It's official. Conqueror's Stage comes out in full on July 3rd.
First, thank you. So many of you played the demo during Steam Next Fest, and the questions and suggestions you left genuinely shaped this build. A lot of what's below comes straight from your feedback, so this update is as much yours as ours.
Conqueror's Stage is a real-time 2D map-conquest strategy game. You build an empire across procedurally generated continents, with maps that grow to over a thousand territories. You climb through 5 historical epochs, research 50 technologies, and go head-to-head with up to 7 AI rivals, each with its own difficulty. It's playable in 6 languages.
Muster Army. Drop a rally flag anywhere on the map, and your nearby settlements raise soldiers and march them to it on their own. You no longer have to train troops one city at a time, so putting an army together is quick and painless.
A proper tutorial. There's now a guided, 20-step tutorial that takes you through founding settlements, handling your economy, researching tech, and going to war. If you're new, you can learn the whole game by playing it.
Sea travel from the very first age. Soldiers can cross open water right from the First Age, so the entire map is in play from the start. It's slow going at first, and it speeds up a lot once you research naval tech like Colonization and Naval Supremacy.
Hold B to see every border. Hold down the B key and all the territory borders light up across the map. It makes reading the situation, who holds what and where the front lines are, a lot clearer at a glance.
Better diplomacy AI. We sorted out the peace-offer behavior. The AI now asks for peace at moments that actually make sense, instead of pestering you with the same request over and over. Diplomacy feels a lot more deliberate now.
Resizable panels. A new UI Scale slider in the Options menu lets you make the city and info panels bigger or smaller to suit your screen. You can also drag them wherever you like.
Move the map with your mouse. Hold the middle mouse button and drag to pan around the map, on top of the usual WASD and edge-scrolling. Getting around big maps feels much smoother.
New map art. We redrew the tree and vegetation icons. The world reads cleaner and looks more polished.
This is just the start for us. If you had fun with the demo, adding Conqueror's Stage to your Wishlist is the single most helpful thing you can do, and it means Steam will let you know the moment we go live.
Thanks for being here early. We can't wait to show you the full game.