The Conquest that allowed players to have 7 locations still left a lot to be desired. Conquest was meant to be a game with multi-faceted strategy, such 7 locations were simply too many to defend - a defensive approach was worthless.

Ping-pong brainstorming...in the end option 3 prevailed, with modifications. In the original plan locations only provided income while units were "working" in them.

The levels phase was a short but revolutionary step that sought to correct the current problem of locations and income in general. At it's current stage, a game of Conquest entailed heinous battling for control of the battlefield, and ridiculous unit sacrifices to take back control (for this reason, cards that vectored units to the battlefield were extremely powerful). Not to mention that structures (or upgrades) were pretty much useless. Why would one ever spend their time using upgrades which gave much less income than locations, when one could annex so many locations at a time?

With a lot of desperation and countless hours of ping pong, Brian and Dan finally came up with a solution to the problem. The first step was to create a greater restriction on the amount of locations. The number was reduced to 3. Strongholds were also removed. This change originally created a lack of income, so the level system was created to correct two problems. First, the levels allowed locations to provide more income as the game ensued. Second, the levels protected locations by allowing only one upgrade (structures changed to upgrades) to be ruined (not destroyed) each turn. Locations no longer had armor. This type of arrangement is the same as in the final game of Conquest, so there is not much need to elaborate on it further. This major revamp did wonders for the fluency of Conquest, and is likely noted as Conquest's greatest revision. It marked the change from a mediocre to exciting game.

A mockup of the new card design. This design had indicators to show if a unit was just unable or was on guard (parrying).

As locations began gaining both mana and gold, it became clear that a separation between shrines and villages was worthless. Thus, there became only one type of location (well, two if you consider the encampment to be a separate type, but we no longer do).

Several other changes occurred during this phase. First, parry was introduced. With parry, a unit could disable to the left to double its armor, for the price of being unable to counterattack. Parry doubled all of the unit's armor, not just it's base armor. Useless and broken abilities such as vectoring between locations and Zombify were removed.

Another very important addition was the barter system. Because of the way income works, there was often an overabundance of locations and upgrades in players' hands. The barter system allowed players to banish cards from hand (1 each turn) to draw an additional card, essentially "trading" those cards for new ones with merchants of Arthenia. This also allowed players to be more creative with their deck building, as opposed to having to ensure every card in the deck was of greatest contribution to the deck's mission. (This seemed far superior to having a tournament "sideboard" to us. With barter, players don't have to fear that cards such as item destruction, spell restrictors, and unique battlefield conditions will ruin their decks because of an underabundance of units.)

The last major change in this phase involves the complexity of the character system and restrictions on alignment use. It was decided that the character system was too annoying and would not appeal to other players. Rather, it was better to allow each player to choose their own alignments and the type of army they would like to build. There were still some restrictions however, given income is universal. The deck selection process, therefore, would be as follows:

1. Choose either Dark or Light.
2. If you chose Dark, choose either Neutral or Chaos. If you chose Light, chose either Neutral or Holy.
3. Choose an element.

As a result, this disbanded the possibilities of decks with two elements (but it never quite made sense anyway).

There were a few other final changes. From this point on, units were naturally deployed unable. This was an important innovation because it allowed for cards to enable deployed units or deploy units able, allowing for surprise attacks (it also ended confusion about when units were deployed and if they could act, etc.). Drawing cards at the beginning of the turn also became a part of income. This simplified the card drawing system and allowed for changes to card income from other cards more easily.

There is one other very important point to mention here. With the plethora of new innovations the final maker Mark finally became convinced of the potential of Conquest, and hasn't looked back since. Both Brian and Dan were very happy to have him join the team, and he proved to be an invaluable member as Conquest continued to develop.