Conquest of Eo Q&A Transcript

[Lanani]

Fellow mages of Eo, we thank you for your patience.
Today, we present to you two transcripts of the Q&A that took place on March 31st.

If you wish to read a full transcript of the entire session, you can find it on our Discord:

Long Q&A transcript on Discord[discord.com]


If you want a to-the-point overview of the questions and answers, please read on in the posts below

Thank you once again for your questions and participation!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Key
Q = Question
J = Jan (Primetide) of Owned by Gravity
SN = Schism Navigator of Grimlore Games

Q: How did the team come up with the rather novel idea of the moving castle? And the corollary concept of apprentice lodges? – easytarget

J: The core concept for us was we wanted to do something that was like a 4X in some elements but is also an RPG and centres around the mages. Because from the get-go that was our vision on the product.

And we quickly came to the point where we said if your mage is just another nation with magical abilities like I can take areas, subjugate the natives. It doesn’t feel very different from being a king or being an emperor or being whatever you are from other games of that type.

One of the things that was clearly for us from the beginning there as well is we wanted a clear competition, so you are a mage and you are up against the circle of mages. And the circle of mages has their own towers and the question of who has got the biggest.

So, you want to tech into your tower, invest in your tower and that is visible by your tower getting larger. But then obviously if you only have your tower your area of influence is going to be limited and we didn’t want to paint the map. Where you go outwards from the centre and everything between you and your border is dead and uninteresting.

We wanted to have a focus for you that was very strong, but it also needed to be mobile, so you only have your little area of influence. And you always must plop your tower into a new area. So, we had to have the tower moving. The tower is almost like a character.

The other part of that is we always wanted to have that initial feeling of a 4X game where exploration is interesting. Where exploration is interesting because it is dangerous and there is new stuff.

By moving the tower, you are preventing a dead zone around that starting area but have to go somewhere else because of that little dead zone you created. The other thing is you are always getting into trouble and new interesting areas. Your heroes are kind of your first scouting and active forces, but the tower is your backup. So, this moving tower concept came from that.

To be honest the lodges of the apprentices came pretty late. Because we realised the moving tower’s nice but mid game late game you had too little of the map definitely needed a larger area, more resources and being able to handle them. And also needed a way to move to the special locations of the map. Apprentices we always had as a main hero type next to the story heroes we have but in this way they became important to build outposts.

I wouldn’t say the lodges were an afterthought, but it came from the game not really working as well with just the one tower. So, whilst we kept that idea we wanted to give you additional area to control.

Q: What is your favourite Conquest of Eo unit for developers and why is it the gobbo shaman? – Farlon

J: I can’t answer for the entire team and to be honest that changes throughout development. Different from the players we don’t discover the units as they are all there. We start with a small bunch of units as we haven’t designed anymore of them. It changes and we always have our favourites.

Take the shaman, it was initially a gobbo unit that had some healing abilities. But it was a little underwhelming with just that. As the gobbos were a level 1 tier unit we wanted to make it more interesting. And for a while that was really cool because when you switch from being a healer to being a leader of goblins and also the healing became the berserker shrooms. It got an attack but also made it weaker that made it a more interesting early unit so we liked it early on to be honest.

Right now, I really like the mole beasts not from the players perspective but from an event perspective. When you first encounter them, you don’t really know about them and they teleport towards you and mess up your whole line-up. That was a moment I liked in the game where something surprising happens as opposed to exchanging damage numbers. So, it’s a love/hate relationship because when I playtest and ran through those I am not really that good at defending but it really takes a conscious effort to make sure my guys survive the attack. So, this is where I like them they change up the gameplay and my established tactics.

SN: It’s fun that goblins get so much love from the community.

J: That is one of the first decisions we made in SpellForce that is true to the IP and the heritage. Whilst there are light and dark units it’s not a sort of good or evil necessarily. We get to know these guys from inside their culture. So, goblins are done away with quite quickly and we wanted to not have them at the centre but we wanted to be valuable units. And we also wanted to show that whilst they’re always a little silly to make you empathise with them to a degree. So, it’s not by accident that the early mission in the main questline has you go to the goblin camp. You suspect them of being thieves and it turns out well they aren’t and they actually worked for your master. It’s one of those things where we like to tell the player: Well don’t necessarily assume you know what is going on because you know other fantasy tropes from other fantasy worlds.

