Expeditions: Conquistador

INTRO:

There have been more than a handful of video games which concern the era of the exploration of the “New World”. However, these are mostly civilization-building simulators. More importantly, they often simplify the roles of the natives of the “New World”, sometimes portraying them as little more than hostile savages.

Logic Artists, an indie developer, wants to make a game which is more involving and dramatic. After having obtained crowd-funding through Kickstarter, Logic Artists’ first game, Expeditions: Conquistador is about the Spaniards’ foray into the Mexican region of the Americas. The game would give the player to opportunity to make a difference in the historical development of this region, at least in fiction.

Unfortunately, this game is also a reminder that good ideas do not necessarily guarantee good execution.

RELEASE DISAPPOINTMENTS:

The game did not launch smoothly. There were many technical issues, especially in the Mexico campaign. To make things more complicated, the issues were not all replicable by the developers; this reviewer personally faced issues which the developers could not solve, two months after the release of the game.

Not everyone suffered problems either. Although most of the problems can be traced to complications with the customers’ computers, they give the impression that the game has not been play-tested on enough machine configurations.

If this impression is indeed true, then an apologist can argue that a small-time developer like Logic Artists does not have the resources to do so. Nevertheless, having customers do the testing and suffer all that hassle (and heartbreak) is far from ideal.

POST-RELEASE FIXES & ADDITIONAL FEATURES:

Fortunately, Logic Artists had been aware of these issues and has invested efforts into fixing them, despite having given advice which amounted to little more than stop-gap measures to customers in the past.

One year of feedback has inspired the developer to carve new features into the game in order to make it more user-friendly. It has also re-balanced some gameplay elements in the game, making it more challenging.

The most stable build of the game thus far is dated April 2014, at the time of this review.

Yet, for all Logic Artists has done, the Mexico campaign of the game remains a massive system resource hog, making it difficult to play. There will be more elaboration on this later.

PREMISE:

The player takes on the role of a newly appointed leader of an expedition. The reason for this appointment is not immediately clear, but the player is allowed to fill in the blanks later.

Anyway, the protagonist is to lead a small team of individuals, some of whom are specialists, on an expedition to what would become Mexico.

On the way, there would be many trials and tribulations, many of which concern the friction between natives and Europeans, and among their own.

Interestingly, Logic Artists has decided to make more dramatic and soulful portrayals of the individuals who are involved in all that. The overarching themes of conflict and intrigue are in the story, but only ever in the background. More often than not, the interaction between the protagonist and the other characters in the game takes on very personal tones.

THE PLAYER CHARACTER & DECISION-MAKING:

The player begins the game by making a player character. He/She will set the statistics for the protagonist’s capabilities, but anything else which concerns role-playing, such as the protagonist’s motivations, will be up to the player to decide.

The statistics of the player character are also altered by the people whom the player would choose as employees of the protagonist; this change will be described later.

Soon after though, the player would realize that the protagonist’s role, from the perspective of gameplay, is surprisingly limited.

At most, the player character would be making decisions which impact the party as a whole. He/She is also responsible for having dialogue with anyone else which is outside the party.

Yet, despite being an individual who will be described throughout the course of the game as being equipped, trained and experienced in battle, the protagonist is virtually never seen participating in combat. Rather, it is his/her underlings who would do the metaphorical heavy lifting.

The lack of the protagonist’s presence in battles and the contradicting statements in the descriptions of the pre- and post-battle situations can lead to an impression of narrative disconnection.

Of course, decision-making in Expeditions: Conquistador is a serious matter, so the protagonist’s role is no small thing.

HIRING FOLLOWERS:

After creating a player character, the player proceeds to hire from a roster of followers, all of whom have been pre-designed. This may seem limiting to players who happen to be veterans of party-based RPGs, but this is the consequence of Logic Artists’ design policy of making sure each individual is (sort of) unique.

Yet, ultimately, just about any character which belongs to a profession will not be much different from the others in the same profession.

Although the player can hire any expedition of any composition, it is in the player’s interest to have a balanced party – something which the game will not inform the new player about, at least in-game. Of course, veterans of RPGs would know this, but for anyone else who does not, he/she would have to learn the hard, painful way.

(This harsh lesson is much deserved if the new player does not notice the facility to automatically hire followers.)

