Star Trek: ConQuest Online

You know what was big in the late 90s? Trading card games. You know what else was big in the late 90s? Going online. What if there was a way-

We can stop right there because someone already did. While Microprose had long-promised a digital Magic: The Gathering card game, a company called Genetic Anomalies beat them to it, releasing the earliest online trading card game in 1997. The game was Chron X – based off a new license GA created themselves, but firmly rooted in physical card game machanics. You would buy cards or packs online for real money, then pit your decks against other players in a real-time cyberpunk strategy game. Their Collectable Bits technology cryptographically copy-protected each digital card to prevent cheating, counterfeiting, or duplicating.

Activision, as they would do, saw a growing new gameplay style and rolled in with their Star Trek license. They simply bonked Genetic Anomalies over the head with a sack of money to adapt Chron X with Star Trek characters for a July 2000 release. But since “Chron X clone” isn’t going to mean much of anything to most people, we’ll take a further look at what ConQuest is actually about. The servers have been down for decades, but its offline mode still allows us to check out pieces, gameplay, and battle some basic AI.

Let’s also note that Bethesda reused the “Conquest” name for a PS2 game. That’s not what we’re talking about. This is Con-Q-est, with Q on the front cover, because you’re all playing a grand strategy game as Trek’s god-like galactic tricksters. This could have easily just been another computer simulation – it already uses the style of The Next Generation’s LCARS interface – but then they wouldn’t have gotten to title it “ConQuest” as if that were clever. That’s really a gimmick that should have stayed with Mortal Kombat. You’ll even win by putting your opponent, (sigh), in “CheQmate.”

ConQuest can be divided into the Collectable Card Game – which is the acquisition of game pieces – and the strategy matches where you put them to use. You could download the game for free and play tutorials, AI bot matches, and unranked games online without restriction. You needed to register for $10 before you could start playing ranked games, enter into tournaments, or buy and trade pieces. You could also buy a boxed copy in stores for $30, which granted you Ambassador Spock and seven additional retailer-specific pieces.

ConQuest shipped with Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Borg, and Mixed starter decks. When you registered, you picked one of these and got a basic set of 51 pieces. From here, it’s common CCG staples. You can create, sort, and balance as many decks as you like out of the pieces you own. Pieces could be bought in random packs, traded with other users, or won in official tournaments. You could purchase the other starter sets and mix them up as desired. There were no restrictions to what factions you could put in a deck, though you’d probably want to stick to the theme. Characters are going to need other pieces from their faction to activate their bonuses. By default, you can only have 3 copies of a piece in your deck, but unranked games let you customize this.

What’s immediately obvious is that there aren’t enough pieces to go around on release – Federation and Klingon pieces are used fill out other factions’ decks, alongside a lot of generic torpedoes and isolinear chips. Romulans seem especially weak, with hardly any special characters or solid abilities, but updates seem to have improved this. There were 158 pieces initially, with 236 by the game’s end. From what I can tell, there were two major additions after the game was released. Ferengi and Dominion factions were added, while “A Matter of Time” brought in handfuls of characters from DS9, Voyager, and TOS. There’s certainly no shortage of Trek lore to draw from and, much like the modern mobile games, I’d imagine they could have comfortably pumped out pieces for decades.

It’s also clear that they were trying to translate physical CCG prices directly to a virtual economy. Boosters were sold individually for $3, or a box of 12 for $30. That’s comparable to contemporary prices for physical cards, a fact which was not lost on reviews of the time. Genetic Anomalies tried to justify this by claiming that “unlike paper, your STCO pieces can never be lost or damaged!” and “each piece remains in ‘mint’ condition forever!” Well, unless the game shuts down just two years later and you’re left with a license to absolutely nothing. Even 2021’s NFTs let you keep the artwork.

The strategy game was always a one-on-one match in real-time, with no option for play-by-email or similar asynchronous modes. The Play Now button on the main menu sent you to a chat room browser. Chat rooms could be public or private, official or player created, and were where you could meet players to trade with or challenge. A basic profile let you view players’ win/loss statistics and any official tournament trophies. Unranked matches were strictly for funsies, while ranked matches contributed to your place in an ongoing leaderboard.

This strategy game isn’t wildly different from Magic, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or similar of the era. You and your opponent sit across from each other at your respective Home Planet. Between you both is the Neutral Zone. The Neutral Zone hosts between one and three planets. Pieces can only be deployed onto or around planets – no battles in deep space – so fighting over these forms the core of the game. A modern equivalent might be Marvel Snap, where you’re assigning units to locations to counter your opponent’s advances there.

