Conqueror A.D 1086 is a mishmash of multiple genres in where you play as a newly knighted knight who has been given some land and some cash with his new found status. You can choose a premade character or can roll the dice to make your own. Choosing the latter will also see you making decisions in key moments from your teenage years, all the way to the present, that will also affect stats as well as starting items. The choices you’ll make are randomly selected from a large amount and then cross check your stats to decide the outcome of your action. That keeps you from simply learning them all and picking the best options, and adds some tension as the consequences can lead to a dire reduction of some of your stats.
With your new knight created, you are let loose and are free to choose your destiny. You can tend to your lands and people to create a prosperous city-state, you can harass and claim other lord’s lands as your own, or simply choose to travel the world to attend tournaments and claim the heart of one of five maidens. It is a vast undertaking, further intensified with the fact that the title plays out in real time when not in menus. Ideally, you will not want to ignore your nation as it is the cornerstone to your success in both amassing wealth and the manpower gained from forcing your population into the military if you so choose.
Management of your possessions is split across three different sections. The Castle where you can build walls, towers, and hire staff to manage the mundane tasks to further increase proficiency. The Village where you build housing, taverns, and other necessities for a growing population. And finally, you have the Forest. It is where you can set up mines, cut down trees for profit, as well as plant food or gather livestock to feed your people. All of this requires both cash to set up and a pair of working hands that could have other uses for you, such as putting a sword in his hand then sending him to fight your enemies. It is a balancing act of both your wealth and population pool making for some really interesting situations.
Unfortunately, not everything is well here. Many of the buildings or special labor you can hire not only lack any descriptions as to what they do, they in fact have no use at all other than handing out some minuscule taxes that are oftentimes not worth their initial costs. This issue affects all three sections of your management, though none are worse than the castle. You can build walls and create a well organized, marvel of a castle, yet doing so has no effect nor does your layout play any part should it actually be invaded. It is better just to plop down key buildings then randomly spread them far out to receive their benefits, as well as to minimize the damage from a dragon attack.
This dragon terrorizes all of Britain, and your lands are certainly not exempt. It can pass by randomly and leave a wake of destruction in its path. Your castle and your crops will be completely destroyed if it is in the zone it passes through, making for a possibly costly return to its previous glory. Especially in the case of crops since they can only be planted at certain times of the year. It is a pretty cool mechanic to have and has had me breathe a sigh of relief when it struck a nearby neighboring lord while curving away from my territories. Killing this vile dragon is one of the two victory conditions. The other being storming and conquering London itself to become the next king. Technically you can win at any time as you only need claim London, but good bloody luck trying to take on King William himself early on.
Aside from that dragon, there are no other fantasy aspects to it. It is all based in reality. As the King’s loyal subject, you will at times receive orders with tasks such as engaging a lord that disrespected him or slaughtering some bandits roaming the land. These not only give you something to do but will pay out a nice little bonus should you succeed. It can be easy to decide to spend all your cash back into your growing economy and population, though investing a little in yourself is equally as important. Buying some armor and a good weapon will go a long way. You do start off with a decent sword, however, there is weapon degradation and it will fail you eventually. The last thing you want in the midst of battle is for your sword to break and have to take on a fully armored foe with your crummy basic dagger. Having a backup weapon will no doubt save you eventually.
Combat takes place in the first person view and occurs when you storm a castle or challenge a fellow knight to melee in a tournament. You attack with CTRL and move with the arrow keys. The tournaments will be fought in melee, though in an actual battle things get a bit more dirty with some units equipped with crossbows, which are seen as a very dishonorable weapon. All that honor stuff goes out the window when the fight is right in their castle halls and they seek any advantage they can to avoid having their head separated from their shoulders. Crossbows are so despised in these lands that you can’t even buy them from blacksmiths, you will need to find one for yourself while scouring enemy territory. You can also find secret rooms, loot, and even some deadly traps on rare occasions.
You will never fight alone, there are always at least a few of your men by your side. There are a few simple commands to give, such as defending a location, following you, or scour the castle attacking anyone they find. Sending them out into the open when you spot someone wielding a crossbow and stabbing him through while he reloads is one of my preferred strategies early on to avoid heavy damage. As you gain better armor they become less of a threat but can still whittle down your health. Since all the proper fights take place in castles, most of your time will be spent in tight corridors. If you have a crossbow of your own to switch to, you can make good use of sharp corners to nail these ranged fiends with a bolt of your own. In best case scenarios you get them before they even notice you.
With proper knights, it is easy to defeat them without taking damage if you work on your footwork and back up out of their reach when they strike. Just avoid being surrounded or caught with your back against the wall, as while you do have your own warriors, they are head over toes moronic. They will follow your orders for a short while, like around eight seconds, then they mindlessly go off to do their own things, such as dying a meaningless death. Telling them to follow you as you storm into a room filled with enemies only to realize there is no one at your back is not the best position to find yourself in. I have no idea why the developers found it a good decision to give them a free will of their own after a couple of seconds and completely ignore your orders, but that results in them being more of a hassle to lug around than its worth.