Q: What was your favourite part of the game, what is your favourite part of the SpellForce universe? – Perpetually Clueless

J: I’ve been a producer on SpellForce 2 and been involved with some of the worldbuilding. And we have had a lot of discussions about the factions and how they would work. So, I’ve been quite close to the actual creation. One of the things I like about it that though it is not entirely original there is quite a lot of serious thought that have gone into it. It is not just a fancy trope and at the same time it is actually quite difficult to do established storytelling without telling a main story. Because in SpellForce 1 and 2 you were sort of teleported around a broken world and the fact that you had a broken world had to do with just technically how much world you could show. We needed these levels so that these islands in SpellForce are a result mostly of the requirements of the game design and the technical requirements and then find a reason for it in the world.

Although a cataclysm is not unusual in fantasy tropes, but I really liked the circle of mages things. These guys sort of broke the world. That is one of the reasons why we chose the point in time in the history that we see in Conquest of Eo. Because in SpellForce 2 the mages were already dead or were kind of an afterthought and in SpellForce 3 the mages didn’t exist yet as such. You get to know early versions of them, but you don’t see them doing what gets them there.

So, what was the time like when a number of enormously powerful mages, some of them less trustworthy than others, some of them perhaps drunken with a new alien power? And these guys exist but they don’t rule the world. Usually in fantasy stories you’d have these guys build up an empire with armies and orcs and whatever. But the mages in the circle don’t. What is the world like that has these guys and at the same time with politics of normal nations that compared to these super powerful beings is totally irrelevant, nothing can stand against them. So that was the part that appealed to me the most. It worked well with what we wanted to do from a design standpoint.

Q: We know there are 13 mages. But are there any mages that you might’ve shown in Conquest of Eo? That they might have died or something problematic happen to them? – Manoholik

J: We are trying to respect the lore and because we have this situation where the past titles, SpellForce 1 and 2, are playing in the future that we are doing and the previous, SpellForce 3, is set slightly before us we couldn’t kill anybody off from the circle mages. Creating a paradox, breaking lore. The reason we don’t have all the circle mages in our game is quite simple, some of them lorewise are supposed to not be on the main continent. So, they’re clearly positioned somewhere else.

The ones that we left out the main reasons really is lore. But the ones we have are the most clear cut in regards to how they work with features in the game. They tend to align themselves with certain buildings and things that you do. So these worked well with what we wanted to do and the units we wanted to associate with them.

So the selection was kind of natural, and we looked at each of the mages. But we didn’t include all of them as there would either be lorewise would be a really weird break or they didn’t give us enough texture in order to associate with. Although they don’t have a lot of dialogue, we wanted them to be characters in the game.

Q: A follow up question: Who is your favourite circle mage, not from the perspective of character but from the perspective of themes? – Manoholik

J: I actually like Ianna because she does something that is kind of outside of the normal “Oh I am going to raise an army and stop you”. So, she is diminishing your values with the cities. So for the same reason that I like the moles, it’s that this is a different element of the game that isn’t just pure powerplay.

Also I have been kicked by Hokan so often that I hate him passionately by now. Because in my playthroughs I always tend to end up next to time.

[Lanani]

Key
Q = Question
J = Jan (Primetide) of Owned by Gravity
SN = Schism Navigator of Grimlore Games

Q: What are your favourite mage type/classes to play? – Agrodal

J: I currently like the alchemist. I am swinging around but I like the alchemist, probably currently with enchantment. I think I’ve gone pure enchantment on my last one, maybe enchantment/nature. For the reason he gets a lot of versatility, but also because unlike the two others who need to wait for the right resources to come along can always craft something because he can always make something.

Q: Were there any types of mages (like alchemist, artificer, and necromancer) that you considered for the game but ultimately discarded? Why did you decide against them? – Doubt

J: No, we actually started out with just the necromancer. Because that was the easiest to do and then we had the alchemist. We knew we wanted a third class that was something more stable and that was the artificer. So we didn’t start off with a tableau of there are some possible things, we actually went through what we had one by one and built them slowly.