It is worth noting here that although the player can only hire a handful of characters, there is no actual limit to the size of the protagonist’s party once the playthrough begins.

FOLLOWER TRAITS:

Traits are supposed to make each individual follower to be more than just a blindly loyal serf. However, they are little more than factors to consider when juggling the morale of party members.

Anyway, these traits determine whether their morale would change or not during different occasions; there will be more elaboration on the morale system later. However, the English-speaking player might want to suspend what he/she knows about the words which are the names of these traits; something might have been lost in the translation of this game from Spanish over to English.

For example, the Proud trait would make one think that this character is all haughty and such, but it actually means that this character likes winning battles.

If one could not keep this consideration in mind, it may seem to him/her that followers have some oddly contradicting traits too. For example, Montego Aragonés, one of the starting Scouts, have the seemingly incompatible traits of Cautious and Adventurous. However, in actuality, they affect Morale in different ways.

Not all characters have traits which match his/her background. For example, there is one Pedro Alvarado, who is described as “somber and quiet”. Yet, he has the Aggressive and Proud traits.

FOLLOWER PROFESSIONS:

Each of the protagonist’s followers has a profession. Each profession serves an important role in the player’s expedition, so it is important to have a balanced party from the get-go.

These professions can be generally divided into two categories: one set for the Europeans, and one set for the Natives. At first glance, it may seem that each category has counterparts for those in the other, but they start to diverge at higher ranks (more on ranks and experience later). Understandably, the player has access to only the European ones at the start.

There are the Hunters (for the Europeans) and Trappers (for the natives). Both gather food for the expedition, and have enough points at the start to function as patrolmen. They are probably better off hunting and trapping though.

Next, there are the Doctors (and the native Shamans), who are mainly needed to convert herbs into medicine. Medicine is needed to heal wounded or sick followers and it is not a cheap resource. The player will need them; there will be occurrences where people get incapacitated in such a manner, even if the player is careful. Doctors are also the only class capable of reviving fallen allies during battle.

(There will be more on the healing system later.)

The Scholars are unique to the Europeans. Although anyone else can technically do what they do (e.g. Tinkering; more on this later), they are better pre-disposed towards this activity than the others. Scholars will also play minor roles in some exploration quests, often providing useful insight which in turn makes available some options on how to proceed in a quest. Scholars also have abilities which are practically party-wide buffs and de-buffs for all enemies.

Then, there are the Soldiers. They are probably the ones which most players would rely on for purposes of combat (more on battles and their limitations later). Outside of fights, they guard the expedition’s camp, which is more important than one would think. The same can also be said about the native Warriors.

Next, there are the Scouts. They may seem the least useful profession; they are like halfway-there Soldiers during a battle, but they are some of the most mobile individuals, making them terrifically useful in preventing enemy Hunters or Trappers from using their ranged attacks.

Outside of battle, the Scouts’ favoured activity, Patrolling, is a completely optional one. However, Patrolling can yield a lot of goodies; there will be more elaboration on this later too.

Most of the native professions can only be obtained in the Mexico campaign. This is perhaps for the better, because they happen to be a bit more complex than their European counterparts.

For example, many of them use damage-over-time attacks, but have slightly lower raw statistics, such as damage-per-hit. Most of them also start with some points in the Hunting skill, making them quite versatile in supporting the party. They also move further than their European counterparts in battle.

Unfortunately, the Mexico campaign has issues, as will be mentioned later. They do not affect these native professions per se, but it would be difficult for a player with a less-than-powerful rig to reach the points in the story where these natives become available as followers.

FOLLOWER QUESTS:

The quests and/or minor plot-lines which are associated with individual followers are the main differences between the followers.

At any time when the player makes camp, there may be a chance that one of the followers would approach the protagonist (or vice versa) and make a tale or two about their pasts. Some followers do not appear to go beyond some inconsequential chit-chat, but others may give the player some dialogue options which can raise or lower their morale (or even the morale of others).

Others may even ask the protagonist to lead the expedition somewhere (usually dangerous places). These become actual quests which can grant substantial rewards. Others may ask to go on leave to fulfill some promise which they have made to someone else.

Usually, it is in the player’s interest to let them do what they want to do. Their morale usually increases, and their quests often reward the player with practical goods. However, if the player does not like the distraction which they are causing, the option to turn them down is there (though not without costs of course).

