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Conquest of Elysium 3 is a turn-based fantasy strategy game, ported effectively unchanged from the original PC version. You select a faction and battle your rivals to control the realm of Elysium, gathering resources and taking valuable locations— towns, fortresses, mines, and some more exotic things— to strengthen and expand your forces.
Diversity is Conquest of Elysium’s greatest strength. There are nearly 20 different leaders you can select, and they’re amazingly diverse, with different troops elections, special abilities, and resources they depend on (besides the gold and iron everyone uses). They differences aren’t just cosmetic, either. Raising and leading the fairly conventional human armies of the Baron is a radically different experience from the bloodthirsty cultists and summoned demons of the Priestess or the huge but costly magic constructs of the Enchanter. Dwarves have a particular incentive to control mines, which give them access to magic gems that their runesmiths use to upgrade troops. Necromancers can call up more troops in places that have seen a lot of death, and they’ll need to, because unlike the living undead units don’t recover hit points between battles. The Priest-King can forgo long-term benefits for larger immediate gain by wiping out whole occupied villages as human sacrifices.
There’s a very deep and complicated battle system when hostile forces actually collide. It plays out automatically while you watch, which is just as well. Winning is about the strength and composition of your forces before the battle begins, and this save you a lot of pointless micromanagement. Besides, putting your army together is where the fun is here.
There’s huge variety of different units in the game, with their availability varying by faction. There’s a lengthy list of different soldier types—swordsmen, archers, crossbowmen, spearmen, halberdiers, cavalry, several different units based on the pre-Marian Reforms Roman legions, guys with giant two-handed swords, knights, and it goes on like that. Many of these types have faction-specifc variants–barbarians, goblins, bloodthirsty cultists, what have you. Then there are siege engines, various sorts of demons and undead, wild animals, enchanted constructs, giants, all sorts of monsters both intelligent and not, various types of magic users with a huge number of possible types of magic, and much more. Each has its own stats, attacks, and traits, of which there are many possible. Fortunately, no faction has access to all of them (or even close to that,) which prevents you from being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of options.
The graphics and sound are unimpressive even by mobile standards. I don’t care. It’s tremendous fun, and the wild diversity in playable factions provides both replay value and away for players with very different play styles to each find their own niche.
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