Video Game / Convoy

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Convoy is Roguelike game that describes itself as a mix of FTL and Mad Max. It was developed by Convoy Games and published by Indietopia Games on April 21st, 2015, after first getting funded on Kickstarter and spending some time in Steam Early Access.

At the start of a new game, you pick your main cargo vehicle and the two escort vehicles you'll start with (more options will become available as you complete challenges). Then, the few paragraphs of text outline your situation as an officer on a spaceship that got so battered by an ion storm it had to make an emergency landing on the desert planet of Omek Prime, and now needs to obtain four replacement parts there in order to fly again. Of course, it won't be easy, as the planet is utterly lawless, and the only way to deal with the threats from Raiders, Privateers and T.O.R.V.A.K. is to travel in the titular convoys.

No relation to 1978 film by Sam Peckinpah. However, see Skyshine's Bedlam for another 2015 Sci-Fi / Post-Apocalyptic roguelike set on a desert planet.

Tropes travelling in this convoy:

• Anti-Armor: Cannons and railguns deal damage to armor, as do chainsaws and buzzsaws in melee. Plasma weapons deal heavy damage to armor, but are otherwise weak.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Mobile Command Vehicle, or MCV. It's primarily designed to be a Base on Wheels, but with upgrades, it can get equipped with powerful weapons and/or support gear. The fact that it can't maneuver is immaterial: anything that gets in the way of the MCV will be crushed.
• Betting Mini-Game: The Lucky Peacock Casino event lets you engage in roulette, wheel of fortune, and slot machine minigames. Wheel of Fortune in particular can end up with you earning Heavy/Super Heavy-tier weapons, or even a unique Gold Car.
• Bottomless Magazines: Downplayed. All ranged weapons have a certain magazine size, and will have to reload once they go through it. However, there's no limit to the total number of reloads they can go through, so the ammo is essentially infinite regardless.
• Cognizant Limbs: The Final Boss has individual systems that can all be targeted and destroyed separately, though its central core is protected by a barrier powered by the shield generators mounted on its sides. Only by destroying the shield generators can you force it to reveal its true weak point — the core at its back (which can also fire a Super-Heavy Laser to defend itself),
• Chainsaw Good: Vehicles can be outfitted with chainsaws and/or buzzsaws: the former deal more damage to vehicle's "health", but the latter are far more effective at shredding armor.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Several pieces of equipment that are normally only usable by your MCV, such as Mine Layers or EMP Blasters, can be equipped on just average enemy vehicles (though at least enemy vehicles don't have the same screen-wide range that your MCV does.
• Damage Reduction: Armor functions as this. Damage dealt to vehicles is reduced by their armor percentage (for example, an attack that deals 10 damage against something with 50% armor will deal 5 damage).
• Defeat Equals Explosion:
  • Defeated vehicles blow up, leaving behind a burnt-out wreck that other vehicles can smash into. Be careful not to stay directly behind something you've just taken out!
  • Large vehicles such as your MCV or the Keeper flagship are completely obliterated by their own explosions, leaving no wreckage behind.
• Deflector Shields: Present as support modules equippable by multiple kinds of vehicles. They protect the equipped vehicle from damage and have the advantage of regenerating, but will collapse instantly if hit by an EMP attack, require a lengthy recharge period when broken outright, and are also ignored by the railguns. MCVs have access to a particularly hefty shield that doesn't regenerate over time, but can be reactivated once the cooldown wears off.
• The Dragonslayer: The "Here be dragons" sidequest has you assist one, who calls himself a Knight of the Order of the Wheel, and actually charges with a lance and shield once you near the supposed dragon's lair. The "dragon" is a laser-equipped Raider MCV, one that also has a bunch of allies supporting it. Once you defeat it, the Knight will offer to join you in a vehicle he jury-rigged from the "dragon's" remains.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: The Raider's version of the MCV is called the Dreadnaught. Obtaining one of the spare parts for your ship involves fighting a Raider warlord who drives his own heavily armed Dreadnaught (complete with escorts), and the ones you can unlock for yourself start with heavy weaponry installed.
• EMP: There are EMP mines and EMP blasters. Both will fully collapse shields and stun the unshielded targets.
• Forever War: Omek Prime is embroiled in a three-way conflict between the Raiders, Privateers, and T.O.R.V.A.K., though your arrival on the scene as an outside party has kicked the conflict into high gear. A fourth faction, the Keepers, appear to have a vested interest in keeping any one side from becoming too powerful — at some point in the past, T.O.R.V.A.K. was coming out on top when the Keepers showed up and crushed them with their high-tech flagship. Said flagship also attacks your convoy at the end of the game, as your presence on the planet has upset the balance the Keepers have been maintaining.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted, though at least vehicles will stop firing if their line of fire is obstructed by an ally. Friendly fire is in full effect with area-of-effect attacks like the MCV's Super Heavy Missile or Laser weapons — be careful not to hit your own vehicles! On the plus side, the enemies can get hurt by each other's attacks as well.