Some characters do not appear to have quests which are compatible with their background, however. Returning to the example of Pedro Alvarado the Doctor again, he has the Adventurous trait, which does explain the occasion when he asks for leave to go on a side expedition with other people. However, his background suggests that he goes on expeditions to overcome his grief over a loss.

Such small mismatches detract from the otherwise good writing for the game’s stories.

FOLLOWER SKILLS:

All followers have a set of non-combat skills, common to all of them regardless of their profession.

Although this means that any follower can perform any non-combat task, his/her profession determines whether they are preternaturally skilled at doing a task. For example, Soldiers already have a considerable number of points in the Guarding skill, so they are best tasked with guarding every time the party camps.

When followers increase in rank, they gain three skill points which can be allocated among their skills at any time according to the player’s whims. The player can choose to either have them specialize further, or apply points to their secondary skills.

(Like any other games with opportunity costs in their RPG progression systems, jack-of-all-trades suffer.)

Some of these skills have very simple uses. For example, Guarding simply makes sure that the party does not suffer a misfortune from theft and infiltration when it makes camp.

Some others have more uses. For example, Hunting is not only needed to provide meat to the party so that they can save on rations, it is also needed to turn surplus meat into rations (lest the meat simply spoils overnight).

All of these skills are associated with the gameplay element of camping, which will be described later.

PLAYER CHARACTER SKILLS:

The player character has skills which are completely different from those of followers.

As mentioned earlier, the player distributes points into these skills during the game’s (rather limited) character creation. After that, the protagonist’s skills are further altered by the followers which he/she currently has. (Losing followers will change the skills’ ratings too.)

For example, having more Soldiers (or their native counterparts) increases the protagonist’s Tactics skill, presumably because the Soldiers either execute tactics better or they act as advisors.

Therefore, with this in mind, the player can attempt to juggle the skills so that weak ones are compensated by followers.

Having high skill ratings is in the player’s interest, because they allow more options for dealing with situations.

HEALING:

Inevitably, some followers will end up getting injured or sick; even if the player is incredibly skilled at keeping them out of harm’s way, bad luck will see to that.

Anyway, followers which are injured can eventually die if they are not given medical attention. Fortunately, injuries cannot spread. Diseases can get worse too, but they can also spread to other followers if the patient is not given medical attention. Speaking of which, medical attention requires the expenditure of medicine, which is an important resource; medical attention generally can only be provided through camping too.

(There are healers at certain cities which can conveniently heal followers rather quickly.)

There are several levels of injury or disease. Harmless levels of disease and injury will not get worse, but only complete recovery can guarantee that the affected followers can regain their functions. The worse levels can get even worse, and they take even more medicine to heal.

Any healer can only work on one patient at a time. Therefore, if the player has incredibly bad luck or is not being careful (which is more likely to be the case), the player could be overwhelmed with a lot of incapacitated followers, all of whom can get worse.

Fortunately, healing followers is not a luck-dependent outcome; as long as a follower is being given medical treatment and there is medicine for that, he/she generally gets better.

CAMPING:

The expedition does not call anywhere in the “New World” home. Instead, the party sets up camp to sleep for the night, and they can do so just about anywhere – even volcanic regions.

However, a camp site is not always safe and bounteous. This is depicted through the element of chance, specifically the percentages of success in three activities: guarding, patrolling and hunting.

Interestingly, the size of the expedition does not appear to affect the success rates, at least in the current version of the game.

As mentioned earlier, hunting gathers meat for the party. It has varying degrees of success; it is only a failure if the hunting party comes back empty-handed.

Guarding the camp is essential. Nothing good comes out of it, actually, but something bad always happens if the player does not post enough guards. Resources might be stolen, or worse, the expedition suffers an ambush.

Most of the ambush events are story-related, but there are more than enough of them that only the most careless of players would not always try to have the guarding success percentage as high as possible.

Patrolling the camp is not the same as guarding the camp. Instead, the followers who go on “patrol” may come across knick-knacks which can be scavenged, or natives who are essentially robbed of their equipment. The benefits of patrolling, however, are rather luck-dependent.

TINKERING & INVENTIONS:

When making camp, the player can assign a follower to work with the non-trade materials which the expedition has found.

These materials can be converted into items which can be used for battles. For example, wood and rope can be turned into barricades, which generally dissuade computer-controlled opponents from taking a path.

