Solar Conquest is a game on the WC group which primarily focuses on the solar system.
History
Development pre-release
Solar Conquest's development was announced during the Summer of 2018, although not much is known about this period of its development, it was announced at time where other maps like the British Isles map were also under development. The unique concept of Solar Conquest quickly drew the most attention out of the new projects and due to this most work was focused on Solar Conquest.
During the end of summer, work on Solar Conquest was slowed down due to the shift of development towards World Conquest 1936 which included a whole new map and better GUIs. Most of the work on Solar Conquest would be kept relatively private until the start of December. During this time, Chairman Phibun announced that the release of Solar Conquest was imminent with a trailer, which made the hype for the game the highest ever in its history.
Release
On December 9, 2018, Chairman Phibun released the game with an everyone ping. Servers of the game quickly filled up and within the first hour over 100 players were in Solar Conquest. The release is considered by many to be a catastrophe, with many features being misused and confusion about the rules and tech limits being evident amongst the playerbase. Within the upcoming days, new features such as the label tool and the ship tool were added, the first of their kind. Although this did help in some roleplays, it didn't help prevent the fall of the Solar Conquest playerbase, and within 2 weeks the game barely had 10 players at any time.
Post-Release
Solar Conquest practically became a dead game, struggling to reach 10 players at any given time. Updates on the game after its release have been few and far in between, with new features such as translucent studs being added to prevent the freepainting of planetary colours. Generally considered dead, it was announced some time in May 2019 that Solar Conquest was being redone, and gradually newer features were added into the game. Examples of these are a custom leaderboard, with custom stats for individual players inspired by WC Deluxe's own custom stats. Due to these, the playerbase is starting to increase again, although incrementally. Rumor has it that Jobo is working on a game similar to this known as Galactic Conquest, however a player who shall not be named has claimed he had the same idea, only for Jobo to discourage it and then steal it later on
Features
Gameplay Features
Solar Conquest was the first game to provide translucent studs, a unit tool and the label tool. While the label tool is very much in use in other World Conquest games, the other features are not, and are mostly forgotten. Although plans to add unit tools are in the works for WC Deluxe, not much has been released yet on its state as it was announced quite recently. Other features include the credits system and the terraform tool.
More recently, features from WC Deluxe were ported over to Solar Conquest and redesigned with a futuristic GUI.
Roleplay Mechanics
Solar Conquest has an in-game tech guide, where its primary purpose was to help guide users on their roleplay for certain time spans, this was to avoid unrealistic technology early on in the game. The credits system also was introduced, although very little is known about its purpose, it is assumed that it would have something to do with a tech tree or the unit tool.
Trivia
- Solar Conquest was the first game with the label tool, for a time it would bug out for those with the roles Elite, Heroic, Legendary and Honoured.
- Solar Conquest is arguably the most gameplay based game available in WC, with many features being released before their release in WC's other games.
- For a time, Solar Conquest had a unit tool where you could spawn ships to represent units, this feature was heavily bugged and was removed later on.