even more variety.
These elements all work well and make CotEII a wargame well worth playing. If you're never seen SoE, that's probably all you need to know.
On the downside, I feel like the game does have complexity that it doesn't need (two different & opposite systems of movement, two different methods of combat) and it's a bit slow with fairly long downtimes (often 10-15 minutes) between your turns. In other words, it's not perfect, but still it's a very interesting wargame, and if you're looking for something in the German mold, or just something different from your average old school war game, this one is recommended, and ekes in a "5" out of "5" for Substance. It has some flaws, but it's one of the best of its class (with Wallenstein being one of the few others that I think succeeds equally well or better).
Comparing Struggles & Conquest
I was particularly enthused when I heard that Eagle Games was redeveloping Martin Wallace's Struggle of Empires because I thought the original game was underdeveloped. I even used it as an example in an article I wrote on Indie game design.
In Conquest of the Empire II Drover does fix some of the problems with the original design. The best changes occurred to the movement rules, which were an ungodly mess in SoE. I still don't think that the land & water movement rules should be so different, but the SoE rules were nearly impossible to explain, and anything is improvement from there. Drover also made a great choice in limiting the number of Conquest Cards that are displayed. In the original SotE every single one of the similar tiles is displayed at the start of the game. Having just 9-17 out at the start of the game in CotE allows for quicker & more beginner-friendly play. Overall it feels like CotE slightly simplifies the SoE model, and that was badly needed.
The new combat system in Conquest is also a real winner. Struggle's combat-system was just a bit too random, or more correctly had too much variance, allowing for fights which would could really upset how things should be. Conquest's system is still quite random, but at a much more acceptable level for the strategy implicit in the game.
I'm a little less sure on some other developments in the game. For example, in Struggle there were limitations to how much you could recruit based on population. Here that's been changed to a 2 chaos cost, which on the whole is a much better, simpler, and more consistent ruling. But as a result there's nothing to keep players from piling up huge amounts of chaos if they decide they're already in last in that race, allowing them to get tons of money and thus recruit forever.
It's also harder to actually take over territories in Conquest because it's become a three-action event: move, then attack, they buy influence. (The same process was just two steps in Struggle.) This gives your opponent and other players more chance to react and thus makes attacking a bit more difficult and thus less encouraged. This impacted our game a fair amount, though that may be because we'd almost all played Struggle before and were used to things working in a certain way.
The new system that originally struck me as the neatest was the Senate system, but it's also the system that I was ultimately most disappointed with. I'd need to play the game much more to know for sure (and that's not going to happen quickly with a game of this length), but after one play it doesn't seem to work that well. The Senate Vote cards are quite expensive (15 gold) and you might not even win the vote once you get it. Worse, if you do win you use up many or all of your Senators, and thus the card's probably going to be wortheless for the rest of the game. Spending 15 gold for the privilege of losing your Senators really doesn't fit with the costs of the rest of the game. I think it might have worked if everyone didn't start off with a hand of Senators, and I think it could have been a great system if the auction play had been just a bit deeper, but as is I'm not convinced that good players will ever grab the Senate Vote cards. But, as I say, that's analysis from one play and it deserves more.
The other really new system is the cities, which I don't discuss much above, but which you can sometimes buy for a 40 gold Conquest Card. They give a lot of great advantages, including defensive advantages and higher income, but they can also be lost to other players. Again, I'm not convinced on the cost, except as a purchase just before you tax.
In both cases I'd almost rather have seen automatic votes and automatic city buildings, as those would have introduced great new elements into the game without the costs which I think are troublesome.
On the whole I like some things about Conquest of the Empire II better and I like some things about Struggle of Empires better. I'd be hard set to say one was better than the other on gameplay alone.
I think Struggle's main advantages are: slightly more complex gameplay, and slightly better theming (the whole idea of alliances just fits better in that time period, in my opinion).
I think Conquest's main advantages are: slightly less complex gameplay, and considerably more beautiful components.
If you're trying to decide which to buy it'll ultimately depend on which background you like better and how well you respond to really pretty components (and/or a higher price). Whichever you get, you won't be disappointed.
Conclusion
Conquest of the Empire comes with two games in the box, and this is the one for Euro gamers and other folks looking for a more serious game. It's still a little rough around the edges, but it's got a lot of good systems that help raise a wargame up to the next level of strategy and in every way is a good alternative to Wallace's own Struggle of Empires, which uses the same system as a base.