A higher level of Tinkering makes the construction of items more efficient, i.e. using less materials. Hence, there is the need for a Scholar with most points invested in Tinker.

(These items will be described later.)

The most important benefit of having someone with a Tinker skill as high as possible is that he/she can work on “Inventions”. Inventions are permanent upgrades which affect the expedition. Their effects are generally small, especially considering the amount of days which have to be invested in them. However, they are permanent, so they pay off in the long term.

It should be noted here though that any invention project can only be worked on by one person at a time.

GAINING EXPERIENCE:

There is a system of experience points and levelling up in Expeditions: Conquistador. However, it would seem rather simple in the eyes of a veteran of RPG titles.

Anyway, experience points are mainly gained through quests. Experience points are awarded in small amounts when the player makes progress in any quest, with larger rewards upon completing them.

These experience points go into a pool and can then be used to promote anyone in the expedition, regardless of how much contribution which they have made.

PROMOTING FOLLOWERS:

For whatever reason, promoting a follower immediately makes him/her better at what he/she does.

Anyway, there are five ranks of promotions; three of these, Recruit, Man-at-Arms and Veteran are available to anyone. These promotions will unlock all of the active abilities of any professions, as well as unlock all of their equipment slots (more on equipment later). There are also usually enough points for any follower to specialize in their main skill or one of their secondary ones.

The two remaining ranks, Sergeant and Lieutenant, can only be granted to very, very few people. The player must make these choices carefully.

Promoting a follower also happens to increase his/her morale, though promotion should not be thought of as a morale-managing tool.

It should be noted here that any experience which has been spent on any character who dies is permanently lost. Death is unforgiving in this game (though not unavoidable; the game does have a save-and-load system after all).

CHARTING MAPS:

To encourage players to explore the parts of Hispaniola and Mexico which are featured in the game, there is the side quest of charting them.

Charting is not as tedious as making sure every bit of the map is covered. Rather, it is about finding shining piles of rocks. This may seem unbelievable, but it is convenient.

These points of interest appear in the coasts, roads and mountains of Hispaniola and Mexico; they will appear on the player’s map when they are on close, which is another convenience.

The player will still need to look about to find them, of course, but their convenience of design takes away a lot of hassle yet still contributes to the game’s themes about exploration.

Furthermore, finding all points of interest gives the lucrative option of ‘consolidating maps’.

MORALE:

As mentioned earlier, the protagonist’s followers are not blindly loyal. They start off servile of course, but if the player does not keep them happy, their morale ratings will eventually drop and their trust in the protagonist disappears.

They may mutiny, which result in a battle where the player is likely to lose something or someone. Alternatively, they may desert the player outright.

Simply speaking, making followers upset leads to a lot of bad things.

On the other hand, keeping them happy leads to a noticeable if rather luck-dependent benefit. Specifically, high morale ratings grant followers a higher chance to score critical hits.

Players who are used to more sophisticated morale systems in other games would not be impressed much.

RESOURCES:

There are four resources which the player will use for sustaining the expedition, keeping people alive, equipping them for combat and trading.

The most disposable of these are “Valuables”. They have little more use than typical currency. If there is any efficient use for them, it is that they are best spent on buying materials for Tinkering (if only because the costs do not fluctuate like the prices do in trading).

The oddity about Valuables is that the player will find few markets in which they are desired. This rarity makes efficient expenditure of Valuables quite difficult.

Medicine is needed to heal people, as mentioned earlier. There is quite a number of markets which want these, but even a seeming surplus of medicine may not be worth selling off. They are, after all, a good cushion for bad luck.

Rations are the expedition’s long-term food. Going hungry makes everyone irritable, among other complications, so having lots is always good.

The fourth resource is equipment; it happens to be the most interesting yet most disappointing resource.

EQUIPMENT:

As mentioned earlier, equipment is needed to gear followers up for battle. How well tricked-out they are is depicted by how many of their equipment slots have been filled up.

These are not like the equipment slots seen in typical RPGs. They are actually more like check-boxes.

Anyway, each slot is filled up by placing one point of equipment into it. This corresponds to a rise in the associated combat-oriented statistic. For example, putting equipment into melee slots increases the melee damage output of the follower.

Any slot which has been filled remains filled even if the player switches their type of gear. For example, if a Soldier has switched from a sword to a knife, the equipped slots are retained.

