There’s something to be said for a turn-based strategy game of conquest and resource management that keeps things simple, though admittedly that task is made easier when your game faithfully follows the blueprint of one of the most enduringly accessible strategy games ever made. Songs of Conquest came out on Steam Early Access in March 2022 and has been steadily marching towards full release since then.
The game is every bit a spiritual successor to 1999’s Heroes of Might & Magic 3, and sees you traversing a map with one of several heroes (or Wielders, as they’re called in Songs of Conquest), gathering resources, building up towns, and mustering armies so that you may take out your rival players. It’s presented through an eye-catching fusion art style where beautifully animated pixel objects exist on a 3D plane, giving the whole thing the appearance of a fantasy pixel pop-up book.
The devs recently added simultaneous turns to the multiplayer mode, which suddenly makes the game much more viable for LAN parties than ever before. While the multiplayer is still a work-in-progress (well, as is teh whole game), one new feature in particular caught my attention, and that was the new experimental option for rival players to control AI armies.
See, as well as the armies controlled by other players in multiplayer, there are also random AI-controlled hostile armies standing around on the map. When you engage an army - player-controller or AI - you enter a dedicated turn-based battle screen where you control each individual unit in that army. These battles are pretty speedy and good fun for those involved, but for those not in them it’s simply a matter of twiddling your thumbs or going off to hang out the laundry while those in battle are utterly absorbed in a life-or-death struggle for a good several minutes.
The point is that these dedicated battles-within-the-war are a serious bummer for pacing, and it’s an issue that’s plagued grand-scale strategy games for years. When other players are embroiled in scuffles that you’re not involved in, you may feel like a bit of a ghost at the feast as you mope around clicking through your resource piles or looking at in-game stats during your unwanted downtime.
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This became apparent partway through a recent multiplayer game of Songs of Conquest that I had. The early buzz of exploration and tentative encounters with hostile armies made way for a kind ofennuieach time any of us had to wait while another engaged in battles. This was exacerbated by the fact that at this point the game doesn’t allow other players to move around the map while one is engaged in battle, so you can do nothing but explore your menus, trade on the marketplace, and plonk down buildings on the map (though the devs assure us that this will be fixed in a future update). Also, you can’t help but grow a bit bitter at that player who decides to manually battle out every tiny encounter with AI forces - the inconsiderate sod.
To solve - or at least soften - this problem, in the middle of the game and without letting anyone know, I checked the ‘Players control hostile armies’ box. You can imagine the surprise of my friend (the one who was constantly fighting) when the next time they entered battle, they found that it wasmecontrolling the horde of undead soldiers they’d stumbled upon in the woods. Suddenly, these relatively trivial encounters take on a strategic gravitas as I got to meet my friend on the battlefield well before our actual armies would collide.
Make no mistake, I got my ass soundly kicked by his army, but I certainly gave him more of a headache than the AI would have, scampering up to the high ground of the battlefield then bearing down on him with those 20% high-ground attack bonuses. He took some heavy losses, while I had absolutely nothing to lose, which meant I had the confidence to play around with aggressive attacking strategies.
In all probability, you’ll be fighting quite a few AI-controlled armies before encountering your fellow players in a given match, so these battles are a neat little way to gauge your rivals' forces, battle tactics, and strengths and weaknesses. Crucially, they add a layer of spontaneity and investment from players who’d otherwise be waiting for several minutes for a battle to resolve.
In a three-player match, that does still mean that during each battle one player gets left out of the action, but that will hopefully be resolved once the game allows other players to move around the map and have their own battles while others take place. In an ideal world, having the ‘players control enemy AI’ option enabled in a match would make jumping into these battle optional, perhaps even with the possibility of taking over from the AI mid-battle should you have other things to do in the meantime. It would all ensure that these games move along at a decent pace even as the complexity of armies and management gets heavier from the mid-game.
Games like this have long suffered from multiplayer pacing problems. The excellent Amplitude Studios, makers of 4X games like Endless Legend and Humankind, are yet to resolve the issue of having a dedicated battle system within the wider strategy game. Even Civilization, which doesn’t have a dedicated battle screen, can become a slog when other players partake in aeons-long conflicts that you have no part in. The ability to jump in and control AI in those scenarios would be appealing, but would need to be balanced against the strategic advantage of being given insight into the geography and political layout of their part of the world. The beauty of a dedicated battle screen is that it’s very much self-contained, so doesn’t offer you insights outside of it.
Some credit should go to the Total War series here too, as for quite a few years now their multiplayer campaigns have allowed rival players to control enemy AI armies if they’re not engaged in their own affairs. It may not be strictly ‘realistic’ to seize control of armies that aren’t your own, but pacing trumps purism in these scenarios, and the more ways to keep all players involved in typically stagnant parts of these long, involved multiplayer games, the better.
