A to Z Challenge: Conflict

Conflict is kind of an obscure game and a relic of Cold War times.  Even when it came out about 1990 it was sort of an anachronism.  It was also pretty damned fun.

The game was a strategy game that like a role-playing game used maps made of hexagons.  You had Blue, which had American weapons, and Red, who had Soviet weapons.  The weapons came in three basic categories:  foot soldiers, armor, and air power.  Each side would have factories to build new units.  There was a factory for armor and one for airplanes, with each having the capacity for some foot soldiers--the armor one allowed you to build better foot soldiers.

Each side had a "flag tank" that was an M1A1 for Blue and a T-80 for Red.  The tank was like the king in chess that when the flag tank was destroyed, that side lost.  The flag tank did have better weapons and movement than a regular tank, so it could sometimes be useful as a weapon, but you always had to be careful not to put it in too much danger.

The maps would have a variety of terrain:  plains, hills, mountains, sea, and marshes.  The plains would only take 1 movement point while mountains were 3.  Marshes and hills might have been 2.  Planes could fly over the sea for 1 point while of course armor and foot soldiers could not move on water spaces.

There were 16 different maps, 15 regular ones that at the end would give you a letter to unlock the 16th map, The Final Conflict.  Each map had different terrain that would provide different challenges.  There was one map with essentially two different continents separated by a stretch of water and islands, so the only way to destroy the enemy was to use planes.  Some of the islands had air bases so you could refuel your planes or you could build a tanker.  The challenge with that level is you can only defeat the flag tank with air power, so if you lose your air factory and your bombers, you're pretty well screwed.  You'd have to hope the red flag tank didn't park on a city and you could chip away at it with fighters until it blew up.  That would take a long time.

The way the weapons worked is you start only being able to make foot soldiers or the M151, which is a jeep with a missile launcher.  The next tier are Vietnam-era weapons like the M-60 tank, A-7 bomber, and F-4 fighter.  The next tier is more modern weapons like the M1A1 tank, F-16 fighter, and A-10 bomber.  In some levels then each side got a really expensive futuristic fighter, the F-23 (which doesn't look like the actual F-23 that never went into production) or the MiG-33, which probably didn't exist.

There were also helicopters in some of the levels that you made in the air factory.  Each side got two gunship types:  the Vietnam-era AH-1 Cobra and modern AH-64 Apache for Blue and the Mi-24 Hind and Mi-28 Havoc for Red.  The helicopters were usually cheaper than bombers but easier for enemy fighters to shoot down.  In a weird bit of censorship the "Hellfire" missiles for the Apache were changed to "Fire Dart" missiles.

Unfortunately for me, there were only a couple of levels where you could get the AV-8 Harrier jumpjet.  I think Harriers are neat and they're weird, which is part of why I like them.  They didn't really have a lot of use in the game except in those couple of levels as light bombers--and usually by the time you could build them, you didn't really need them anymore.  I would have liked to use them more often.  Red gets the crummy Soviet equivalent:  the Yak-38 that was used on their crummy "aircraft carriers."  But since the cost difference between that and a Su-25 "Frogfoot" bomber is so minimal, it's unlikely the computer would ever make any.

Another level was shaped like a snake with Blue in the tail and Red in the head.  The idea there was you'd have to bring any ground forces all the way around the snake to attack the other side.  Fuel would become a problem unless you have a supply truck to refuel your tanks.

The best way to cripple an enemy would be to destroy his factories.  One level in particular, my brother and I found a way to sneak a jeep in a couple of moves to attack the enemy's air factory.  You had to be really careful with how you moved it or else the AI would take notice and blow it up with a bomber or tank.  But when it worked, you could sneak up to the factory in a few turns and blow up the commandoes guarding it.  Then the computer would have to rely on tanks because you can't rebuild factories or make new ones.  That would give us enough time to build up our forces to attack.

The way you got points was by destroying the other team's units or claiming the city hexagons and airfield hexagons on the board.  All you had to do was park a plane or ground unit on it and it would change to your color.  If you move, though, the enemy can claim it and steal the points.  So it's best if you can park something on it and leave it there.  That also lets you refuel and repair damage to the unit.

The fighting in the game was kind of goofy.  If you selected to attack a unit, the screen would change to where half shows your unit and gives you options to Attack, Defend, or Retreat.  Under each one of those were sub-options that depended on the type of unit.  Airplanes would have things like "Accelerate" or "Roll" while armor units had options like "Turn" and "Adjust" and the foot soldiers had something like "Drop" where they'd just fall on their bellies.  

So if I have a bomber attack some foot soldiers, I could choose to drop a bomb or strafe them with my cannon.  The bomb does a lot of damage, but you only get a certain number while the cannon has unlimited ammo but does less damage.  Each unit had like 15 points.  If a bomb hit foot soldiers, the damage was usually something catastrophic, so no worries.  With a tank it might only do 10 points to a first-tier tank like an M-60 or it might do only 5 points to a more modern M1 or only 3 points to a head tank.  So you'd need to use a few bombs and if the target only has one or two points, you might just use the gun.

