Konkwest, a new strategy game, has been released on Steam by Vincent Busch, a recent Hanze University Game Design graduate.
Konkwest is a turn-based strategy game that sees players trying to dominate the world as they try to amass more power. It is a combination of several games including Diplomacy, Europa Universalis, and Civilization with a control scheme inspired by Google Earth. However, there are several aspects making the game stand out from other games in the genre.
One of the standouts is that instead of a flat map, a staple in the grand strategy genre, Busch opted for a globe. He said that even though this wasn’t part of the original plan, it was always in the back of his mind – feeling that when he saw a globe in other games, there was too little interaction possible with it.
“It wasn’t until several friends of mine, who played the game in the early stages of development suggested it would be great and something rather unique,” Busch told The Northern Times.
After a bit of reworking and the help of his friend Yoav, a mathematics enthusiast, he changed the flat world into a globe-shaped one. “In my opinion that makes Konkwest look and feel a lot more special somehow,” Busch said.
Busch explains that the game is different from others in the genre because it’s relatively accessible and easy to understand with quicker progress throughout. This way it’s also a lot more interesting to beginners. “I enjoyed playing games such as Europa Universalis in multiplayer, but you usually need four sessions of several hours to finish the game, you can imagine it’s rather challenging keeping a group of players together for that,” he said.
It’s no coincidence that the camera and controls are nearly identical to Google Maps either. “It’s something that’s already known to most people and already has been optimised for intuitive use by the people who develop such navigation software,” Busch explains.
However, Busch still made it clear that the game is still fun for seasoned gamers as well. “The user interface resembles those of popular grand strategy games, which makes it easy to pick up for veteran strategy gamers,” he highlighted.
Another thing which contrasts with similar games is that there’s a single-resource economy, which Busch hasn’t seen done in other games with comparable or higher complexity. “The only resource in Konkwest is power. You gain it by improving or expanding your country, and need it for almost everything in the game,” he said.
Because there is no need to track gold, diplomatic power, or culture points in the game, the difficulty for Busch was to keep this economy in balance and still a fun and fair mechanic. However, there is a way for the gamers to make it even more interesting. Players can interact with a system he calls partial autonomation. “Players can, for example, optimise their country’s power by implementing linguistic policies in their regions. But if you completely ignore it, the game will just pick a linguistic policy that fits the region,” he said.
Luckily there weren’t any major setbacks, but there was a slight issue with the Android version and since that was so close to his release date he decided to bring the game to Steam first, but despite some delay it is set to launch at a later point.
Busch does explain that sometimes he realised from feedback not everyone was as knowledgeable about things like geography as he was. “I think I probably know the name of Switzerland-sized and bigger areas in the world, and that is not normal,” he said.
Occasionally, players asked him questions about where some lesser-known countries were, so taking this feedback onboard Busch added a ‘find-a-place’ button.
Konkwest is now available to play on Steam.