Control Points act as your currency. These are mainly generated by controlling planets, with other effects meaning you’ll likely earn a few extra control points in every following turn. This ensures matches start small and build up over time. You’ll start at 6 points; a basic Ensign costs 3 points to deploy, while a much more capable Worf costs 11. By mid-game you could be earning 20+ points a turn. You also can save up points to send out heavy hitters in future turns. Control points further break all ties – who attacks first, who moves first, even who wins by default after 20 turns – so while the impulse is to spend them all as you get them, holding some in reserve has clear benefits as well.

You have open access to your full deck of 40 pieces and never need to worry about drawing a hand. Instead, you can deploy as many pieces as you can afford. At the head of your army is a unique Q with a special bonus reflecting different playstyles. “Political Q” makes it easier to capture planets, “Destructive Q” gives ships a combat bonus, and so on. Q pieces cannot attack or be killed. If they start and end a turn on a planet they don’t control (in short, are surrounded) then that player loses the game to a CheQmate.

The remaining pieces are recognizable People, Items, or Ships from The Next Generation. People are the only way to control planets. Each piece has an influence value that contributes to the planet they’re on. If you have more influence than your opponent, then you control that planet at the start of the next turn. People pieces can also fight other people pieces, which is how you’ll remove your opponent’s influence from a planet. Planetary control can shift each turn this way.

Like Star Wars: Rebellion, People pieces need to travel on Ship pieces to move around. Ships can fight other ships if both are in the same area. If you deplete an opposing ship’s shields, that ship – and whatever people and items were on it – get removed from the game. Not sent back to your opponent’s hand; they’re dead and gone. This can be a very effective way to prevent any people and their influence from getting down to your planet.

Items simply slot onto People or Ships to improve them in some way, either directly boosting a stat (more shields, more combat damage), or bending a game rule (ignoring the first four points of damage, preventing a Diplomat character from being attacked). People and ships can only be brought into the game at your home planet, but you can throw items on anyone, anywhere – even debilitating ones on your opponent. This adds a little uncertainly to combat – you think you’ve got an easy win this turn, then the opposing ship suddenly has +10 shields. Once attached to a piece, items cannot be removed unless a special rule says so.

Gameplay runs in linear phases – Deploy, Auction, Special, Attack, and Move. This predictable order is part of the strategy. Unless the battle is over your Home Planet, you won’t be able to Deploy and Attack in the same turn. You won’t be able to quickly bring ships into a Neutral Zone fight, since Attack happens before Move. And as said, you won’t be able to beam pieces down to a planet in the Move phase before you’ve survived any blockades in the Attack phase. ConQuest rewards planning – often multiple turns ahead – and punishes any attempts to play a completely reactive game.

Even in the base release, there’s no shortage of strategic layers and considerations. Maybe too many, if we’re being honest. Planets have randomized effects and control point values that you won’t see unless you beam a piece down to it. Is your opponent sitting on a control point gold mine? Should you change your plans to find out? The Auction phase mixes 10-card side decks from each player and puts a random piece up for bidding each turn. Do you do a big deployment this turn, or save your points to counter your opponent in the auction? What if it’s a special Event piece that prevents the loser from attacking for three turns? If you’ve spent all your points already, you’ll be stuck with it.

Battles also have a lot to think about. Let’s say you move a ship carrying a critical invasion force, only to see your opponent has moved a ship into the same orbit. The next turn begins. Each piece gets one action per turn, so if you attack, you can’t beam that force down in the Move phase. But it’s a pretty good bet your opponent is going to assign their ship to attack yours. Ships have a range of attack values, and you notice the high end of their range will destroy your ship and everyone on it. But if they roll low, you’ll survive with an action intact to deliver that invasion force. BUT, you notice you have more control points. If you do choose to attack, your ship would be attacking first. You couldn’t deploy your forces, but you might remove the threat. Would you have enough time to beam them down on the next turn? What if they’re already planning to move in more ships from their home planet?

All information is open, except planet bonuses and what cards are still in your opponent’s deck. All moves also happen at the same time, so you can’t see what your opponent has set up to do this phase. Otherwise, you’ll be able to see every piece deployed, every item added, every element of a planet’s defensive force. You can still be surprised by item cards, but you should always have an idea of what’s coming and what your opponent is trying to do. This allows for some ultra-powerful combos to be built up – groups of Borg have ways of generating free pieces, for example, and many ships gain stacking bonuses with multiple crew members. But, as these take an excruciating number of turns to come together, it’s kind of on you for letting it happen.

All of this sits atop three(!) different ways to win – CheQmate, having the most control points after 20 turns, or earning 10 “Q Points.” Q Points get awarded for a wide variety of reasons through the game (having the most planets controlled, surviving lopsided combat, some pieces and planets just generate them each turn). There’s a lot of plates spinning at once, and admittedly, it’s sometimes overwhelming. I’m sure there are players would love this, but it also seems like a pretty big barrier to entry. I can see a lot of people deciding this is too intense for them. You could argue that the Pokémon card game is for kids, but it and Magic are popular, at least in some part, because they’re not this complicated.