Equipment can be lost in battle; this appears to be one of the features which were added post-release. If a follower is incapacitated in battle, he/she immediately loses one point of equipment from any randomly selected slot. If a follower suffers a critical hit, one point of equipment is lost too.

However, careful decisions during battle can generally prevent such losses, so a skilled player should not expect to lose too much equipment this way. Rather, bad luck would be the main cause for loss of equipment to such a player.

Unfortunately, such a system of equipment can seem disappointingly simple, especially to veterans of RPG titles who have seen more sophisticated and versatile systems of gearing up party members.

Furthermore, putting equipment into followers mainly results in increases of mundane nature, e.g. damage increases. There are hardly, if any, secondary benefits.

TRADING:

The four resources will be used as bargaining chips in the trading gameplay element in Expeditions: Conquistador.

Virtually every settlement has a market of sorts, where the player can trade resources for other resources.

Every settlement has pre-determined reserves of resources, which will always reset every few days. This means that the player can exploit this to buy low and sell high.

As an example, if the player knows that a village has a surplus of Valuables but has a paucity of Rations, he/she can attempt to regularly gather Rations by making use of contextual activities which produce food (more on these later) and then dump them at this village to earn a profit.

However, trading in this game does adhere strongly to the concept of supply and demand. Goods which are in high supply at a market will barely make any profit when sold to that market; dumping also happens to dry up profit margins quickly.

Wiser players would know that it is probably better to trade small and often whenever they pass through settlements and keep what they believe are small surpluses, instead of trying to actively pursue profits.

PECCARIES:

Peccaries are porcine creatures who roam around the map; they are difficult to miss, since they are highlighted with red pillars of light. They can be hunted down for a large intake of meat; if the player is very lucky, one peccary can give around 30 pieces of meat.

Peccaries move when the player’s expedition does, though for every ‘step’ which the expedition takes, peccaries take a few more. This means that peccaries can potentially be difficult to run down, but unlike real peccaries, these ones are stupid and will move in random directions. They might even cross the expedition’s path when the latter is moving, upon which they are automatically slain and harvested.

HERBS, TREASURE CHESTS & CRATES:

Like peccaries, herbs, treasure chests and crates are found here and there on the map. However, unlike peccaries, they are, of course, immobile.

Gathering them can be a bit finicky; unlike peccaries, which are usually killed if they get too close to the in-game model for the expedition, they may not always be immediately harvested if they are close. The player will need to have the expedition move away a bit before moving right back onto them.

Treasure chests typically contain Valuables. Unlike the other loose piles of resources, they do not have pillars of light, but their golden glow should be enough to attract any player’s attention.

Crates often contain materials which are needed for tinkering (and in the Mexico campaign, a long-term quest). Sometimes, they may contain Equipment or complete items, but these are rarer.

Herbs can be turned into medicine through the herbalism activity. This activity takes away opportunities for other activities, but herbs will always be there, waiting to be turned into medicine. They will not spoil, unlike meat.

CONTEXTUAL ACTIVITIES:

There are certain regions in Hispaniola and Mexico which grant opportunities for what the game calls ‘contextual activities’ when the player makes camp in them.

These activities usually grant more resources, in addition to those from regular activities. For example, if the expedition is close to a body of water with fish clearly in it, a follower can be directed to go fishing, bringing in fish in addition to the meat from hunting.

However, not all contextual benefits are wholly beneficial. For example, when the player camps near native burial grounds, the player can direct a follower to do some grave-robbing. The follower is likely to suffer morale loss, and getting something is not always a guarantee. The pay-off is not always very good either.

PASSAGE OF TIME:

Generally, no one ages in the game; the player could log thousands of in-game days and the story will not register the passing of what should have been years.

However, there are a few quests in the game which have to be finished in a number of days; they can surprise a complacent player the first time they occur. Failing to finish these quests within the allotted time means that the player loses the opportunity to earn some experience; there may even be worse consequences.

The Mexico campaign does have a long-term quest which will involve the passage of time. However, enjoying this quest is dependent on whether the player has a computer which can run the campaign smoothly; there will be more elaboration on this later.

COMBAT – OVERVIEW:

Combat does not happen regularly in any playthrough, even if the player seeks battle actively. However, it happens enough to give the impression that the player must be ready for battles.

