SpellForce: Conquest of Eo

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo was provided by THQ Nordic for review. Thank you!

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is a very intriguing title, unlike any other strategy game I've played before, and I've played my fair share of the Civilization franchise. Still, while SpellForce: Conquest of Eo shares some similarities, it's a unique experience that is easy to understand while offering a lot of complexity.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is split into campaigns, either the Path of the Circle or the Origins campaigns, which can be played on pre-made maps or a randomly generated one, with a few shorter scenarios you can play through on procedurally generated maps. While this is the only content in the game, the campaigns are long, several hours each, and you could replay the campaigns and scenarios due to the random generation in the game.

At first, SpellForce: Conquest of Eo might look like another Civilization clone, but it differs greatly in how you play the game. Sure, you play on a hex grid map with borders around your base that you can gather resources within, but that's where the similarities end. In SpellForce, you merely have control of 1 tower, which functions similarly to a city in Civilization, providing a few spaces of borders around it, determining who owns the resources and structures in that area.

You can expand your area of influence through a few means, such as casting spells at certain points on the map that can be activated to create a border around them or by using a special unit to place a Lodge, which also provides borders and lets you claim control of the land. Ultimately, SpellForce is much more about acquiring resources to build your armies and make your Tower (your main base) more powerful by crafting more rooms and unlocking its full potential, and in that way, it differs from many other 4X strategy games.

There's also a heavy focus on questlines. It's not just about defeating your enemies in combat. Throughout the world map, there will be neutral parties that you can interact with, either giving them your aid in exchange for allegiance or forcing them to join you. These can bolster your strength, giving you an advantage against opposing factions. This gives SpellForce an almost "RPG-like" quality, where you are advancing a plot while gaining power and influence.

There are also various structures on the map, like Goblin Camps, where you can hire Goblins if you own the camp, Watchtowers that reveal large portions of the nearby area, and neutral cities, which can offer quests and several other map elements like harvestable resources if you have a unit with the worker skill with you.

When facing an opponent in combat, the game switches to a more tactical view, zooming in from the overworld to a more detailed hex-grid of the local area. This allows you to move individual units on the battlefield in turn-based tactical strategy. While these battles are interesting, with various abilities available to use and tactical positioning required, they do take a rather significant amount of time, usually a few minutes, for a single battle. So unless it's a tight battle that you want to control manually, you'll probably want to auto-resolve most battles when you have a clear advantage, and let the game simulate the fight.

There are various other classes, or archetypes, that you can choose from, such as Alchemists who can craft potions to boost their troops, Artificers who can create glyphs to upgrade their troops, and Demonologist who uses the power of demons to fuel their empires. Each uses a similar system but tends to lean into different playstyles, so there's a choice depending on how you like to play these strategy games.

In my playthrough, I chose to use the Necromancer. This archetype lets you build a room in your tower that you can use to create new monsters to fight for you without upkeep cost. This uses a unique system where the resources you collect on the map have values assigned to them, allowing you to combine various resources with a "soul" to create new types of monsters. It's a really innovative mechanic and a nice surprise in a strategy game like this.

Each of these archetypes also affects the spells you can cast, which are abilities you can use on the overworld map every few turns that can have drastic effects on the world, such as expanding influence or altering a unit in some way. And if you want to really specialize, you can create your own archetype to suit your playstyle, choosing which pages of the Grimoire you want access to, which affects the spells you can cast.

As for presentation, the game is quite pleasing to look at, although nothing particularly impressive. Other strategy games definitely surpass SpellForce in the visuals department. However, that's never really been a key point for strategy games, so it's by no means a big deal. It's certainly not a bad-looking game.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is an interesting and unique strategy game. While there is base-building and expansion of borders, a lot of the focus is placed on quests and the gathering of resources to expand and improve your army, moving from one major plot point to another to advance the story. This makes it stand out as unique in the turn-based strategy genre, and it's a game you should check out if you want a campaign-driven strategy.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo - Steam Deck Performance

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo supports 1280x800 as a resolution, so we don't get any black borders on the Steam Deck. It also has great controller support for a strategy game, so once you get used to the controls, it's perfectly controllable with just your Steam Deck controller.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

Set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 30 and no TDP limit.

For this preset, we use the standard settings used by SpellForce: Conquest of Eo when you start it: pretty much everything on High and Anti-Aliasing on SMAA. This gives you great visual quality, and the battery life isn't too bad if we limit it to 30 FPS.

Here are the settings used for reference:

At these settings, the game generally stays at 30 FPS, although at one point, I did encounter a sustained drop to 24 FPS for several seconds for no discernable reason. This seems pretty rare, though, so you should expect a stable framerate.

The power draw is in the middle of the road, mostly holding around 12-17W of battery drain. So you could get around 2-2.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD and around 3.5 hours of play from a Steam Deck OLED.

Temperatures stayed reasonable, around 60-65C, occasionally getting close to 70C, but the fan never really ramped up.

If you want to increase the battery life a little, you can lower the Shadows and Anti Aliasing to "Low" and "Off," respectively. This lowers your power draw to the 10-14W range, giving you an extra hour or so of battery life.

Accessibility:

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo has text size options, and I'd recommend you set both Font Scale and Tooltip Scale to 120% as it makes the text easier to read on the Steam Deck. There are also ample tutorials that explain the majority of the mechanics in the game, even down to moving units.

Conclusion:

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is a unique and interesting turn-based strategy. While the focus might not be as much on expanding your empire as it is in games like Civilization, the focus instead of questlines, story, and the world's lore enriches the game and places it in another category altogether. If you're a fan of turn-based strategy and tactical turn-based battles, SpellForce: Conquest of EO might just be the game for you.

As a bonus, SpellForce: Conquest of Eo works flawlessly on the Steam Deck, with a good control scheme and the ability to run the game at 30 FPS with no issues.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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