Partially addressing this, ConQuest shipped with Basic and Advanced modes. Advanced is what I’ve laid out above. Basic has flat point bonuses for the neutral planets and cuts out the Auction and Special phases. This often works to its detriment – one of my pieces was hit with a “Confinement Grid” that could never be removed, because the phase that would let that happen isn’t in the Basic game. Card text isn’t rewritten either, referencing bonuses and abilities that simply don’t apply. Basic seems intended to be a stepping stone from the offline tutorials, but not fleshed out enough to be a full game. It’s clear that Advanced is the intended way to play. I’m curious if ranked games in Basic mode were even allowed, or if patches improved it as the game went on.

And that’s ConQuest Online. Even only being able to play against the AI, and with a limited set of starter pieces, I like the strategy game they’ve built here. I like that you can choose to assign multiple pieces to defend an ally being attacked, and if you do, then you – not your opponent – get to allocate where the incoming damage goes. Assign it to a smaller ship and it gets destroyed, but the excess damage also gets thrown out. I like that there’s many ways to win, while the open information means plans have to stay fluid.

I also like the Star Trek flavor and the numerous references to episodes of the show. Borg can assimilate opponents – Locutus specifically removes your opponent’s Picard piece when played. Data gets +2 influence with his Emotion Chip installed, but a 20% chance to lose his actions for a turn. Gowron can claim a Q point if your opponent’s deck includes Klingons with a combined influence total lower than his own.  Armus, the black oil creature from the episode “Skin of Evil,” pretty much just exists to immediately kill Tasha Yar and give 1 Q Point for doing it. If not directly made by Star Trek fans, Genetic Anomalies and Activision at least ran it by some for good ideas.

What I don’t like is how pay-to-win the whole setup seems. Any talk of ongoing balancing or general complaints died with official forums that weren’t archived. No major news source even mentions the game after the initial reviews, so a lot of this is speculation. But from studying the official piece list and comparing it to a rough list of 2001 prices, some rare pieces seem incredibly overpowered. Picard on the U.S.S. Stargazer makes it literally invulnerable to ships that cost less than 12 control points. Grand Nagus Zek just deletes a random undeployed piece from your opponent’s deck each turn. The Planet Killer – it kills planets, Avi – destroys everyone on a planet and permanently wipes out its control point value. If any of these came out against me, I’d probably be pissed.

And again, these prices are wacky for digital game pieces. I get it – this was a new economy, so it made sense to look to established physical cards for guidance. But to price them basically the same as a physical card? Getouttahere. Genetic Anomalies didn’t sell individual pieces themselves, but they fully supported the “bitbroker” economy, listing partner sites directly on the official website.  Most prices got lost behind PHP forms that didn’t get archived, but I was able to find this list from late 2001. Pieces for under $10 isn’t bank-breaking stuff, but it certainly accumulates. Powerful bonuses mean a starter deck just wasn’t competitive against someone who’d spent $50-$100 assembling a power team. Losing to someone who clearly outspent you would be extremely discouraging.

I don’t love the interface. You’re stuck in 800×600, 16-bit color. This worked for wider compatibility in 2000, but seems too restricted for the information needed to convey. You’ll need to remember to click through the names of each region to check what pieces are deployed there – you can’t see that in one place. Items attached to pieces are only visible in a smaller tabbed window off to the side. Only three people or ships can be visible at a time, with arrow indicators jumping between the rest of the pieces in the row. Big fights resolve immediately and require awkwardly scrolling through the game status updates just to figure out what happened.

There are a handful of function key shortcuts, but the keyboard is mostly used to chat. Instead, ConQuest’s interface is driven entirely by the mouse. You left-click to navigate and right click to select. For example, you’ll right-click a piece to select it, left-click on the place you want to move the piece to, then right click again to move it. You also have to manually click “End Turn” at the end of every phase. I never stopped getting this wrong and there’s no way to change it.  You’d probably get used to it with enough play, but it’s not exactly intuitive.

You also never actually move a piece on your turn. You’re setting up actions and committing to them, but they don’t get performed until the end of the phase. This means you’ll have to rely on icons placed over the pieces to mark what they’re going to do. I assume this is to accommodate servers and the bandwidth limitations of an early online game, but it is a bit off-putting. The manual makes no mention of a turn timer, so I don’t know if a slow opponent could leave you hanging for a while.

