LP Beach

So I've been thinking about making a screenshot let's play for a long time.

anyway, here is Conquest of Elysium 5:



Not much to look at, don't worry it doesn't get any better,

conquest of elysium is a spin off of the overcomplicated Dominions strategy game franchise. it takes a lot of the complexity out of the series, gone are complex unit formations, pretender design and magic systems, they have been replaced with an overly energetic world teeming with wildlife and lore, that will eat all the players alive before anyone actually encounters anyone.


I like both dominions and elysium, both have their flaws, but let's not get into that right now.
This is going to be a screenshot lP, maybe I'll record a gif if a battle is super cool. or something.

the game isn't very graphically appealing, most of the sprites are nice enough but with only a single frame of animation. there are also cool particle effects in the battles.

I plan on doing a couple of playthroughs for this. First I want to speed through with the baron, the early game speedy pubstomper to introduce mechanics and get everyone sorta familiar with how the game works and some of the crazy things that can happen. After this first run is complete though, I guess I’ll let the thread decide.


Like dominions you can rename units, If you want to be in the game let me know, unlike dominions we don’t get tons of commanders to give funny names to though. So if you don’t make it in don’t be sad.


I’m going to try and do an update every day early on, that will probably slow down as turns get more difficult to write things about, but I’m a scatterbrained slacker, so we will see.

First post with the actual game should be up in a minute if I have the image hosting stuff figured out, if you don't see anything know I am frantically pushing buttons

Chapter 1 the Baron:
Year 1



In order to get myself back into the swing of this game, and to introduce people not familiar, I’m just going to speed through with one of the least complicated characters.



The baron is fast, he doesn’t really have a late game, other then roll the opponent before they get there. However he gets a lot of units for free, more money for free, and siege engines, which actually does give him a fragile late game strategy of killing things in siege rounds, but I’ll get to that in a minute.




Well heres the start, day one, you can see my tiny castle,


The baron himself is a competent leader,


Ok, he is slightly better then a normal footsoldier, probably should be kept out of combat when possible, but he is at least less likely to die in an ambush then some of the other faction leaders,

If the baron dies, he is gone forever, but another baron unit will eventually show up for recruitment. That summoning circle indicates he has a ‘ritual ability’ nothing magical though, just some overworld special action.





Raise levies is a ‘spell’ that can be ‘cast’ in small towns to ‘summon’ some ‘defenders’

Aka we bully some townspeople into standing up for themselves. Levies are good because they prevent your small farms in the sticks from being overrun by a snake and using that as an excuse to stop sending taxes.

Swift justice is a spell that turns a bandit camp into a gallows, the mechanical significance of gallows doesn’t matter to us, just the fact that the bandit camp is gone, and will stop spawning bandits


Raise fort is the real important ability, it takes 6 actions to cast, so the baron has to sit around for at least 1 turn after casting it. The ability turns a normal village into a motte and bailey.
This makes the land produce more gold and adds walls making it harder for your peasants to complain.

The level 2 abilities I’ll get to next Update,


We also start with this joker,



High lords are awesome, they hit hard, move fast and can cast all the level 1 abilities that the baron has.

Their only flaw is that they are fast, frontline fighters…. For a leader that isn’t exactly a desirable quality early on.

Anyway I’m going to start off by clearing the local hostiles,
My starting army is a mess of calverymen, spearmen, and longbows, I’m going to make a slightly risky play and send my horsemen with the lord up to the soldier, who is apparently alone in town, and the baron will lead the pokey stick crew heroically to slaughter some villagers.


Most recruits cost a minimum of 50 gold, the baron has one of the few exceptions being a squad of war dogs.



I’m not going to recruit these guys. There are situations where a bunch of dogs tearing into something bigger can be good. But I’d much rather bank my money for the first couple of turns.





Good news, we slaughtered the peasantry, bad news, a siren wandered 1 square away from our fort.

Neutral units, in gray, move entirely randomly as far as I’m aware, but have an uncanny knack of moving towards things you own which makes me think it isn’t random at all.

If we lose our last(only) fort we automatically lose, even if it was to something dumb like a single peasant wandering in. annoyingly since that siren is amphibious I can’t send anything to kill it.

