Take all the techniques you know about Quake 2 and throw them away.

Quake and Conquer is all about resource management and strategy. You can't resort to a gung-ho solo charge because - well, you just can't.

Your player is a disembodied essence wandering the levels. You have direct control over your creatures and machines through your crosshair.

You will always begin with a flyer and 500 units of stuff.

STUFF IS IMPORTANT

Everything costs stuff. If you can't get stuff, you are stuffed. Or my name isn't Stuffy.

Wait a sec - you don't know what stuff even looks like, do you? Load a level and fly around a bit. You see those piles of blue glowing crystals? They are stuff crystals. Each chunk is worth 50 units, and the only way to get them is to have a central thing to store it, and flyers to collect it for you. Your flyers are skittish little bastards and often get bored, distracted or lost ferrying stuff about. To prevent this potential financial calamity, flyers can build resource points. Resource points are bucket-like structures that can store stuff as long as you still have a central thing. Flyers will look for the closest resource point or central thing to dump their load into.

 

YOUR SOLDIERS REALLY LIKE YOU

Which is kind of nice considering they are mass produced blobs of mush..

Once you get the hang of moving around and using the menus, you will need to start working on producing units to fight for you. This is not a tickling competition - your opponent will be out to make life really unpleasant for you in the shortest time possible.

You need to build a technician (the floating brain in a bucket) ASAP. It builds all your more advanced structures. And because it is a generous thing, it also repairs busted buildings. You can see how badly damaged a building is by selecting it and looking at the energy bar in the bottom right corner of screen.

Once your base is up and running, you need to think about defence. A squadron of tanks or half a dozen gladiators and their beserker and gunner buddies will chew you up and spit you out faster than shit through a goose. That's if you have no defence. But you can build up to 5 turrets in your base, and these are capable of holding up the baddies while you move troops to where they are needed.