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Deadlock: Planetary Conquest

aka: Deadlock: Conquista Planetária, Deadlock: La Conquista Del Pianeta, Deadlock: Planetarische Eroberung, XenoSphere
Moby ID: 696
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Description official descriptions

Deadlock: Planetary Conquest is a 2D turn-based 4X strategy. Players take the roles of aliens deadlocked on a planet surface. The game has seven different races with special abilities, for example the Maugs are great scientists, ChCh-T have the highest birth rate etc. They spend turns building, expanding, and ultimately warring. The planet's surface is divided into smaller areas. Each area is home to one of the cities that need to be constructed. To colonize a new area, the player must build a colonizer. Players can expand their cities by erecting residential buildings, farms, factories, mines and research centres. Inventions made in the latter provide new units, new materials and better buildings (for example a hydroponic farm is far better than a normal farm). The residents' satisfaction is important - dissatisfied citizens (taxes are too high) protest and don't work.

The battle begins after the player places their units in a foreign land. Battles are separately animated - after being initiated players have no control over them. The game also has a spying mechanic that spies can use to steal technologies. The player wins by fulfilling one of the victory conditions, for example remaining the last living race on the planet, or reaching a set number of city centres first.

Spellings

  • デッドロック - Japanese spelling
  • 魔星大戰略 - Chinese spelling (traditional)

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Credits (Windows 3.x version)

75 People (52 developers, 23 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 76% (based on 21 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.3 out of 5 (based on 32 ratings with 1 reviews)

Dull, boring, and wholly uninspiring.

The Good
The only thing about this game that I really, really liked was the voice work done for one of the alien races. I forget their name, but they were the mysterious race with the deep, sonorous voice. Whenever something would happen worth noticing, your advisor would pop up and, in this deep, resonant, evil voice say: "There has been...a change." I liked that so much I made a .wav file out of it

The Bad
It wasn't that I disliked the game. It was that the game featured elements of other games that had been done better in those other games. Deadlock felt very much like someone had said "Let's take the elements from the other popular games of the day and try to combine them into a single game." So there are elements of RTS, none of which are as good as the RTS elements of contemporaneous games like Command and Conquer or Warcraft. And there are elements of empire management, none of which are as good as the various Civilization games. Etc. In short, the game tries to be many things at once, and therefore fails to succeed at any of them.

The Bottom Line
I played a few games of it, grew bored, deleted it from the hard drive four years ago, and have never been tempted to reinstall it.

Windows · by Afterburner (486) · 2001

Trivia

Bugs

Known bugs as of version 1.31 (from patch readme.txt):

Deadlock doesn't terminate completely on exit. Upon exiting a multi-player game of Deadlock, if you try launching a second game of Deadlock the message "Cannot run multiple instances of a DLL under Win32s" appears. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Win95 task list. Select and END any running Deadlock tasks. You can now play Deadlock again. [Win95 only; on TEN & Mplayer online services]

Cover misprint

Some CDs of Deadlock: Planetary Conquest have the designation "Retail Demo" printed on them by mistake.

Demo version

If the game was played without the CD, a demo of the game was available to play. However, the demo was so limited that it defeated its own purpose.

Development

During the game's development, there was some discussion about making it a real-time strategy game, instead of a turn-based one.

Information also contributed by NGC 5194 and Techademus.

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  • MobyGames ID: 696
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Tony Van.

Macintosh added by Copland-II.

Additional contributors: Jeanne, chirinea, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger, Techademus.

Game added January 8, 2000. Last modified August 2, 2024.