Note the soldiers are not the same shade of gray, but a blue-gray, they belong to a different neutral faction then the wandering wildlife, and these groups stationed at the villages will never move.





I elected to retreat the baron, the archers by themselves are probably enough to deal with the siren before she can do anything. Also she will probably just wander back into the ocean next turn.


Meanwhile the highlord is ‘liberating’ another village. The 2 crossed swords indicate a battle is taking place there.



Turn 3, I decided to leave the barons troops at the castle defending it from the solo sea monsters, while sending the baron to start upgrading the towns, this cost ALL of my money, but we will be getting more money soon. The upgrade process is instant, but it will take 2 turns before my baron can move again. I’m not worried about the hippocampus, because it doesn’t transform and can’t go on land.



Pictured, everything wrong with high lords.



don't mind the battle, that's just the highlord dealing with some local wildlife.

I don’t have enough money yet to build another fort, but I did set up some levies in the one I had built. And the market village… oh yeah the market village.






The market is a very basic system in this game, you don’t interact with other players but some magical independent merchant’s league or something. It basically lets you convert one kind of resource into another, we need iron for our better units so this is good. With 1 trade we can get 1 iron for 1 gold every turn, or if we check the overprice option we can trade 4 gold for 2 iron.


There are other resources with less even ratios. But the baron doesn’t care about them so he can’t even see them in the market. Kingdoms are forged of Iron and gold.


That brings us to winter,




Winter sucks, all the tiles in the temperate areas get covered in snow, slowing movement to a crawl, also several tiles produce less resources during winter. Our two villages and our castle had their gold production cut in half.

However the winter also freezes water to ice, which actually gives me an opportunity to deal with that siren.

We also get a recruitment offer for 2 trebuchets,

Very nice, but at 75 gold AND 75 iron, we can’t really use this yet.



Recruitment offers pop up randomly depending on what tiles you own. Owning a temple gives the baron the chance to recruit priests and monks, while owning a library will give us the chance to hire wizards. The more of these structures we own, the better our recruitment offers will be.


Anyway, after some deliberation I decide to send my lord south towards the desert, where he finds a gem deposit, and uh…



Is that a horde of monkeys on an elephant?




Balanced precariously on a wall?





Well, this is a curious situation. Normally trampling units are a major pain, since they can squash knights and bypass their protection. But since this is a ranged unit, I’m not sure if it will behave that aggressive. Especially in a siege scenario, I should come back with archers and pick this castle apart.




Caught the siren in ice, lets see if I can make it out before the ice melts in spring.

Also a bunch of goblins appeared,




Yowtch, 50% casualties,


The problem is that the siren has an ability that gives it a chance to convert anything that attacks it within a certain range to an ally. I was confident that my longbows could take it down before it got close enough, but I was way off in my estimate.


I also got a recruitment offer for swordsman and archers, its a pretty good deal, 10 men for 70 gold, vs the usual 5 for 50 deal. But I don’t have enough iron for the swordsmen, I’d rather save the gold for forts at the moment, but I do recruit some Longbows at the normal price, to replace the 2 I lost.


Anyway I moved the baron off the ice before spring hit, the changing season will solve our troop concerns soon.


I start looping my highlord back around, after the season changes, and make a critical error.





See that battle, that keep was unoccupied. Which means this is an ambush, no mundane unit can hide in plain sight like that, so that means I likely got ambushed by ghosts.


There are several kinds of ghosts ranging from ‘annoying but mostly harmless’ to ‘welp their goes that army’, so we will have to see what I got…




You have got to be kidding me.




Ok, if you have ever played dominions you probably know horrors are bad news, eldritch monstrosities that do not play fair, this is an endgame tier unit, that I walked into with 5 knights, that is mostly immune to physical damage, most magical damage, casts more spells per round then my entire faction can learn,


I was expecting a disaster, I didn’t expect this much of a disaster though…


Well, it wasn’t really that bad, so the eldritch abomination mind controlled a couple of knights, not really any worse then losing them in some other ambush.

And because this guy is mounted on a fort, he isn’t likely to leave. So at least I don’t need to worry about a roaming moon horror.


