Super Conflict the Mideast, for SNES

Rating: 6.3/10; Above Average

Worth playing for strategy fans, though may not be worth beating.

Super Conflict is a turn based strategy war game, which according to its full title takes place in the Middle East. That is the entirety of the game’s story. You obviously play as the Americans, while the enemy uses Soviet tech. It is not clear who the enemy is or why you are fighting. There is no overarching narration to tie the levels together, and no briefing given for each level. It would have been nice to have a little story, or at least some references to real world locations so you could believe you were fighting in actual locations. The game is instead purely military strategy.

The gameplay consists of moving your units around the map and attacking the enemy during your turn, then the enemy gets a turn. This continues until one team loses either the flag tank or flag ship. To mix things up slightly, both teams get factories which can produce new units. A number of interesting mechanics come into play. Terrain defence is important, with deserts actually lowering defence. However, all land units receive the same defence bonuses. It makes no sense for heavy tanks to get the same bonuses from mountains, forests and cities as infantry. This relates to one of the worst aspects of the game; all units are nothing more than attack and defence values vs land, sea and air and they are designed in a purely linear fashion. Thus the heavy tank is superior in every way to all other ground units (other than SAM), making weaker units such as light tanks and infantry pretty much useless. The weak destroyer is in a similar boat

An interesting feature is limited ammo and fuel. Fuel limits the number of moves land and air units can make, with air units crashing when they run out. Most units have 2 weapons, 1 of which is better and comes with limited uses. You can choose to use the weaker weapon, which can have advantages. Both fuel and ammo influence tactics and put greater value on cities where both can be recovered, though I generally found that land units had more than enough fuel to last the battle. Which units you can make at factories is determined by score, which is affected by your and the enemy’s losses. This encourages keeping your weak units alive.

The final mechanic to mention relates to the attack and defend stances. When a unit attacks it gets the first strike, though the defender is given a defence boost and takes less damage per hit. To offset, the defender randomly skips their combat turn. In general, a battle between attacker and defender ends up even if the units are even, though this assumes a defender will attack half the time. Due to the random nature, the defender could attack every round (thus owning the battle) or not attack at all.

The game includes 2 different combat options. Short greatly speeds up combat by skipping much of the battle animation while forcing attack vs defend. Long forces you to sit though the animation for every combat round while giving you the option to change from attack, defend or retreat at any round. Long combat has a number of tactical advantages, though most of them break the game. Being able to push to attack during the AI turn can allow you to inflict more damage, especially if your unit has the advantage. It also sometimes makes the AI go defend, which can cause it to do less damage by randomly skipping turns. Being able to retreat can allow you to use multiple weak units to defeat a stronger unit without losing any when attacking, but being able to retreat during the AI attacks is seriously overpowered. You can have infantry guarding a city simply retreat from an enemy tank that would otherwise obliterate it, thus most likely preventing the enemy from capturing the city that turn. You can also switch to your other weapon, which causes the enemy to also switch their weapon. So you could have a tank shoot shells at a fighter jet to force the jet to waste its air to air missiles in preparation for an attack from your jets, or even more silly have a sub shoot torpedoes at the jet; I don’t think this works in short combat mode.

Now to talk about the 2 major flaws of the game. The enemy AI is bad. While it is pretty good at killing your weak units, it fails to use its units in a way that will allow it to possibly win. Bombers and choppers are often wasted to kill infantry instead of heavy tanks, fighter jets attack the closest thing if no bombers/choppers are currently in range (and fighters are terrible against ground and sea), subs and destroyers often attack land (both are terrible vs land), and the AI seems to prefer attacking factories above all else (which are somewhat hard to kill), even going so far as suiciding SAMs against factories. This makes the AI largely trivial to deal with, and ends up with a lot of silly combat where both parties only inflict 1 damage per attack. Even worse, the AI completely does not understand that losing the flag unit is defeat, often sending it to the front lines to be easily defeated.

By far the most boring flaw of the game comes from the level design. The designers pretty much completely fail to make interesting and novel tactical scenarios that could take full advantage of the mechanics of the game. Instead they settle for almost the exact same set up for all 55 levels, which gets very boring very fast and makes the game tedious to complete. The objective is also always the same; kill the flag unit. There is no variation and no need to defeat all units. By the end levels, I could win in 2-4 turns, making the entire concept of factories moot.

Overall this is decent game, but with significant wasted potential. A level creator for players could have massively improved the game.

Pro

• Terrain tactical considerations for defence and movement
• Limited fuel and ammo, with resupply at cities
• Long combat allows you to switch combat mode and weapon used
• Balanced combat (no advantage for whose turn on which combat takes place)
• 2 player mode
• Air superiority can be obtained by either destroying enemy air units, or capturing airports and destroying the carrier

Con

• Cannot undo a mistaken move
• Severe lack of story
• Naval units cannot move past a bridge if there are naval units on the other side (and thus cannot attack them)
• Land units block the movement of air units, and vice versa
• Long combat retreat as defender is overpowered
• Long combat can force the AI to waste its good weapons
• Cannot skip combat animations in long combat
• Too much randomness in combat with respect to defend
• Linear unit design makes many units obsolete, rather than giving every unit a unique role
• No variation in win condition (always kill the flag unit). You still win after the flag unit is destroyed even if the enemy has enough units to defeat you
• Bad AI, which makes game too easy and tedious
• Uninspired level design with minimal variation
• No way to move land units over water