Review by: Brian Clair

Conquest of the New World Deluxe Edition places you back in the 16th century to explore new lands and expand your mother country’s empires! Don’t think that this means the game is fully historically accurate, it’s not and the manual comes right out and says it (I just love excessive honesty, or is it modesty?). What the game does do is put you in a randomly generated world with the technology and conditions of the 16th century. So, your main job is to explore the world for resources, landmarks, and other important discoveries; build colonies for new citizens while watching out for other nations; and if possible, establish trade with the natives.

There are 4 main types of units in the game. Explorers are solitary units which roam the countryside revealing areas of the map, notifying you of important landmarks (which you can claim for your country), finding native tribes, special ore deposits (which give you mining bonuses if a colony is nearby), special wooded areas (oak forests, etc) and enemy settlements. Settlers do exactly what they sound like, they form new colonies. Leaders are very important in the game for two reasons: they give bonuses to your troops when lead by a leader and they allow you to attack enemies and use your armies with ease. Terrain is separated into various distinct sections, including: ocean, streams, rivers, grassland, forest, jungle, mountains, and more. Terrain is also sloping or steep depending on the elevation of the mountain or hill — flat land is the best however.

When you build colonies, you have many different options. You start out with a level 1 town which only has a townhouse/town center. Using the supplies from your ship, you can build: mills (to provide wood), taverns (for more explorers), farms (obvious), churches (to attract more people from the motherland), metal mines, gold mines, forts, docks, etc. What you can build depends on the resources available which you have some control over, depending on where you placed the building, its level, bonuses, etc. If you need extra goods/supplies, you can also trade for them either with other towns, the homeland, or with native tribes. As your town gets bigger, you can upgrade the buildings to their next level which allows them to produce more. Military units are different however in that you can recruit only has many as the level of your fort. This can be very debilitating in the game if you don’t make allowances for it.

So, what’s new in the Deluxe edition of the game? You can expect to find more scenarios to play ranging from the basic tutorial (which is what the downloadable demo is), to the Conquistador scenario which is basically a free game for you to explore. You can also customize the scenario templates which define the players, when ships arrive, etc. to make things harder/easier for yourself. The same goes for Mapped Scenarios which allow you to decide where existing colonies are, resources, etc. World size has also increased from the original game with sizes ranging from a small game of size 80 to huge worlds of size 256. Also, unlike in the original version where countries were all the same in the game, each country (Britain, France, High Natives, Holland, Portugal, and Spain) has it’s own special bonuses. There are also LOTS more special discoveries from just the mountains, rivers, and gold mines of the original. Now you’ll find gold deposits, silver deposits, copper ore, redwood trees, teak trees, wheat, corn, and more. You can now start trade alliances with other colonies and send communiques to other players.

Conquest of the New World can be played single player, but the game also lets you play with up to 6 people via IPX network, modem, null modem, or even e-mail. The game is very flexible and with each newly generated world the challenges all reappear in a new way providing days of non-stop play each.