Also moon horrors are void aligned, so any neutral unit that wanders in there is going to get eaten, I’ll just think of that fort as an extra-planer bug zapper for a little while… and by a little while I mean the entire game because I don’t think I have a single thing in my arsenal that can kill a moon horror…




It will take me a little while to rebuild from that loss though,

Hilariously, I got an offer for a new highlord the next turn, but I don’t have the 10 iron to get him suited up. Oh well, just keep building forts for a few turns…





Jackpot, this is the real power of the baron, every year at the start of summer, he gets a wave of free units,




Knights are great units at any stage of the game, they hit hard with the lance charge, have a lot of armor for a unit available this early on, as long as your not trying to stab an incorporeal moon horror throwing a ton of knights at things is a reliable strategy. The only real weakness of the knight is that little icon next to the shield. That is ‘battle fast’ meaning the knight gets 2 moves in combat, but still only 3 moves on the overworld. The highlord and calverymen have ‘fast’ which gives them an additional move on the overworld. The downside is pretty negligible since your usually mixing in other slower units anyway, but it does give the highlord with 5 calverymen a bit of a niche.



There are a few more exotic conscripts we can get by capturing certain tiles, but we will get to them when we get the chance.


I think thats a good note to end the update, We survived 1 year, captured a bunch of towns, set up some forts. Found some interesting threats, and introduced a lot of mechanics.

The only things I really know about this game is that it has extremely murderous deer and himbo birdmen.

That Moon Horror seems like a really unlucky draw, is there worse that could've spawned there or is that as bad as it can get there?

RandomKesaranPasaran wrote: ↑

Wed May 24, 2023 10:40 pm

That Moon Horror seems like a really unlucky draw, is there worse that could've spawned there or is that as bad as it can get there?

It might be, its definitely the worst thing that can spawn and be invisible on the world map. Some other giant monsters like the beholder could be stronger, but I wouldn't have walked right into them.
on the other hand, I am pretty sure that horror is just going to hang out on the ruins, sometimes tiles held by npcs can spawn new wandering monsters, but if the ruins spawn anything it would probably be undead units.
npc mobs can fight each other if they aren't part of the same faction. so I shouldn't see any wandering spirits at least.

There are several kinds of ghosts that would have screwed me over just as bad as this horror, a banshee has an aoe save or die scream that would have wiped my crew of knights unless I got really lucky and the lance charge hit through the ethereal effect,
ethereal just gives the unit a flat chance to avoid damage from non-magical attacks.
I might not be able to kill the horror, but It might be a safer neighbor

Year 2
Here is an overview of the kingdom,



We are starting to get rolling money wise, but we won’t be able to bring our siege engines online until we get some iron,

This is probably going to be a quick year,I only have the baron to move around and he is going to finish building the forts on the villages, for 4 turns.


Each season is 3 turns long, and one full cycle of seasons is a year. The game starts in the summer of year 0, I’m not sure if aging has an effect on units in COE5, it existed in 4, mostly to interact with the decay debuff, But I think they simplified it for this game. I don’t see a way to check a units age anyway.

At the end of winter I get a recruitment offer for a scout,



A scout is a good thing to have, when your army is ambushed their normal formation is scattered, so even if its a single bandit, it can pop up in range of your squishy captain or mage, while your melee units are a few rounds away.

It wouldn’t have helped me see the moon lord though, magically invisible units require magically good sight to detect. I’ll buy him anyway because he’s only 21 gold and I have a decent excess at this point.

Its good to keep a certain amount of gold in reserve, since a lot of your more powerful recruit opportunities pop up randomly. Until I get enough gold per turn to actually recruit something every turn I’m going to be pretty frugal.

Finally at the start of spring I get offered a Captain,



Captains are the most generic leader unit in the game, they have a pretty nice looking sprite and that’s about it. I buy him anyway because I want to do something risky with the baron and don’t want to immediately lose if it backfires.



Yeah, that went well, was a little hairy when the elephant got close but the elephant decided to trample my knights instead of going for the archers and baron, still now I know the elephant won’t hang out behind the gate just because it is an archer unit.

