Conquest Earth, install, loader, intro, menu system and crash ...

Conquest Earth was an 1998 RTS developed by Data Design Interactive and published by EIDOS Interactive for PC DOS/Windows and PlayStation. It featured licensed music by the british psytrance project Eat Static (as well as enemy designs based on Eat Static's cover art).
It had a very impressive intro sequence for it's time, but was poorly recieved due to it's ridiculously high system requirements, unstable code and bad controls. The graphics were great, but the game was almost unplayable due to a lot of strange design decisions, bad path finding and slow performance.

I'm sorry about the stuttering video, I've tried to record it several times on different machines, but never get good results. It's worth noting that I remember the intro stuttering a lot when I played the game on my DOS machine 10 years ago as well, but not quite as horribly as here.
I decided to record the entire setup progress as well, might be boring to look at for some, but it only lasts for about 30 seconds. I'm sorry about the lack of any actual gameplay in the video, but the game crashes when I try to launch a mission (as you can see by the end of the video). Hopefully the video might inspire others to try and record some gameplay footage from the game.
While this was not a good game I don't want it to become forgotten like so many other games from this period (and earlier).

Recorded in DOSBox 0.73.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• eidos
• data
• design
• interactive
• 1998
• rts
• real-time
• strategy
• conquest
• earth
• psx
• pc
• windows
• dos
• setup
• dosbox
• eat
• static
• intro

[TheBearlydeloved]

This RTS was kind of cool, AFAIK you could individually control units as if it were a top down shooter.

[fisk0]

@TheBearlydeloved Yes, you could, the problem was that it was THE ONLY way you could control your units, as the pathfinding and AI was beyond horrible. Your soldiers wouldn't automatically fire back when fired upon, and wouldn't target the enemies you clicked at, but rather at the specific point on the map you pointed at, and would shoot in the general direction before they were in range, hitting absolutely nothing. :) It had some great ideas, but the implementation was terrible in every way.

[21innocentbystander]

I remember this game as the the first over hyped game that bombed. Maybe I'm wrong, but in my mind it is.

[fisk0]

@21innocentbystander Ion Storm's Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 was released the same year, and it was overhyped and bombed as well, but there certainly have been very notable critical bombs long before that. Arguably E.T. on the Atari 2600 was one (and not only did it bomb, it took the entire U.S. video game industry down with it), as well as Imagine Software's Bandersnatch (vaporware for a long time, finally released as Brattacas in 1986) and Battlecruiser 3000AD (1996).

[xthuanho]

can play already, how come very laggy but in-game smooth

[fisk0]

@xthuanho I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but the menus run a lot slower than the actual game because there are a ridiculous amount of full screen animations going on the entire time, while the in-game stuff is just a standard 2D RTS, which is a lot less resource intensive.

[21innocentbystander]

@fisk0 Thanks.

[hsanafad]

@xthuanho

I had the same problem and I got it to work!

All I did was put the FLIC03.WAD and the CD2 files from disc 2 into the conquest folder and it ran.

[fisk0]

@xthuanho have you tried inserting (mounting) CD 2? I haven't encountered any problems with that, but if you're using DOSBox it's best to either use physical CD's (originals or burnt) or using an external image mounting program, like Daemon tools or so, I don't think DOSbox supports switching a mounted image while a program is running - and this game uses a lot of CD swapping.

[xthuanho]

how do i solve the 'INSERT CD 2' ??