Conquest.eth First Beta launching on Gnosis Chain on March 23rd!

Hi all!

Thrilled to announce that our first beta is coming on Gnosis chain on March 23rd!

It was not easy to decide which network our game should run on and we did not take our decision lightly. You can read some of our reasoning on our devlog.

To play the beta, you just have to join our discord

What’s new?

A lot actually.

We refactored our smart contract using hardhat-deploy latest diamond standard support. We added quite a few features too.

While they were technically feasible before (thanks to our minimalistic yet extensible game core), we made them more robust and added the necessary frontend component to make use of them.

You can sell spaceships in-game

Interestingly in the world of interoperability, the ability to send friendly spaceship (added in our last alpha), automatically implies the ability to sell them. To make that practical and extensible we added a plugin system that allow any kind of marketplace smart contract to be put in place.

We implemented a basic one, source code here, but any logic could be implemented. Actually combined with alliances, the possibilities are endless.

Note that the ability to sell spaceship do not break any rules of physics. You still have to send them through space. You can also of course send the spaceships directly to an enemy if you want too.

The secrecy of your move is also preserved. This has interesting consequences like the ability to buy spaceships from someone to attack that same person.

This is where custom marketplace smart contract could be beneficial. You want protection that someone is not sending spaceship to attack your own planet ? Sell them through a marketplace smart contract that also require a deposit that can then be slashed based on behavior.

One core tenet of conquest is the preservation of player sovereignty. The alliance system is designed to that end. We cannot prevent people to organise through multi-sig but players are better of not using it anyway.

The real cool thing about player-driven spaceship marketplaces is that it unlock a new role for player: that of merchant.

And with alliances, we expect to see merchant guilds!

You can sell planets

We made planet transferable like any ERC721. Note thought that we did not make any plugin for that yet and the plugin system will need some adjustment to support it. Having said that the transfer of planet could already be combined with the sell of spaceships. Like mentioned above, this could be used as a detterent for unwelcomed behavior.

Keen to hear your thoughts as players! And help anyone that would like to build a plugin or smart contract using that facility.

You can combine attacks from different planets, without needing to first send them to an intermediary planet

The game battle mechanics gives an extra advantage for high number of spaceships. In previous version of the game, the only way to combine forces was to first send them to an intermediary planet and send the spaceships in one go from there.

In the new version, fleets can plan their course of action and combine their attack. This is achieved by adding a new possibility: adding delay to your fleet. This also means that it is no more possible to assume that a fleet has gone past your planet. Now both destination and time of departure are hidden.

Note that attack combination feature is only accessible for your own fleets or your public allies. We believe this gives yet another strong incentives for player to form public alliances.

We separated the alliance management from the main website

While we technically had that before, we now separated our basic alliance contract in a separate repo here that then live in a separate website. Any new alliance smart contract can handle their alliance their way too. The game do not care about how alliance are managed. This allow players to create any kind of rules for their collaboration and have that managed through their own UI.

We are excited to see what player can make of it and if you are interested to develop some of these, let us know!

We separated some functionality thanks to plugin

As mentioned above, for the sell of spaceship, we created a plugin system. This allow anyone to create their own marketplaces and make it work in game. The plugin system is currently rudimentary and subject to changes.

We would love to get feedback from fellow developer to improve the capabilities there.

The upcoming beta

As always, there will be prizes! We expect to have more than 5000$ of prizes and we are going to announce our sponsors in the following days.

Like for the previous alpha, prizes will be divided in 2 categories. One will be allocated to the highscore table and the other will be disributed to random planets to spice up the game.

An important difference with the previous alpha, is that the beta run on a real network. Combine this with the ability to sell spaceships, the game is likey to have a different feel. Will players sacrifice dollars to get in the highscore table ? Will economic incentives change the usual strategies?

Can’t wait to find out !

As mentioned above, if you want to join the fun, you just have to join our discord

Thanks

Etherplay’s team