In a siege, most melee units will wait patiently behind the walls until the gate is breached, but they will open the gate themselves and charge out if there are no ranged units to man the walls.

Capturing the desert palace gives me another recruitment location, now if a meteor lands on the baron’s castle, I won’t automatically lose the game!
I'm pretty sure they patched meteors breaking starting bases out of the game.

Also some locations have their own special recruits, the desert palace has these guys



Uhh, scourge lord? I think this is a oversight from the devs, camel riders and desert fighters used to be generic units in CoE4, but were incorporated into the new faction’s roster with new lore for CoE5, the scourge lord has a gimmick that reduces the areas it controls to desert, but unless I missed a message of one of my computer controlled opponents dying, there probably isn’t a scourge lord in this game. Oh well, we get to appreciate some of the offbeat humor in the unit descriptions.

Mechanically its a horse archer with desert move. It costs 50 gold and 5 iron for 2, definitely not worth it at this point in the game, and probably never worth it while we have access to our themed longbowmen and siege weapons.
I also get another captain this turn, he will chill out at the desert palace until I have some units for him to move around.

Its slow crawling through the desert, each move costs 2 actions instead of 1, so I barely make it anywhere interesting before the year ends. But we got something cool to tease for next time.

A meteor destroying your only fortress does sound pretty on brand from the developers based off of what I know of them.

Does trampling work differently in this game than it does in Dominions? Because those knights look pretty alive despite having had an elephant step on them a bunch.

combat in general is simplified, there are no attack or defense rolls, all attacks are assumed to hit, unless a special property on the attacker or defender makes missing possible. armor is also significantly simplified with most units only having 1 or 2 points of armor, that give a flat damage reduction. however damage rolls are also a lot more chaotic, any kind of modifier to damage increases the size of the imaginary dice being rolled instead of adding directly to the damage. so even the most powerful unit has a chance to roll a 1 for damage. humorously a few of the instant kill spells are coded as d999 damage.

the way they implemented trample is also pretty dramatically different. In dominions the size of the creature, gets factored into the damage roll, but in COE its a flat value based on the creature.
the elephant deals 1d4 trampling damage, still subject to the usual exploding dice rule, but knights have 3 armor plus a shield which reduces damage by an additional point randomly.

All in all, knights are just really really really strong at dealing with anything that isn't magical.

Current state of the kingdom,


Right off the bat we have a bunch of decisions to make, I have a recruitment offer for a new highlord, which I snap up and use to send the fresh wave of knights to reinforce the baron’s party. I leave all the spearmen for now, but I’m starting to get a decent pile of them.

The baron uncovered two interesting neutral units last turn. First is the squad of pale ones.



Pale ones look kinda scary but aren’t actually any tougher then normal soldiers, they have an inherent bad vision debuff which means they miss a decent chunk of their attacks. They are pretty underwhelming as defenders, but that little pickaxe icon? If they attack in a siege they have a chance of tunneling under fortifications and starting battle inside your opponents base.

The pale ones are guarding an iron mine,

The other unit is a bile dragon



Poison is a pretty serious threat in this game. Even if my knights managed to kill the dragon, it would likely tag them with 2 blasts of poison damage. After combat ends, any unit that was poisoned will tic down any remaining poison in their system. Unless there is some regeneration to counter the damage, they are likely going to die.

I probably would still win the fight, but the bile dragon is sitting on an ‘abandoned mine’ which is just a less valuable iron mine. So I’m just going to ignore it for now.




One of my knights got a permanent injury from the battle, honestly not a big deal when you only have 11 hp to start with. No actual casualties so the mine is mine!

I also get a recruitment offer for crossbowmen



Crossbows are the games ‘default’ heavy ranged option. They aren’t worth picking up normally because longbowmen are better in every way for the baron. But at a discount, eh, sure, I’ll grab them so that the desert palace has someone manning the walls.




Some fish people wandered out of the sea kinda close to my new iron mine,



Slightly tougher then your normal soldier, but nothing to write home about. I’m probably going to have to chase these guys down like the siren from earlier.

