The third resource that can't be harvested is "reputation" or in the demons' case "fear" and it is gained by conquering neutral cities of by killing enemy units, its sole usage being to promote you own troops. Strange enough Seven Kingdoms encourages these kind of arbitrary promotions that allow you to upgrade units that didn't even see combat at all. It's only possible to promote your troops five times but this is more than enough to stomp over the lesser enemies with these super units.

Usually the tutorial should help the newcomers getting familiar with certain units and gameplay but Seven Kingdoms Conquest is a failure even at this stage as the human tutorial can't be completed due to a bug. After a couple of basic maneuvers you are asked to proceed with your mission and expand after a specific gate that won't open so there is simply no choice but to call it a game. The pessimist has only pleasant surprises and I must confess I was thrilled to acknowledge that the same gate opens in the Demon tutorial so I can complete my training and have an easier ride in the actual campaign.

There is not much to say about the campaign set, at least not on the good side as the missions are virtually unscripted and seem to be mere skirmish games in disguise. Basically you have a starting city and the computer has its own and the objective is simply to annihilate the opponent by destroying each and every building and units he possesses. To make things further worse some missions are bugged and you won't be able to complete them even if there is nothing unconquered on the entire map.

The story is weak, twisted and lacks cohesiveness while the narrative passages recited between missions are insufficient to create that certain mood that can preserve the interest intact. Saving the game from time to time is definitely the wise thing to do, because Seven Kingdoms Conquest has the tendency to crash when least expected and even a harmless alt+tab can have a catastrophic effect on your progress. There is a downside on this action because when you load a mission all hotkey group unit assignments will be lost and troops tend to blend in so it's a challenge to reconstruct your teams.

Well, there is one more thing to do after you eventually give up the campaign and that is trying the skirmish where you can at least chose both the side and the starting edge and a different victory condition such as "domination" or "king of the hill". The opponent can be set on different levels starting from easy up to insane in case you are interested in an extra challenge; still the AI is very weak and the main concern is not how to outmaneuver the opponent but how to deal with the miserable path finding. The computer will frequently walk his army right through your troops ignoring the inflicted damage, as his agenda is to conquer an obscure neutral village on the opposite side of the map.