Interestingly, almost every fight would seem different from the last. There will be different battlefields and different enemy make-ups for different battles, even if they have the same objectives (the most common of which is to take out every enemy, simply enough).

What they have in common though is that the player is only allowed to choose up to six followers to bring into battle. Some battles reduce the number even further. Having these followers incapacitated means that the player has lost; there will be no reinforcements.

Although this is meant to ensure that battles are always challenging, it can seem unbelievable, especially if the player’s expeditions have a lot of members. Those which the player cannot bring into battle can seem like a lot of dead weight.

(At least the game gives the player the opportunity to redistribute equipment and promote some members before a battle, regardless of how unbelievable this opportunity is.)

Anyway, battle is a turn-based affair. Depending on who had the upper hand at the beginning of the battle, either the opposition or the player gets to move first, followed by the other, and then back again. Any character on either side can be moved in any order when that side’s turn comes up.

Characters move along a hex-based grid, which is a common but reliable and believable means of partitioning the battlefield.

Every character has two sets, or rather, stages of moves which he/she can take.

Firstly, he/she always has at least one stage of moves which can be spent on actually moving around the battlefield.

Secondly, he/she has another stage, which is used for attacking. Alternatively, this stage of moves can be spent on moving about instead.

Such a system has been seen before in present-day turn-based combat-oriented games, which make use of limited number of moves instead of the old-school system of action point pools.

For better or worse, a major part of combat has luck as a factor. Specifically, all ranged attacks have a chance to miss. This chance is altered by factors such as how clear the lines of fire are, but there is always a small chance to miss.

This luck-based success at ranged attacks is supposedly implemented so as to balance ranged attacks against close-combat attacks, which always hit but of course do not have the advantage of range.

Yet, before one thinks that going melee is the way to go, there is another luck-dependent element of combat: the chance to block melee attacks.

These elements of combat can very much sour the experience of the game for players who despise luck-dependent gameplay.

PASSIVE ABILITIES:

When a follower is promoted, the player can pick what are the game’s equivalent for “perks” for this follower. As their name suggests, “passive abilities” are benefits which are always available to a follower.

Unfortunately, most of them appear to be combat-oriented, i.e. they come into play during battles. Even the ones which do not come into play during battles are still associated with battles. For example, the “Good Patient” passive ability makes a follower easier to heal during camping.

There are a few (albeit very few) non-combat-related passive abilities, but the game could have been more sophisticated if it had more.

ACTIVE ABILITIES:

Every profession is characterized by the abilities which can be used by the follower which follows this profession.

For example, the Soldier’s active abilities are mainly defensive. Coupled with his/her high defence potential, the Soldier is the shield-wall for other characters.

Wise players are likely to bring some doctors and/or shamans into battle, even though these characters are not exactly the most survivable. (They can be upgraded to have better weapons, but they generally will never get access to high amounts of defence.)

However, doctors are one of the few professions which have the ability to restore lost health (called “endurance” in this game) during battle. Considering that as long as followers are not incapacitated during a battle, they come out of it completely unscathed.

Perhaps the most disappointing active abilities are those which Sergeants and the Lieutenant gain. Sergeants and Lieutenants have the ability of Smoke Bombs, which make anyone in the smoke harder (but not impossible) to hit. The Lieutenant gets the ability to Rally, which grants any follower some free moves – which the player does not get to decide on how to spend.

PREPARATION PHASE:

If the player makes decisions carefully, he/she can enter combat with the opportunity to place followers in hexes which have been marked as deployment zones before the battle starts. This is convenient, though there are some followers with traits which make them disdainful of such measures.

Anyway, in the preparation phase, the player can also place down barricades, net traps and spike traps; later, even artillery can be placed. If the player can cleverly position followers – or more precisely, exploit holes in the behavioural scripts of enemies, he/she can lure enemies into them.

Considering that the player’s team is almost always outnumbered because of the aforementioned limitation on the number of followers who can be brought into battle, it is in the player’s interest to have many traps.

However, these traps can no longer be placed once battle starts, and they do take up item slots which could have been used on items which can be used during battle. Furthermore, the protagonist’s level of Tactics places limitations on the number of traps which can be placed.

DEPLOYABLE ITEMS:

In lieu of traps, the player can opt to bring deployable items into battle instead. These are, of course, limited in number by the protagonist’s Tactics skill too.

