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The key to sustained success is most definitely filling out a line-up of generals to assign to specific units who will help bolster and improve your troops’ strength. While you start out with a limited pool and budget you can use to pick up a few as you complete Scenarios or have success in the Campaign mode you’ll accumulate points that you can use to either get new generals or promote existing ones to be more effective. You can use these generals to either reinforce your strengths, compensate for your weaknesses, or take a balanced approach. Take care to see what areas each general is most effective in so you can choose the ones that will work best for your strategy. As a note most of the European front scenarios will be fought on land, but over time it begins to diversify a bit. You’re also able to level up base attributes of your various unit types using currency, further allowing you to customize to your strengths and weaknesses. Once you’re either done with the scenarios or looking for a broader challenge you can take on the plain insanity of Campaign mode, which essentially stages the entirety of World War 2 and includes pretty well every country involved in the conflict. A single turn can take a while if you watch it all unfold. You can speed it up but that can also mean you’ll miss what a particular country may be doing to mount an offensive against you. Choose small countries at your own peril, the Axis countries are generally very aggressive and have a formidable force at their disposal. As much as I enjoy the strategic combat in X that isn’t to say the game doesn’t have its shortcomings. As I noted before this isn’t a world-building game so there are hard limits on what you’re able to do with cities, something the game actually doesn’t do a very effective job of conveying. You’re able to open the city screen to look to build them up but while you can sometimes place a special structure there or create an upgrade when the option isn’t available there’s no real explanation. Fortunately as long as you’re able to construct new units and make use of the resources they already have in place this doesn’t make much difference but it does demonstrate that the cities and their control is more of an afterthought. One surprise is that if you replay scenarios the AI doesn’t necessarily behave consistently though I don’t know if I made all of my moves the same precise way either. Whether this works out to be good or bad may depend on the scenario but it was worth noting since so many units are controlled by the AI. All said I was very pleasantly surprised by World Conqueror X and even impressed. While it isn’t everything this age-old Civilization fan was hoping for I realize that’s an extremely high bar for anyone to even attempt to reach. While its city management and world building are lacking it does a very respectable job of playing as a strategic World War 2 sim and is absolutely the only game in town if that sort of thing appeals to you. Add in the layer with leveling up your base units and managing various generals from throughout history and it is a pretty polished product strategy fans should check out.
Justin Nation, Score:Nindie Choice! [8.0]