Solium Infernum is a simplified turn based strategy game, similar to games such as Civilization. The overlord of hell has gone missing and now all its factions are vying for the throne. You play one such faction and everyone takes turns plotting their devious methods.
The game is pretty simple and easy to grasp in terms of the mechanics, letting the focus shift to general strategy instead of micromanagement. During your turn, you can only queue up two actions total. Most of the time you will be moving troops and collecting tribute but you can also spend one action to buy things from the bazaar, research things, scheme, or take diplomatic action and so forth.
Moving troops around is very simple as well. You can move a platoon of troops two tiles every turn. You can only move them onto cantons you own or onto unowned cantons. When you move troops onto tiles that are not owned by anyone, it simply becomes yours. No one can move troops onto cantons owned by another faction unless you are at war with them or subservient to them. When you are at war with a faction, you can steal their tiles but the enemy can do the same to you as well.
As for the combat, it initiates when your unit moves onto a tile occupied by an enemy force, a place of power, or a wandering dog like creature. The combat is automatic and the damage is calculated in a very straightforward manner. Each legion has three ratings, one for ranged damage, one for melee damage, and one for spell damage. When you fight another legion, the difference between the three ratings are calculated and that is how much health is lost. For example, if your legion has a ranged damage rating of 5, and the enemy legion has a ranged rating of 3, you would deal 2 damage to the enemy legion. If the ratings are the same, no damage is done to any legion.
You can modify the damage numbers by hiring praetors from the bazaar and attaching them to your legion. Each praetor will boost different areas so you can either hire a praetor to shore up an area your legion is weak in, like melee damage, or to further strengthen a stat that is already high.
You can also attach tactics to legions. Tactics do things such as increase ranged damage by two and etc., but these tactics cannot be seen by other players. It’s like activating a trap card in Yugioh. There are other mechanics as well so while the game looks simple, there’s plenty of depth to each element of the game. Solium Infernum does a great job of streamlining things so that they are easily understood and easy to use.
Collecting tribute is very simple as well. When you collect tribute, you select two coins out of three on the next turn. Each coin has different emblems and these come into play when making purchases at the bazaar or taking any action requiring funding. For example, the Stygian Guard legion costs nine ghost coins, two blood coins(I’m assuming it’s a drop of blood and not water since it’s hell we’re talking about here), seven fire coins and four moon coins so you would try to get those coins when selecting your tribute. It is entirely viable by the way to use both actions of your turn to collect tribute if so desired.
Solium Infernum has a sense of humor as well. In order to invade the cantons of other factions, you can make a demand of tribute. Most likely the faction will refuse and then you can retaliate by invading. You can choose a condition for victory, such as defeating an enemy legion in battle or conquering five enemy cantons, and then the war will end. The end goal of all these actions are to earn prestige and the faction with the highest prestige will win the game.
There’s also schemes and plenty of other ways to screw with the enemy factions. Once in awhile, there will be legislation that will be passed that every faction must vote on. Communism is where demons draw the line. Blood sacrifices are OK, communism is a no go. Anyways for example, one time I had the choice of voting between every faction losing one legion purchased from the bazaar and one other option that I don’t remember since I am getting old. I picked the legion one because I assumed the starting legion you have would not be counted as being purchased from the bazaar. Boy I was so wrong. I lost my only legion that I was upgrading early in the game. Needless to say I quit that game and started a new one immediately.
There’s definitely a lot of mechanics but the mechanics are very easy to grasp and simple to use but definitely hard to master. Overall, the Solium Infernum demo was pretty enjoyable. One of the few issues I did run into is that the demo was pretty unoptimized on my PC. The demo is still available on Steam as of this writing if you want to check it out. Hopefully this will be the case when the full game is released but you never know these days.
Additional Info
Steam Store Page : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1893810/Solium_Infernum/
Review Score: N/A (game is not out yet) as of this writing (10/20/23)
Developer: League of Geeks
Publisher: League of Geeks
Release Date: Coming soon
MSRP: TBA
Time spent: 1.5 hours
Achievement Score: N/A
Ducky Obrien 