Conquest Guide: The Metal War

Unlocking the War

Conquest opens through a Research card called Goblin Nuisance: 100,000 Food, Villagers unlocked, never bought by autobuy. It adds a War tab with two views, the Muster Grounds and The March. The war is yours for good: Resettlement and Ascension replace your settlement, never your campaign, so the road, the standing army, every war Research card and your Valor carry across both resets. Metal does not; it is a settlement resource and starts over with the run.

The Muster Grounds

Your army is a merge board. Each tile is a regiment of one line and merges like anything else: same line, same tier, one tile a tier higher, up to tier 9. A tile's tier is its population: a tier-2 militia tile fields two militia. Merging two tier-1 tiles is population-neutral, but above that a merge trades soldiers for board space (two tier-3 tiles hold six men, one tier-4 holds four). Merge for room, not for strength.

The grid is the formation: each row of the camp is a line of battle, drawn with forward to the right, so the vanguard is the right-hand column. The board starts at 2x1 and grows to at most 8x4; Widen the line and Add a rank are bought with Valor, and width is deliberately cheaper.

The Six Lines

Militia are the root and need no research. Every other line is a Research card requiring the one before it: Archery (750 Valor), War Sorcery for Mages (3,000), Holy Orders for Priests (9,000), The Spear Wall (15,000 Valor and 10,000 Metal) and The Stables for Horsemen (40,000 Valor and 50,000 Metal); the plated lines cannot precede the Forge.

Militia deal 1 damage with 10 health and no armor. Archers shoot from long range and back away from anything too close. Mages ignore 2 armor and hit an area. Priests heal nearby soldiers. Spearmen wear 2 armor; Horsemen wear 3, hit for 2 and are the fastest. Armor soaks one point per blow, floored at half a point.

The Road and Its Landmarks

The Conquest Road is 200 stones long. Every stone is a holding held by goblins, hobgoblins, trolls or a warlord — Farmland, Lumber Camp, Ore Mine, Mana Well or Workshop — and every twenty-fifth is walled: Walled Towns and Stone Keeps alternate, and the High Keep closes the road at 200. A captured holding pays what it produces, permanently: a farm boosts Food production, a mine Ore, a well Mana, a workshop Metal. Boosts start at two percent (three for Metal) and compound; a minority of farms, camps and mines pay storage instead. Each walled landmark raises every future Valor award by 25 percent, compounding, so the eight walls together are worth nearly six times the base rate.

Ground is only taken in live battle; nothing marches while the tab is hidden. Walled sites are sieges — palisades with arbalest towers, then stone keeps with moats and a mangonel — and impact damage hits walls hardest, slashing least. A sound the advance button releases a waiting army.

Valor

Valor is a body count: one point for every soldier who falls in battle, on either side. It buys tents, board expansion, training and the war's Research cards. Away for more than a minute, your camp pays Valor at a tenth of your army's best five minutes of live fighting ever recorded, for up to eight hours per absence; boost claims pay the same fraction.

Metal and the Forge

Smelting is a spoil of war: 2,500 Valor, hidden until the road's tenth landmark, kept through both resets. A Forge is a Workshop worked by a villager and seated beside Ore Deposits; it draws up to two streams from the ore around it, needing no villager of its own. Ten Ore make one Metal. A stream refines a hundredth of a Metal per second at the bottom and speeds up with every order of magnitude of your ore income. Ore committed to a stream yields no Ore of its own. The unlock grants a Metal cap of 50, which Stockpiles extend. Bellows (500 Metal, tripling per rank, 20 ranks) multiplies refine speed by 1.25 per rank; Stronger Alloys (3,000 Metal, quadrupling per rank, 6 ranks) adds six percent to Food, Wood and Ore gathering per rank.

Training and Identity

Stats are trained per line: Militia health, respawn, damage; Archers damage, fire rate, range; Spearmen armor, health, respawn; Mages penetration, damage, respawn; Priests health, healing, respawn; Horsemen speed, damage, armor, respawn. A rank adds 3 health, 1 damage, 1 armor or 1 healing, cuts attack cooldown by 8 percent or respawn time by 10 percent, or adds 8 percent speed; range adds four paces and stops after six ranks, penetration after two. A rank costs 30 Valor times a line factor (0.8 for Militia, 1.6 for Priests and Horsemen), times 3.4 per rank already bought; armor ranks on Spearmen and Horsemen also cost Metal from 10,000 upward, scaled by the line's largest-ever size.

After six trained ranks a line may buy an identity for Culture — 2,000,000 for its first fork, 20,000,000 for the second, both above the starting Culture cap of 1,000,000: Swordsman or Berserker, Longbowman or Crossbowman, Halberdier or Tower Shield, Light Cavalry or Knight, Fire or Ice Mage, Medic or Battle Priest. Each identity owned adds 250 Metal to that line's later recruits.

Honest Tips

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