Those from the beta know that even the spell list we had two each and then later on decided the necromancer get two death spells. That was because we started the necromancer out with mind and death.

There was some stuff but that was more like spells that didn’t make it into the game. For this one we didn’t do much paper design, which is what you usually do, and then it ends up on the cutting room floor. But for this game we always did small steps in trying to get there so we usually work in very cautiously in not creating a feature creep or scope creep. And make sue what we have in there is actually workable. In this case it worked out quite well.

Q: What drove your decision to make Conquest of Eo turn based? – Agrodal

J: That’s very easy. We are old and slow, I can’t do real time games anymore.

SN: No don’t say that, I’m not that old yet!

J: No, it’s because there was a real time game already. We didn’t want to do SpellForce just in blue. The initial concept was very clearly turn based because we wanted to achieve something else. So we wanted to expand the SpellForce universe to the point where you go “okay so SpellForce is not just an RTS-RPG hybrid”. When SpellForce came out two decades ago it was a very novel concept, I am not saying ours is terribly ambitious, but we are trying to take two genres that have expectations and to be honest got a little stale. There are lots of variations, but we wanted to do something that breaks the mould a little. And what we know best is turn based games because that is what we know best. We wouldn’t dare to say do a SpellForce shooter because we don’t know that very well.

Q: What was the decision behind making damage types? E.g., why is there only elemental damage and not cold and fire? – Paradoxs

J: There needs to be a parity between the amount of units that can have certain damage types. If you have like death and white damage and then fire and ice and acid and earth then you have six damage types. But then all the undead have death. So how do you distribute all the other damage types? So that is one of the reasons why we wanted that sort of damage type trinity if you go with non-physical damage for balancing. Three is a good number to have for all of these things. So that is why we decided to give all elemental damage one class.

Otherwise, you’d end up with on the mage side you need a fire mage, an ice mage. But these are similar spells and tactically that’s kind of boring unless you have these weaknesses and then if you have too many of those elemental weaknesses you have smaller and smaller amount of units that it’s applicable too. Versus something like light and death damage which are much more generic. So that was a design decision that we quickly found that is the right amount of damage types.

Q: What is the part of the game you are the least satisfied with at the moment? – necor.nebredrev

J: One easy answer is that we don’t have a quest log that we seriously underestimated the demand for. The other is I’m not terribly happy about the end game. Because you can essentially after killing the four mages, tick off the other boxes. Which is exactly the point we didn’t want to reach! “Oh I’ve already won.” There is still danger in the world but it’s definitely less focused.

So, the emerging tactic of killing the mages and then finish the rest is not something we’re happy with. Which is also why we kind of adjusted the aggressiveness and some of the approach. And I don’t think it’s as easy to do as in the initial release but it’s still too easy to attack the mages.

And to be honest this is something where we underestimated the audacity of our players. Because during our playtesting we were always a little cautious of the mages. And we didn’t think people would go “Okay, let’s attack them all head one at once”. And we thought you might play around with them a little more before going head on. So I think there is room there to make them more challenging and so you can’t directly attack their towers.

Q: Why isn’t there more ways to use research than just spells? Why can’t you do more with research like spying? - vieuxchat

J: Our assumption is there should be enough research for you to last you awhile. And there’s other stuff to do with the spell book with the discovery of the alchemist pages where you need to invest resources.

So, there are a couple of obstacles and we had more of those obstacles in initially, so it was harder to go through the spell list than just spending research. The problem is dependent on where you started and what resources you got. That could’ve blocked you for a long while so you could not progress with your spells. So that made it difficult in terms of balancing for the player. We dialled it back.

The honest answer is we think there is enough to do in the spell research. If you focus very strongly on it, you can probably end up researching all of the spell lists in the world. But by then you should have won the game already.