Anyway, these items can be used during battle for effects which are different from those of traps. The player’s own traps will not damage his/her own followers, but these items can, if the player is not careful.

For example, the fire which spreads out of thrown oil lanterns does burn the player’s own followers.

However, if the player times their use properly, these deployable items can be more potent than traps.

ATTACK OF OPPORTUNITIES:

In addition to the allowance for a single attack during his/her side’s turn, a character also has allowance for an “attack of opportunity”.

This attack can be performed if an enemy is adjacent to the character and tries to move away. From this perspective, attack of opportunities can be seen as a form of area denial and a way to tie up enemies.

The attack can also be performed if an enemy makes a ranged attack at point-blank range. However, this rarely happens, unless the player has selected the stupidest set of behavioural scripts for enemies. On the other hand, it does lock down dangerous ranged attacks, such as those used by Hunters and Trappers. It even triggers if these enemies use their ranged active abilities too.

COMPUTER-CONTROLLED OPPONENTS:

At the default settings, the computer-controlled enemies are dumb. They make a lot of mistakes, one example of which is described in the caption of the following screenshot.

If the player wants a believable level of challenge from them, he/she may want to consider selecting the highest setting for their cleverness from the Difficulty menu. At this setting, they will always avoid hazards and avoid provoking attacks of opportunity.

There are typical difficulty modifiers such as the ratio of damage which enemies inflict to the damage which the player’s own followers inflict, if the player is so inclined towards such artificial sources of challenge.

Interestingly, in some battles, the enemies are given peculiar behaviours, such as enemy Soldiers and Warriors keeping their distance. Wise players would know that this is a baiting tactic, and that there are likely traps in between the player’s forces and the enemy’s.

RANDOM EVENTS:

When the player’s expedition camps or moves about the map, random events may occur. The random events which occur for the latter are usually bad, such as followers getting bitten by poisonous creatures.

The ones which occur when the player camps are usually good, such as the expedition’s Hunters coming across a trove of wildlife which can be poached willy-nilly for lots of meat. However, as mentioned earlier, there can be unpleasant events such as ambushes.

These random events can seem to make luck an all-too pervasive factor in the gameplay though.

HISPANIOLA CAMPAIGN:

The Hispaniola campaign is the one featured in the game’s demos. It runs well on machines which are just past the minimum requirements for the game. It also presents the fundamentals of the gameplay in Expeditions: Conquistador quite well, though it does not feature some of the advanced content of the game, especially the native classes.

MEXICO CAMPAIGN – AND SYSTEM MEMORY ISSUES:

After having completed the Hispaniola campaign, the player unlocks the Mexico campaign. The Mexico campaign has far more content than the Hispaniola campaign, including long-term quests.

Unfortunately, all this content comes with a price of much higher system memory usage – far higher than the game’s official minimum requirements for system memory.

When loading a saved-game for the Mexico campaign, the game’s active memory usage can go over 1.5 gigabytes of memory, just for the loading process – and that is for the lowest possible graphical settings on this reviewer’s computer. Furthermore, the game caches a lot of data, resulting in even more memory being utilized in the form of standby memory.

For anyone who does not have memory reserves of several gigabytes, they are likely to suffer crashes when transferring over to the Mexico campaign.

Even worse, the game may allow the player to continue, but proceeds to corrupt the player’s saved-games because it runs out of computing resources when attempting to write save-games.

Indubitably, the game’s minimum requirements are splendid for the Hispaniola campaign only.

SOME NEW FEATURES AND BALANCING:

Since its release, the game has benefited from some additional features which have been patched in, in addition to re-balances.

Some of these have been mentioned already, such as followers losing equipment in battle. This actually applies to enemies as well too.

The current build appears to be much more amicable to windowed mode than earlier builds. In the earlier builds, playing in windowed mode caused havoc with mouse-clicks. This is mainly because at the time, there was a deviation between where the mouse cursor actually was and where its icon was.

That the Tactics skill determines how many items can be brought into battle (for both preparation and actual battle) has also been mentioned. This change was introduced to pare down the advantage provided by these items.

At launch, the map system was little more useful than just a provider of points of reference. Since then, there is a feature to allow the plotting of paths towards locations which are marked with icons. The calculations for the plotting are a little slow though, suggesting poor optimization. Furthermore, only paths towards locations with icons can be plotted.

