Conquest is a top-down, real time space warfare game. It was originally written in RATFOR for the VAX/VMS system in 1983 by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres.
I spent incredible amounts of time playing this game with my friends in the terminal labs at college, and when I actually had a multi-user system running at home (Unixware) I decided to try and translate/port the code to C in Unix. This was in the early to mid 1990's.
Of course, over the years many things have changed. Today, Conquest is a true client/server game. The client uses freeglut, SDL 2.0 (for sound) and OpenGL. It uses C++11 to build, though for now it's "C software with some C++ containers and constructs".
The curses client is no longer provided.
Conquest is released under the MIT License.
Conquest is a client that must connect over a network to a conquestd server. By default, if all requirements are met, both the client and server will be built. To start the client and connect to a server, run:
conquest
By default, when running conquest without options, conquest will query the meta-server at conquest.radscan.com to get a list of currently available servers. Pick one, login, and play.
Alternatively, you can specify a specific server with the "-s" option:
conquest -s localhost:1701
The port number is optional, and will default to 1701.
You can get a list of the currently active servers via your web browser by going to https://radscan.com/cgi-bin/conqmeta.pl
The goal of the game is to conquer the Universe by bombing planets, placing your team's armies on them and fighting off any ships that want to ruin your day. When all of the core planets have been taken by your team, the game is reset to start the carnage all over again.
To build and run Conquest, you will need:
- automake/autoconf/libtool - The whole autoconf system.
- X11 development headers and libraries (all of them)
- OpenGL development headers and libraries. Conquest uses OpenGL version 1.x.
- glut/freeglut development headers and libraries
- SDL 2.0 and SDL_mixer 2.0, if you want sound (you do).
- g++ 4.9 or better, or clang++ 3.4 or better
Conquest supports Linux systems and has also been tested on MAC OSX with homebrew. I currently develop on Kubuntu 22.04.
In the past, other Unix systems were supported like the BSD's (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc) as will as Digital Unix for Alpha processors, and Sun/Oracle Solaris.
These have not been tested in a while, so if there are problems, please feel free to send patches. If they still work, I'd love to know.
The last release of conquest in 2010 also supported the conquest client (only) on MS Windows systems (XP and Windows 7) using MinGW. This has also not been tested in a while, but I plan to support this again later.
On an Ubuntu system (tested with Kubuntu 18.04), the following should install the required packages to build the server and client:
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool \
libsdl2-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev ncurses-dev bison flex \
freeglut3-dev libxi-dev libxmu-dev
conquest can be built on MacOS (only Sonoma was tried) using homebrew. It will run under XQuartz, so have that installed.
brew install autoconf automake sdl2 sdl2_mixer pkg-config
Conquest requires it's own group to prevent cheating or interference with the game data.
First, create the conquest group (unix):
sudo groupadd conquest
On MacOS, you must create the group using Apple Menu->Users and Groups. Add the conquest group. Afterward, click on the Info (i) icon for the group and add yourself to it.
Then:
sh ./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
There is a low volume mailing list for Conquest. You can subscribe here.
There is an IRC channel for Conquest on irc.libera.chat, channel: #conquest
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The Conquest Guide. This document gives you some more information on Conquest and explains how to play it (bomb planets, fight robot ships, etc). It also provides information on navigation and other things you might want to know.
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A Conquest player put up this Strategy Guide some years ago. While a little dated, it still has some good information for new players.
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The HISTORY file. This document gives an overview of changes between releases.
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The Server Guide has instructions for those wanting to run their own Conquest servers.
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Marisa Giancarla has setup a Conquest Gameplayers Club Community Page for players and operators who wish to participate. Also available are tools to help potential server operators who are not familiar with the Linux/Unix command line.
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The CQI Parser Documentation provides information on the format and types of files the Conquest server and client uses to configure itself. The Universe (planets, etc), textures, animations, and sound information are all handled by this parser. This is primarily of interest to those wanting to run a server with a modified Universe.
NOTE: Some of these were taken using the server recordings of actual game play.
