Conquest: Frontier Wars

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Your fleet, your repair bills

A brave attempt to do something different with the Real Time Strategy formula Conquest: Frontier Wars featured three sentient species and a different take on resource management. Probably the only game to proclaim 'Fleet-based Real-Time Strategy' on the cover (Yes, we know what you're thinking!), CFW had you commanding Terrans (Humans), the Mantis (Bug-like aliens) and the Celareons (Energy beings in robot armor).

Battle could be waged across multiply solar system connected by wormholes, with variety of navy inspired warships.

Featuring a voice cast of British, American, Japanese, Russian and others CFW also had good quality cut scenes to add aid plot progression.

Tropes used in Conquest: Frontier Wars include:

• American Accents: Admiral Steele,Texan.
• The Asteroid Thicket
• The Brigadier: The Terran admirals except Smirnoff, who betrays the Terran Federation to the Mantis..
• British Accents: Admiral Hawkes.
• Bug War
• Chewing the Scenery: Whilst by no means a Large Ham, Admiral Halsey has a scene chewing moment during one of the briefings where he declares that he wants, "every weapon, every outpost, every stinking insect carrier, from here to Hell reduced to molten SPACEBORNE SLAG!" Justified in that he did just witness, The Mantis attack and try to destroy the Earth, lead by Smirnoff, recent Terran turncoat and formerly one of his own commanders.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Blackwell to Smirnoff when he shows up leading the Mantis invasion of Earth. The fact that all the swear words are bleeped out makes Blackwell's rant arguably all the more amusing.
• Cool Ship: The Celareon Monolith-class ships look like giant stingrays which rake enemies with bright-blue beams.
• Critical Existence Failure: As long as they have enough supplies to fire their weapons, it doesn't matter how many hitpoints a given ship or defense platform has until they hit zero, at which point they explode...
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The three races in the game are organic swarmers, average humans, and hyper-advanced aliens. Blizzard may have something to say about that.
  • Blizzard is the last company in the universe to have any right to complain about that.
• Easy Logistics: Averting this was the game's main shtick, with combat ships also having a "supply" bar in addition to the standard health bar. This bar would tick down whenever the ship fired its weapons or activated (with a few exceptions) its special abilities and the ship would be left unable to fire or use its specials when it ran out of supplies. To get more supplies, the ship would have to be stationed near a headquarters, supply building, repair building or supply ship (a vulnerable and unarmed but highly necessary type of ship that itself only carries a limited amount of supplies, though a far larger amount that what any combat ship carries). The player also had to have "supply lines" open into a star system in order to build operational platforms in the system, either by building a headquarters in that system or by connecting the system to a system with an HQ via building a jump gate over the wormhole that leads back to the system with the HQ (note that a string of jumpgated wormholes can connect an HQ to a system any number of wormholes away).
• Energy Beings: Celareons, artificial evolved by an even more powerful species.
• Everything Fades: Even though ships leave behind wreckage that can be salved, this is still played straight as the wreckage itself is just a generic construct that looks nothing like the chunks of starship or space station that are seen flying away from the epicenter of the ship or station's explosion right before those chunks fade into nothingness...
• Fog of War: Made even more difficult as you had to keep an eye on multiple systems.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Mantis
  • Also Bug War.
• Humans Are Special: They did end the mantis civil war and bring peace to the galaxy, that and some of Celareons are scared of them.
• Humans Are Warriors: Carved out a huge empire against established races the first time they left their home system.
• Informed Ability: At the end of the first mission, Admiral Halsey says, "...so you survived both a hostile alien attack, and your first encounter with Captain Blackwell. I'm not sure which is worse." This, even though Blackwell has not up to that point and never will act like much of an ass to the player during the campaign. Blackwell's personality 'is' a little rough around the edges, but its actually relatively mild.
• Insectoid Aliens
• Laugh Track: When Admiral Halsey's flagship arrives on the scene during the campaign, Benson quips, "I thought that thing was still in mothballs!", which accompanied by some very forced sounding canned laughter in the background (presumably intended to be from her bridge crew).
• No Recycling: Partially averted. Destroyed ships leave behind wreckage that resource gatherer ships can harvest for ore, but stations do not do this.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: Wormholes are how the ships of Conquest get around, using the numerous wormholes present in the galaxy to jump between hundreds of different starsystems and then maneuvering through those systems on what appear to be sublight-only drives. The strangest thing about these wormholes (aside from the very large number of them) is that it is possible to build a device called a "jump gate" around the wormhole's event horizons, which locks down the wormhole and prevents hostile vessels from jumping through until they have destroyed the gate (the gates also provide supply lines into the systems they are connected to, allowing platforms to operate in sectors that don't have H Qs as long as they are connected to systems that DO have them via a jumpgate or series of jumpgates).
• Rousing Speech: Admiral Hawkes just before the Mantis begin their attack on Earth.
• Send in the Search Team: In the intro, a ship was lost shortly after going through a wormhole. After that, a small search team sent through the wormhole was also lost. Now, they're sending in you.
• Space Does Not Work That Way (Used and Averted)
• Space Is an Ocean: Battleships (complete with cannon turrets intended for broadside-based attacks) and even aircraft carriers (complete with runways), In space!
• Space Is Noisy: There is no shortage of rockets wooshes, laser zapping sounds and big booms when ships go up.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet
• Stealth in Space
• Stuff Blowing Up: Ships and orbital stations explode in impressive fashion when they run out of hitpoints.
• Translator Microbes: A translator is used in some sections and ignored in others.
  • More or less: The Mantis and Humans need it to talk to each other, it's buggy at best, the Celareons just learn your language in two seconds.
• Unexplained Recovery: Captain Blackwell tests an unknown wormhole and disappears. The Mantis claim he was sucked into a black hole, but he was saved by the Celareons.
• Units Not to Scale: Some units are bigger than the planets they orbit
• Wave Motion Gun: The Ion Cannon.
• You No Take Candle: The Mantis due to bad translators
  • Eloquent in My Native Tongue
• Zerg Rush: The Mantis, big shock I know.