Luckily, you really don’t need them. Soon enough you’ll be one-shotting enemies left and right, making these invasions a breeze. There is also food, healing balms, and ale scattered around to restore your health. It is wildly unbalanced in your favor once you get a good weapon, though it is a fun power fantasy. In any case, your ultimate goal when storming a castle is to kill the commander who is a far better fighter than the rest. Once you do, you can choose to either leave victorious or continue searching around for hidden treasure that will no doubt fill your men’s satchels if you don’t find then claim these riches yourself first. Annoyingly enough, you can only carry one of each weapon or armor, meaning that you need to sell what you don’t need or you won’t be allowed to take another of that type you could then also sell.
There is no inventory system either. You will automatically equip what is best and can only change your weapons while in combat. It is a pretty messy affair as well, since it makes it more difficult to gauge what items you have in your possession. The other form of combat occurs when two opposing armies meet. It will switch to an isometric view and play out in an “RTS” like manner. I put RTS in quotations because calling it that is an insult against the genre. What is on offer here is simply that horrendous. To start off you randomly pick from one of four formations, without being able to see what you are up against leaving it all to chance. Halberd units defeat knights, Knights defeat swordsman, and Swordsman defeat halberds. That is the most important aspect of it.
What happens next is completely out of your control and just painful to look at. The armies will slowly march toward each other and you best hope that you got lucky with your formation, because while you can order them around in theory, the AI really does not listen to you. You have handy shortcuts like the K key for knights and so on, yet it is all for show. For instance, if there is a huge gap in your enemies formation during battle, you can’t order them to go through it and split their forces. Well actually you can order that and there will be a straight line showing you where they are meant to go, but that means nothing to the AI. They will bunch up behind their mates and wait their turn to attack an enemy even if they are being slaughtered as they are up against the wrong unit class.
This one aspect of the title nearly ruins the whole experience in my eyes. There is nothing quite like ordering your men forward to encounter the enemy and halfway through, suddenly see your knights ride off in the wrong direction. Your casualties will always be extremely high despite what you try to do, so setting any battle to auto-resolve will be the best option for your sanity. High casualties really limit your capabilities as you constantly need to attract enough people to live in your lands to once again refill the army for your war efforts. It is an uphill fight as you start the title and are facing a much better-positioned lord by mindlessly having to brute force your battles. That isn’t even the worse of this RTS mechanic.
You don’t even need more than one army to defend your lands. If either you or an enemy attacks a castle, even with an earth-shaking amount of troops marching right up to it, that only equates to a couple of men storming it at most. And if it is you being attacked, you will instantly be transported to that place and will fight it out in first person against a handful of invading men. You are an absolute god of war and will easily slaughter the lot of them, despite how many times they try to take an inch of your land. That makes any need for defense pointless. With your men being useless due to AI, you only need an army large enough to brute force your way towards a castle so you can do all the work. It effectively makes the entire army aspect of it feel completely unnecessary.
Jousting thankfully fairs much better. This can only be done during tournaments, and requires you to try to position then maintain your lance back to its starting position to knock the opposing knight off his horse. It is a nice way to rake up some quick cash via bets once you get good at it and also doubles as a way to impress the ladies. Talk to them before a jousting match and ask to wear their colors to earn their favor. Some don’t like men with a higher Pious stat and others will refuse to even talk to you until your name has some worth to it. If you are trying to slay the dragon it is vital to get on all of their good sides as they all somehow contain a piece of gear, be it a lance or armor, needed to take it down. Even if you are not going that route, it is well worth your time as they shower you with gifts that you can then sell for some sweet, sweet gold.
I do love how the environments change as the months go by. It starts off in a lush green summer perfect for planting crops, will switch to Autumn with red leaves swaying about, and end in Winter before coming full circle again. It gives the world a breathing, living feel to it. As the years go by, your character does grow older. Assuming you read the manual you’ll know that you will die at age 30, so you will have to make your moves to accomplish your goals eventually. You start at age 18, but it is nonetheless more than enough time to screw around and do whatever you please. Or you can choose to not even pursue an ending and go down in history as a relatively non-important figure. It is a nice little touch that when you die it will flip through a history book that shows your legacy, wife, and whether you were loved or hated as you are laid to rest.
Conqueror A.D 1086 is an extremely ambitious title, especially for 1995. It is often called the grandfather to Mount and Blade, though it only has some similarities to it in my opinion. The developers Software Sorcery really pulled off some magic with this title. Its flaws are enough as to keep me from saying that everyone should try it, but it gets just enough right to be an addictive experience once you ignore the RTS aspect of it. If any game ever needed a remake/remaster, it is this one right here as fixing its issues would truly make it into something unforgettable. As is, I’d only recommend it to those that found any part of this review in the least bit interesting or are looking for a unique gaming experience from yesteryear.
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