The game had text to go with each option and sometimes there'd be these silly paragraphs talking about how the pilots or drivers "glare into each other's eyes."  There was often one combination where if an enemy plane fires a gun, you Accelerate and then it'll miss and go on about how the G-Forces overtook the pilot's body but allows him to get behind the other plane.  An inordinate amount of time in each battle is spent "Look"ing for the enemy.

Sometimes the text would say "Engine Hit!" or "Pilot Hit!" to instantly destroy the unit.  The funniest was when it would say "Soldiers Hit!" and wipe out the foot soldiers.  Well of course the soldiers were hit; what else could you hit?

There were a couple of little goofs like where it'd say soldiers "droped down."  Or it would say a helicopter went over a ground unit "with a sonic roar" which would be impossible.  (The same for Harriers and A-10s that are subsonic.)  With M1 tanks there's sometimes a glitch where if you keep using the Defend/Smoke option the plane or tank attacking you will only use its machine gun instead of a bomb/tank gun.  It doesn't work all the time, but when it does, it can bail you out by limiting the damage the other side does.

Anyway, it was a really fun game for the NES that would have been more fun in a PC version where you could have expansion packs for more maps or weapons or even customize things.  

A few years after the original they made "Super Conflict" for the SNES.  It was as disappointing as Age of Empires II.  Super Conflict added navies and some different air and ground units.  But the combat style changed to where it was pretty boring.  Basically each side just hammered the other.  There was none of the artistry of in the previous game where you had all the different options and goofy text.  You could do a shortened mode even where it just shows each side fire once and then tallies up the damage and ammo used (or shows one side or the other explode).  That shortens the game but takes most of the skill and luck out of it. 

There were some other annoying things too.  They made the "flag tank" about as useful as a commando unit.  The factories took longer to build things and destroying an enemy factory was all but impossible without a ton of firepower.  You only lose like 300 points for each loss, so it's really hard to drain an opponent of points.  Antiaircraft guns were really puny against aircraft.  And so on.

That made it a lot harder for an underdog to win.  So it never really won our hearts like the first game.

Replaying all 55 levels, it was kind of fun though not really difficult.  One time where because neither side had a factory, I just had all my units run to the top of the map and hide in the mountains.  The computer ran his units out of ammo and gas in pursuit so then we could pick off his flag tank to win.  Another time he stupidly ran his remaining T-80 out of gas and didn't reclaim the airport when he had the chance so his Hind helicopter (that I really had no way of downing) was stranded.  So they didn't really make the AI much smarter.

As the levels progress, you start to get factories and then planes and then navies--including the "flag ship" that was like the flag tank only on the ocean.  It could do some damage to planes and weak units but not a lot.  The computer's strategy was generally to wipe out your weak units like commandos, M1901 APCs, or Sheridan light tanks.  And then attack your factories.  If I left any planes or helicopters out in range of his fighters, he might attack those.  Generally I could just keep my bombers in the airport or aircraft carrier for the first two turns, after which he'd need to refuel his fighters.  And by then I might have destroyed most of them with my fighters, SAMs, or cruiser.

So most levels the computer had the upper hand the first couple of turns but usually by the third and fourth turns I'd have begun my counterattack that in a couple more turns would have the computer all but wiped out.  In all 55 levels I don't think there were many times I was really on the ropes, except maybe the first couple where you have such finite resources.  

There were a couple of better things vs the original game, like having an aircraft carrier lets you have a mobile base for your planes.  And it's kind of nice that stronger units like M1 tanks had more hit points than puny infantry.  It was kind of neat to have some different planes like the F-14, F-5, and F-18 fighters and A-6 bomber.  Red had the MiG-21 "Fishbed" and MiG-23 "Flogger" added. The addition of the "flag ship" made things more interesting as you had two options to end the game--or lose the game.

Though Conflict was never a really popular game, you could still find emulators of it online a few years ago.  I think it was one called Console Classix or something that had it and I replayed a lot of the levels.  And last year I played it on RetroGames, which also had Super Confict. 

That's right, baby, build me something sweet...

I was especially happy to see the cute supply chief for the Blue side again who always made me think of Lisa Hayes from Robotech--or later Captain Lisa Shaw in my story First Contact.  The red side got some Russian dude, so it was always good most of the levels you had to play Blue unless it was two-player.

Anyway, it's still one of my favorite strategy games to play, though I usually remember pretty quick how annoying it can be when the computer rigs a battle so my SAM battery never hits his plane or his infantry destroy my tank with "engine hit" or something like that.

I think mostly I like that unlike most other games it doesn't rely on reflexes to run, jump, and punch.  You don't need long strings of buttons for special combos or anything like that.  You need brains far more than reflexes.