As presentation goes, everything is pretty bare bones. No pieces have any animations. A brief overlay effect indicates when a piece took a hit or is damaged, but this is the same shield shimmer or sparkly effect laid over every static piece. Piece icons are kept small, with only one view and little detail. To my knowledge, there were never any “holographic” or “foil” rare pieces that offered a different look. I expect this is all to accommodate being an early download title and to keep file sizes reasonable. The game is less than 20MB and the disc copy is mostly filled up with screensavers and demos for other Trek games.

There’s no music of any kind, which is honestly a surprise. I assume this, too, keeps downloads small. Sounds effects are limited to a few sparse samples played at the start of a phase, such as a photon torpedo announcing an attack. Rare voice samples are associated to pieces, like Alice Krieg threatening assimilation when the Borg Queen attacks. These all seem taken from episodes or the films. The only new material comes courtesy of John de Lancie smarming it up as Q at the start of the game or the end of a match.

ConQuest ran for about two years, officially ending on June 20th, 2002. It’s unclear whether the license was pulled or simply wasn’t renewed, but Genetic Anomalies was no longer allowed to sell game pieces or register new users after that date. They were able to keep the servers running for existing players, but that seems to have quickly petered out. Official support was ended Februrary 21st, 2003, with the last Wayback Machine capture of the website in December. I’m assuming the shop entirely folded up at the start of 2004.

I suppose this leaves the big question of why ConQuest didn’t do well and was soon forgotten. From what I can tell, it’s a combination of factors. Reviews were middling to hostile, which didn’t help. The crossover between who wanted to play a Collectable Card Game, and who also wanted to play it online, was probably pretty small to begin with. Remember, this was 2000-2001 – when shooters like Half-Life or Unreal Tournament dominated the PC market. I can imagine a destructive cycle of interested users logging into ConQuest, seeing that there weren’t that many players or matches, and logging off, never to return.

The pay-to-win model and inflated prices surely didn’t help either. Not to mention, physical CCG cards retained their value. I remember articles about the outsized price of Magic’s Black Lotus card pretty much as soon as the game was popularized. No one knew if digital would be the same, and they were clearly right to be skeptical. Magic also boosted the benefits of its cards with some truly beautiful artwork – ConQuest just uses lifeless CG renders that you never really get a large view of anyway. They could also never be displayed. What you bought literally doesn’t exist outside of the game program.

Adding to all this, it’s worth noting that the game released almost smack in the middle of the dot com collapse. In 2001, anything offering to digitally replace the “old ways” of doing something was going to be met with suspicion. Does anyone remember Beenz? As mentioned earlier, prices aren’t reliably archived, but it’s interesting to watch one bitbroker willing to pay $5-10 for pieces to resell in mid-2001, and then watch that drop to pennies by a month before the game shut down. Genetic Anomalies’ other projects – Chron X and a similar CCG based on the WWF called With Authority! – also collapsed around the same 2002-2003 period, which tells me it wasn’t just Star Trek‘s fault.

The whole game will run on Windows 11 without fuss – there’s occasional crashes that might be the fault of the OS, but likely are glitches that would have been patched out in the live version. However, you cannot install the game on modern Windows. It uses a 16-bit version of InstallShield that no longer runs on 64-bit OSes. You can use a generic 32-bit replacement installer, or fire up an emulated Win98 system. Not that there’s much to see. It might be worth a curious look, but I doubt anyone will spend much time with the offline mode. The AI offers a decent challenge, but you’ll never be able to expand or change your decks. Chron X’s peer-to-peer functionality doesn’t work here either and I assume was coded out at Activision’s request.

Since I haven’t truly played the game, take that star rating with an appropriate grain of salt. What I could play offline was interesting, but probably not in a way I’d pay money for. Looking further into the game’s monetization, I feel like I’m even less likely to have bought in. Digital card games had obvious advantages for actually connecting with players and getting games going, but their long-term value hadn’t been proven yet. If anything, this game’s relatively quick collapse shows why investing in ConQuest would have been a terrible bet. Not a bad strategy game, but built on an economy that was doomed to fail.

 

The Good

Lots and lots of strategy layers. I could see it taking a while before matches felt “same-y,” while the Star Trek nods feel authentic and earned. Theorycrafting powerful combos and assembling the pieces to execute them probably felt as good as any other CCG. If you love the game, finding players from all over the world would be leagues easier than taking your card deck to physical tournaments.

 

The Bad

You never really owned anything, as proven when the servers went down. Didn’t sound like enough players bought in to make it a thriving scene. Pricing digital tokens the same as physical cards was ridiculous. They cheaped out on the artwork too. Interface had too much information to try to get across in too many small windows.

 

Ahh! Looking for a contest of wits against the most powerful beings in the universe? Well, you’ve come to the right place.” — Q