Not to be confused with the tickets-and-control-points Conquest mode in Battlefield, which is fun but not what I'm on about, the conquest mode I'm talking about is where you get a big, often slightly silly layer over the top of the 'actual' game itself, in the form of a map with regions or planets or whatever that you strategize over capturing, and fight over down on the real-time ground itself. It's taken me a while to realise but conquest modes are often the secret ingredient to some of my most beloved games, home to my most beloved pre-adolescent memories.
I would very much like them to come back. There was a weird, brief time when it looked like they might happen around 2005, seemingly off the back of a wave of appreciation for Total War, when they started popping up in everything from other RTS games to the original Star Wars Battlefront 2. Conquest Modes, I truly believe, are the best thing to almost happen to video games.
