It probably doesn’t get shouted about enough, but there’s no denying that Songs of Conquest is one of the best new strategy games of the last couple of years. Scaling up the kind of action you’d find in games like Heroes of Might and Magic, it has attracted a surprisingly large and loyal following – publisher Coffee Stain says over 600,000 units have been shifted now, which is mighty impressive. Songs of Conquest is keen to keep capitalizing on the interest and delivering new content to players, and after launching its first DLC at the end of last year, it’s now revealed what’s to come in its second expansion. The highlight is a brand new faction, which is basically an interconnected hive mind of sentient trees.
While Civilization 7 has stomped in and set out its stall in the fight to become this year’s best new strategy game, that’s not putting Songs of Conquest off of bringing big new updates to its pixel fantasy world. The Vanir expansion in December added the eponymous faction of Viking-inspired warriors to the game, bringing the total number of factions up to five. Number six will arrive later this year in the Roots DLC, and once again, the faction carries the same name as the expansion itself.
The Roots are described as “an ancient, sentient colony of flora, fungus, and the bones of lost heroes,” and while there are of course a variety of different unit types for you to fight, Roots do not consider themselves as individuals. Instead, these pixelated plants all share the same “collective consciousness” that drives them to expand their dark forest territory.
Units known as Tree Mothers lead this shared goal, but even sentient plants have limitations – so, they reanimate fallen soldiers to act as Vessels that can speak for them and carry out the acts that they can’t.
It’s a freaky premise, and the Roots’ backstory will be explored across two brand new challenge maps alongside five new conquest maps too. It’s pretty much the same amount of content offered in the first DLC, so it seems developer Lavapotion has immediately landed on just the right formula for Songs of Conquest’s expansions.
However, there will be one key difference this time around. Lavapotion says it will be manually setting regional prices for the Roots DLC after Steam’s recommended pricing caused quite a wide disparity in how much people in certain regions were paying. The studio says this was not intentional and was “an honest mistake” that it won’t make again when Roots goes live.
The Roots DLC for Songs of Conquest is slated to arrive in summer 2025. To get more details on it, head to Lavapotion’s announcement post here.
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