Unfortunately, these changes are not mentioned in the latest edition of the game’s manual, which appears to have been made for the launch version.

WRITING:

One of the greatest appeals of Expeditions: Conquistador is its writing. As mentioned earlier, this game intends to provide a more dramatic portrayal of the travails of the European comers and the natives.

In particular, the game is generous on the descriptions of every individual which the player would encounter. A player would be terribly unimaginative indeed if he/she could not conjure a mental picture upon reading these.

The game could have made some characters memorable through their associated side-quests. However, this is held back a bit by the one-off nature of the side-quests as mentioned earlier.

The bigger setback though, is that the game will randomly pick followers from sets of followers to be used as dialogue participants in certain situations. (These sets are organized according to the undisclosed but otherwise guessable criteria for these situations.)

For example, during a certain random event which causes a follower to fall into quicksand and turn sick, the game will pick any doctor or shaman to deliver the assessment of this follower’s condition.

Such selection by the game may result in some uncharacteristic behaviour by characters, especially if the player knows the personality of these characters. For example, followers which have been described as soft-spoken in their background may make loud outbursts in a scene, if only because the game picked them because they have the right Traits.

GRAPHICAL/VISUAL DESIGNS:

The visual designers for Expeditions: Conquistador appear to have done their research in figuring out how the Europeans, the natives and their settlements would have looked like.

Although there are some simplifications such as the small number of buildings in settlements, most of their architecture appear to look authentic, at least to those who are not experts in such things.

As for actual character models, these were designed with silhouettes in mind. The player should not expect to be able to see detailed faces or textures like the rust and burnish on the armor of Spanish soldiers. However, the shapes of the character models are usually enough to inform the player of what they do.

For example, the frills and head-dresses of shamans should clearly mark them out as shamans.

There may initially be some confusion among new players though, when it comes to some models. As an illustrative example, there are few differences between a Doctor’s model and a Scholar’s model, at least until the player realizes that the former usually has hats.

Outside of combat, icons float above objects of interest to advertise their presence; otherwise, they have illumination coming out of them, as mentioned earlier. This is convenient.

However, there may be some visual issues in combat. In some battles, there are buildings with overhangs which can obscure the models of characters which are under them. There appear to be no accommodations to highlight these characters. This is odd, considering that the game does have some for characters which are under trees.

Some of the most obvious visual designs in the game are the hand-drawn portraits of characters and artwork of locales such as native settlements. These loom large in the dialogue screens; they take up nearly half of the screens, in fact.

Most of them are quite good to look at, especially the natives, most of whom look convincingly authentic. Some of the Europeans may seem a bit exaggerated though; this may be because some of the portraits are actually based on real people, such as Juan Ortega (though Juan Ortega’s portrait is one of the more believable ones).

SOUND DESIGNS:

The most noticeable sound designs in Expedition: Conquistador are its music tracks. All of them sound as if they have been made with actual acoustic instruments, such as drums, instead of typical electronic music as is often the case with indie titles. Many of the tracks are pleasant to listen to.

(It so happens that the game’s music is freely available on Bandcamp.)

There are some sound effects, but they are so unremarkable that they could have originated from stock sounds.

There are few legible voice-overs in the game. Most of the utterances which the player will hear from characters other than the narrator are little more than grunts and groans in combat. Even these have a limited pool, so the player will eventually hear the same groan over and over.

As for the narrator, Oriol Rafel (as mentioned in the credits), his narration in European languages other than English has a splendid baritone. Of course, experts in these languages, or simply pedantic people, may argue that not all of his enunciations are correct.

What is certainly not correct to anyone, even those who are not linguists, is his English enunciations. His English voice-over also halters.

Unfortunately, the game does not appear to provide any facility to listen to his narration in other languages but retain the subtitles in a specific language.

CONCLUSION:

Expeditions: Conquistador has a lot of good gameplay ideas and a very sophisticated portrayal of the quest to explore the “New World”, it has to be said first. Its gameplay rewards good planning, despite the factor of luck in it.

Unfortunately, it is held back by poor optimization of the computer resource usage by its content packages, namely the memory-intensive Mexico campaign. This would not have been a problem if the Mexico campaign is a small part of the game, but it is not.

Perhaps the game would have been great for people who have machines with system memory capacity that is far beyond that of the game’s minimum requirements. For anyone else though, they might want to steer clear of this game.