Conquest: Frontier Wars is one of the best looking games - even by today's standards - and proves, that you don't need excessive foliage or HDR-rendering to create something that is visually stunning. While mantis ships and platforms are rather lackluster in their designs, which I attribute to the difficulty to implement truly organic looking contures into 2001's graphic capabilities, Celareons/solarians/whatchamacallem solve this problem by combining flowing curves with a wonderfully artificial chrome finish, which fits the game's visuals rather well. Texture tricks, like the taos-scout's glowing front, complete the picture. By far the most wonderful artstyle has to lie with the terran ships, where the low poly count integrates seamlessly into industrial design. Each ship is instantly recognizable - be it a humble missile cruiser, or the terrifying lancer. Gameplay wise, CFW deviates from the norms of infinite-resource and limited-resource RTS with having a hybrid system: Controlling planets (e.g. having a refinery or equivalent on said planet) slowly drains said planets regenerating resources (thus providing a higher gathering rate early on, that later becomes limited by how fast a planet can regenerate its resources), while nebulae and asteroid fields provide a finite source of resources, and most of them also serve as a kind of obstacles for fighting fleets. One gripe I have with this game, however, is its at times outrageous balancing. E. g.: The terran lancer cruiser is a glass cannon, which can and WILL one-shot unarmored and lightly armored ships, which make up the bulk of available ship types. Wormhole hopping is thus frightingly efficient. The celareon aurora... cruiser? is a very high-cost ship that is supposed to serve as a counter to lightly armored ships - unfortunately, its damage output is pathetic, and its weapon is too slow firing to be useful. Gladly, it can cloak other ships. I would still recommend this game for the soundtrack alone.
