I'm back to playing Strategic Conquest 3.0 after a couple months hiatus. I get discouraged easily. Before when I skipped ahead to level 10 I got into a pretty tough game that I eventually didn't want to go back to. So I left it at that and hadn't played for the two months or so until last week when I started back at level 2 and have been progressing through the levels since. I'm up to level 9 now, so I thought I'd write a bit more about the game and my playing style.

If you've played Empire or Conquer (or any of their derivatives) then you know the basic concept of Strategic Conquest: a 100 by 60 square world, mostly islands, with cities scattered about. Cities can produce units, the only cost is the time it takes to build a unit. Use your armies to capture other cities and eventually the whole world.

There are armies which are the slowest and weakest units, but the only ones that can capture cities. Fighters which are weak but fast. Bombers which are faster than anything but fighters and which blow up the target square and (in later turns) nearby squares. Everything else are naval units: destroyers, submarines, transports, carriers and battleships. Its a basic rock-paper-scissors deal with the naval units: destroyers kill submarines which kill battleships and carriers which kill destroyers. Transports are very weak but are the only troop moving units in the game.

I start out making a fighter for quicker reconnaissance. It's vital to find the cities in your starting island quickly, since armies only move a square a turn. After that the first few turns are spent taking all the neutral cities in the starting island, using the fighter for recon, and starting a troop transport. In lower levels your starting island has more cities while the enemy islands have less cities. I try to set up three army cities, one transport city, and other cities making a destroyer, submarine, carrier, and battleship in that order. Extra inland cities can be used to produce fighters.

My mid-game objective is to have the above eight cities making units, plus another 4-6 cities making fighters. Anything else go into bombers. This keeps my unit density down so I don't get overwhelmed, although it also means I have to play smarter than the computer. The computer is not that great of a player, but it does recon well and attack aggressively.

Key unit here are the fighters. They can get from one side of the map to the other in two to four turns, can go on land and water, and can fight any unit. When I attack an enemy held island, I only use one or two transports worth of armies (6-12). A few bombers to take out the rear cities so that the computer can't build armies from them to contest you, then use the fighters to stall the enemy from taking those bombed cities. Fighters can also provide instant reinforcements in case the computer manages to land armies on one of your undefended islands.

In the higher levels you start out significantly outproduced by the computer. At these levels you have to lean on your fighters to keep you alive. Naval units are too slow and will be outgunned 3 or more to 1, so there's not much point in trying to win that war. Concentrate on fighters and try to maintain air parity. Set up a fighter screen (leaving fighters hovering between turns) to intercept his bombers, which will turn around if they encounter a fighter. Patrol the seas and destroy his transports. Use the fighters to screen your transports as they ferry armies to the attack.

If you can survive with 10-15 cities (to his 30-35 cities) until bombers have a two-hex blast radius (after a hundred turns), then you can stockpile them and use them to quickly take out an island and make your invasions that much easier. You'll lose a lot of fighters, but don't be afraid to waste one or two to destroy a transport or a bomber. One fighter takes six turns to build. A fully loaded transport is 34 turns, a bomber is 20, 25, or 30 turns. And in general you won't lose the fighter unless you have to send them too far to return in order to destroy one of those targets.