Q: Talking about the earlier point that after defeating the circle mages there is no grand threat anymore, wouldn't it make sense of the nations to become increasingly aggressive because you beat their chosen "protectors/envoys" – Twice28

J: You know that if you beat the circle mages you don’t actually beat them, they’re still there for various reasons. So, our cities and regions don’t have an active military force. There is no one to come after you at that point. If they already had an army, that is something we toyed around with, then all this working for the city becomes less logical.

Again for us this is a particular tactic in the game that is possible but it is not an intended design. We definitely need to work on that, but I think the circle mages should be the ultimate enemies. I don’t think it’s a good feeling to have more enemies after defeating them. We’d rather invest in trying to make them more interesting and longer lasting enemies perhaps. And it’s fine you should be able to take out one or two if they really annoy you.

Q: Have you played any of the previous SpellForce games? If so which ones? – the-fourth-knower

J: I’ve played all of them and I produced four and a half of them. So, I’ve played some of them more often than others.

SN: A more interesting answer might be mine. That is honestly I haven’t yet played SpellForce 1 and 2. I know some of the lore but I haven’t played them yet. I’ve played SpellForce 3 and Conquest of Eo so far. But I need to get to play the older games as well.

Q: How was your collaboration with THQ Nordic? What were the benefits? – Kyoteblok

J: SpellForce as an IP is owned by THQN so if we can do anything with it will be if they want to work with us. The collaboration was great. Because I’ve been around the industry, I know people at THQN at every level. So it was a very easy working relationship and also they’ve been very good in trying to make it easy for us to do our own thing. Which I respect. It’s their IP and they need to protect it. Giving us a chance to do something else with an IP that is established as an RPG/RTS that in itself is a big gamble and I am very grateful that they took that and let us run with our ideas. So they’ve been quite supportive of that and to me that’s the greatest thing I can get in a publisher allowing us to play around with their toys and not making it difficult for us. I’ve worked with other IP holders in the past and I can tell you there are very different ways at approaching this that there are much less pleasant for the developer.

Q: Did you use any kind of map editor during development for the game? - Red Dragon

J: We actually hand painted the maps. So, they are essentially built in Unity. There is a whole editing structure for all the adventures/missions. Spawning monsters and all that. So, there is something we call a game director and mission and dialogue editor that is quite heavily connected to whatever happens on the map. But in terms of creating the battle maps or world map that is completely done by hand.

The initial scope of the world map was very different. How large would a mountain be? What does a hex represent? In terms of imagined distances. And initially our scope was a little smaller. There were fewer hexes and the map wasn’t as big. After our initial tests we redid the whole map and made it much larger to what it is now. THQN was gracious enough to allow us to do that, letting us take longer even though it wasn’t in the initial scope. So, they invested in the game to make it even better.

Q: Was there anything in the game that was technically particularly difficult to do? But you really wanted it in just for flavour? - Rhaaah

J: I think the map is definitely the one that was the most difficult for us. We need to load the whole world on creation and making that look quite as good as it does there’s a lot of level of detail and clutter that is poison to the graphical cards. That was the biggest technical challenge believe it or not. Everything else was an iterative approach that helped us a lot in the technical side. We rarely built a system that was huge and then broke everything.

Q: Did you consider making it a rogue lite or 4X when the get go? – vieuxchat

J: No, the concept was always for lack of a better term RPG/4X hybrid. And it really sprung from where we had a mission selection map and wanted a world that was more active and going on.

[easytarget]

Great to see this! Nice to read discussions about how the ideas in the game were developed.

So, DLC? I'd be more than happy to pay for some attention getting put to the issues you mentioned around end game and a quest log.

[AldeArte]

Interesting to see some of these answers, and certainly my strategy for when I decide to attack a circle mage is just to blitz my armies straight at their main tower so it would certainly be more interesting if I couldn't just directly assault them when I wanted to take them out. Options could be an implementation similar to stormwatch faste where there are multiple event battles or make it so the mages secondary towers have to be defeated first.

Given the fact that the map is hand painted I highly doubt we'd ever get custom maps in the game, but would it be possible to have a way to set custom spawns for the game elements? I only ask because alluyvans inn sends me everytime I see it in the middle of the forest (who's going to stay there?!)