Also we have spotted our first actual opponent



Unfortunately other then his color, and his name on the scoreboard we know nothing about this other conqueror.


I immediately rush in to steal his farm which reveals some more territory,



The levies are neutral, so whatever force he used to take these farms was small, and couldn’t capture the larger village,

Before I try and take the village I use my extra movement to scout around a bit.



Oh ho, a squad of wandering dwarves.

a not insignificant number of dwarves, this is a more even match for my knights then I’d feel comfortable taking on, the dwarven arbalasts can only fire 1 arrow every 3 turns, but it hits twice as hard as a crossbow, the dwarven warriors are no slouch either,

This force probably ‘liberated’ the market village from my rival in blue at some point…
Next turn I get a piece of news,



Welp, so much for the first encounter. On one hand its kinda reassuring when someone else bites the wilds of elysium, but it can be jarring. I lose 2 archers in the assault of the peasant village, which is kinda annoying.





While this little drama has been playing out, I sent my freshly recruited high lord with a team of knights to loop around north.



We have uncovered a few cool things. One is coal mine guarded by dwarves, weaker then the force we found in the savana, so I will probably be taking it soon.
Fort Hope is guarded by 2 trolls, which hit hard, have a ton of health, and regenerate, I can kill them, but it will take a few more knights to do it safely.

But the most interesting thing is this ancient forest, ancient forests spawn wildlife to harass players, and are often guarded by powerful forest monsters like hydras and witches, but this one appears to just have a bunch of wolves in it. And a large mushroom


I have a scout with this force, but there is still a chance there is a monstrous invisible creature hanging out here, I might go for it anyway.




I went for it, and there was nothing there but wolves. Game is really making up for that moon lord incident.

I also spotted this beauty



Neutral dwarves are a pain in the neck, they send out swarms of scouts to occupy mines and taking out the dwarven queen isn’t easy,



Dwarf magic level 3 is very strong, with access to spells like earthquake, or earth elementals. I’ll have to send a weak force into the mine to see what spells she knows. This will be an ideal location to put siege weapons to use, unfortunately the dwarves have one of their own.

Pretty neat,

I decided to throw my pile of spearmen at that coal mine, I figured loosing a couple spearman to a well aimed arbalast is better then loosing a single knight



Spearmen really really suck, they are only really good for killing wildlife and tanking hits.

But they were free so its still better then loosing a single knight. Also this guy got a cool injury



The baron finds another forest,


I’m a lot more suspicious of an empty forest so I’ll wait for the scout to get closer before tackling it.

That was the plan at least, until I saw this guy




This is actually a really weak mage, level 1 necromancy has good rituals, but the battle spells are just things like ‘curse 1 unit with certain death’ a well placed arrow can do that!, also the rest of his troops are just a dozen or so long dead, which while threatening in numbers, aren’t noticeably stronger then an average human.

I should be able to take down this castle,

Also of interest is the temple right above it. Temples give access to priestly recruits, so I should try and take that, the minotaurs guarding it are just smaller elephants essentially, and I should be able to stomp them with my numbers.



Ethereal units are no joke, I probably should have held off on this a bit longer,

Capturing the ruin lets me hire thugs for myself.



They aren’t that good, but stealthy units are fun to mess with.

More concerningly, baron ComatosePhoenix was hit by a disease,



It will take a year before he croaks but barring a miracle he is on a clock.

I rally all the remaining knights and go to clear out the temple, 2 more die in the process alongside the scout who got a little too close to the minotaur's somehow. My Highlord Aelfred picked up a baddass ice spear and used it to great effect.



Just a ton of damage on a frontline fighter.

Unfortunately we lost one of our villages to that wondering troop of dwarves, but overall this has been a pretty good year. Also, since we held onto that ancient forest I can show off this guy!



Unicorn knights are really good, 3 attacks + lance charge, recovers from afflictions,
and that alicorn horn ounts as a magic weapon so no issues with ghosts. They are also truly fast instead of just battle fast so 4 moves on the map woo!

Of course you only get one of these guys per ancient forest you control per year, so its basically impossible to get a useful number.

I'm going to have a busy weekend, so I'm not sure when the next update is going to be, Tuesday at the latest.