I would really likt to give this game a good rating, because what I could play was pretty fun. But there is one thing, one promise that GoG makes to its customers: games on GoG are DRM-free. This game is not though! Basically, the game cannot be played offline. It can bestarted, but you won't get very far. Once you meet "The One Who Waits" you will not be able to progress without some tricks. The game "hangs" at that part after the dialog with "The One Who Waits" and the only way to progress is to go back to the main menu and start a new game. But once you built a temple and you have began the sermon and need to choose your first ability you will not be able to progress at all anymore. The game will hang again, but this time you cannot even open up the main menu. The game needs to be killed manually. According to the developer ( see https://steamcommunity.com/app/1313140/discussions/1/3761104049342941821/ or if deleted https://web.archive.org/web/20230203225221/https://steamcommunity.com/app/1313140/discussions/1/3761104049342941821/ ) this is an anti piracy feature: "This issue can happen in offline mode or while pirating." So you cannot play the game offline because it cannot validate you have bought it. And that is just what DRM is. I think this game should be removed from GoG and I hope the Customer Support will contact me about this. Otherwise I will.
If you're just here for the title: Google for "CQFixPatch_AllinOne_1.2". That should solve your problems, hopefully. About the game itself: Conquest: Frontier Wars is a very old but still quite fun RTS that plays in 2d solar systems that are connected by wormholes. Three factions are fighting over the solar systems and the player can chose to play one of them. To prevent the enemy from entering systems easily there are jumpgates that can be attached to the wormholes. These ensure you systems are all supplied with energy. The solar systems contain three different kinds of resources that are ore, gas and crew. They are required to build ships, planetary stations and to research technologies that unlock new or improve already existing contraptions. All resources can be found on one of the four existing planet types (earth-like, swamp, gas planet and moon) but only gas and ore can be gathered by harvesters from fields of asteroids or gas nebula. Be aware though, nebula can have different positive and negative effects on your ships and asteroid fields will slow them down. To stay in control of the fleet there are command points required, that can only be obtained by building additionals HQs or a certain other sensory-building for each faction. The larger the fleet the more command points are needed and the stronger the fleets' ships are the more points are needed to build them. In battle there are different types of ships that are effective against other ships and buildings. I can't really say if it's balanced, but it's enjoyable imho. I've been playing this game a lot in my late childhood. I can still remember all those phrases of the Admirals, the sounds, ships and the quirks with the AI. So playing this game for me is like digging in a box finding all the old, almost forgotten stuff. It just makes me happy to be able to play this once more.
Everspace is hard to learn and hard to master. The basic instructions from your AI are far away from sufficiant. But once you learn how to dodge you will be able to even succeed against a Corvette, some say you can do it without a scratch - but I'm not good enough to reproduce. You can upgrade your ship before each run. The amount of credits available depends on your previous run, so keep an eye on that. In the beginning you don't gain a lot, but later you can extract about 20k per run, and the better you perform the more you might aquire. When you die, your run ends and you only keep the perks and the Credits you had left before death. There also is a sotry, but I wasn't able to see alot about it yet. It seems to be interesting though, and I've a wild guess how it might conclude. You will learn parts of the story by continuing to a higher chapter and some encounters you've had will affect the story in some way. An additional factor that makes Everspace interesting are the various hazards that occur, each with different effects on you. Be cautious. So I've already had some fun and probably will have futer fun time with this game. Enjoy it!
What's fun: The fighting, grinding for stuff, optimizing the build and learning new abilities. What's not so fun: Clunky movement, especially with keyboard and mouse. Some keys are not rebindable (for example q,e,x and z which are used to switch stances - on a qwertz keyboard this sucks incredibly hard, on a querty keyboard it's okay). Sometimes it seems to be more effective to smash some buttons instead of doing proper timed attacks. I've also experienced a pretty bad input-lag. Auto-targeting. Imho a game that can be played with a mouse should never have non-optional auto-targeting. Also, there are certain builds that benefit way too much from auto-targeting. What's buggy: Collisions with objects are really bad, sometimes you fall off a pit because one of your feet partially started gliching on a plank or you get stuck between some stones. Some enemies spawn multiple times, this also goes for bosses. The world: It feels pretty empty and dead. Except for the enemies around there's almost nothing. In my eyes it's also not very pretty, maybe because I dislike the graphics. I wished for a fighting game that would draw me in because of the polished mechanics and movement, and there's a lot of unused potential in this game. Though I guess it's sort-of in development, I don't see the game developing into the direction that I've been hoping for.
