14 DAY TRIAL // I don’t know if it’s worse to admit that my party starved in Expeditions: Conquistador or to acknowledge that a bunch of Indians with primitive weapons defeated my experienced Spanish fighters.
The new game from Logic Artists manages to walk a fine line, with a number of rather steep challenges for gamers to tackle combined with a sense that better preparation and some tactical tweaks can overcome even the toughest of them.
I had played Expeditions earlier in the year in beta form and the game then seemed to be a little too hard for me, but the final release managed to kill me a couple of times only because I was careless and failed to prepare adequately.
The most important resource for an expedition is rations, which can be bought or manufactured in the field.
I initially invested heavily in equipment to make my soldiers more capable and that left me with little money and I resolved to rely on my survival skills to capture some animals and turn them into rations while I hunted down rebels.
My expedition then got a little diseased, which meant that my doctors were unable to hunt or preserve meat.
My soldiers also failed to capture servants who stole my rations.
Then my hunters came up empty handed a few days in a row.
And soon my expedition was made up of half starving characters with low morale who were more interested in getting revenge at their leader than in fighting natives.
So when the Indians attacked, my superior equipment counted for little and I was forced to admit that Expeditions: Conquistador got the better of me.
I love the fact that the developers made my failure feel entirely fair and that I returned to the start of the game focused and determined to better manage my supplies and rely less on my combat troops.