• Gatling Good: There's a Minigun, and it's one of the most cost-effective weapons.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: You can unlock a Gold Car if you get lucky at the casino's Wheel of Fortune. It has the highest health of all support vehicles at 1500 HP (although the Gila HA still beats it durability-wise due to possessing much heavier armor) and also has high handling at 80, which is only behind the much more fragile Interceptor and Keeper Drones. However, this is offset by it possessing only a single weapon slot and no capacity for system upgrades. Some players consider this enough of a drawback to straight-up trade it in as soon as they get it.
• Kaizo Trap: Defeating the final boss does not end the game — if some of the boss's minions are still active when it explodes, they must also be defeated. If your MCV was already on its last legs, those final few shots from the surviving minions can put an end to your run.
• Life Drain: The Leech Drone utility upgrade does this and can be used to drain health from enemy vehicles. Inverted with the Repair Drone, which transfers health from the user to the target.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Light, Medium, and Heavy Rocket Artillery weapons amount to this, and don't even need a direct line of fire! However, their long reload time and comparatively low accuracy usually puts them in the Awesome, but Impractical category.
• Magnetic Weapons: There are Medium, Heavy, and Super Heavy Railguns. These ignore shields completely, and the Super Heavy Railgun in particular does insane per-shot damage, but their long reload time also means they have pretty average DPS: i.e. Medium Railgun is equivalent to Light Pulse Laser in DPS, though it compensates for that with its shield-piercing and armor-breaking qualities.
• More Dakka: There are light, medium, and heavy machine guns, and they are the most basic weapons of their tier: effective in conjunction with other weapons, but almost useless on their own. Only the Minigun is a genuinely impressive option.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The Super Heavy Railgun deals 400 damage per shot, and so frequently amounts to this. Just be aware that the lightest, fastest vehicles also have an automatic 20% chance of dodging its projectiles!
  • Running into a solid obstacle, such as a wall or a mountain, is instant death, no matter how strong the vehicle is. One (dangerous) strategy is to surround a vehicle that you can't damage easily and force it to run into an obstacle, though you run the risk of doing the same yourself.
  • The Keeper flagship can crush smaller vehicles under itself when moving around the battlefield, destroying them instantly.
• Over Penetration: The beam from a Super Heavy Laser will damage everything it passes through.
• Practical Currency: On Omek Prime, the only currency anyone cares about is scrap metal. You even use it to bet in casinos.
  • However, you can also find bottle caps, and even get side quests that allow you to get even more of them...but they can never get spent on anything.
• Random Encounter: These will often occur when travelling on the world map.
• Ray Gun: There are pulse lasers and beam lasers. Both deal good damage to health and shields, but cannot break armor.
• Ramming Always Works: Any vehicle can ram, though it's not without risks: ramming will damage the vehicle that initiated the ram, and if a lighter vehicle rams a heavier vehicle, the lighter vehicle will pay a stiff price with no real reward. It's possible to create ram-oriented vehicles by equipping them with chainsaws and/or buzzsaws; equipping a vehicle with an A.I.D. (Advanced Impact Defense) will protect it from ramming damage (both from being rammed, and the self-inflicted damage from ramming other vehicles).
• Real-Time with Pause: The way the battles work. Tactical pauses let you better aim your MCV's abilities like rockets and Super Heavy Laser.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Played straight, as the energy shields will eventually regenerate, whereas the armor or health bars must be repaired at camps.
• Secret Test of Character: Completing a hitchhiker's sidequest and declining a reward gets you the Rainbow Car, far more valuable than the "normal" rewards even if you just sell it for scrap straightaway. While its stats are pretty average, the weapons it comes equipped with are random, and so it might possess powerful guns right out of the gate.
• Shout-Out:
  • The items you need to obtain in order to repair your ship and get off the planet include a flux capacitor and sonic screws.
  • One of the random events has you locate a tower that broadcasts the GNU message.
  • There are sidequests to do with collecting bottlecaps: the last one of these even lampshades this with "Presumably, planet Earth has need for bottlecaps... if only you could get there."
  • Another event references the infamous nylon bag debacle from Fallout 76.
  • Also you can encounter a robot wandering through the desert that starts quoting Styx's song Mr. Roboto. If you can match the responses, the robot transforms into a car.
  • You can find the elevator and crystal from Dungeon of the Endless, along with the corpses of the game's characters Skroig, Troe, and Josh. Repairing the crystal to use it as a power source will let you save some fuel.
  • One event has you come across a lost bag of mail. One possible letter is a Super Smash Bros. invitation issued to Waluigi.
• Slow Laser: Pulse lasers function in this manner. This makes them inferior to the beam lasers, which function like a laser should, and thus are both slightly more powerful, and also cannot miss.
• Smart People Play Chess: One possible outcome of a random event in Raider territory is running into a Raider who asks you for a chess match. You don't play chess yourself — you just pick dialogue options (one of which is Flipping the Table if you decide you get fed up with the event). If you happen to get a winning result, the Raider will join your convoy with his own car.
• Taking the Bullet: Combat in minefields is exceedingly dangerous: because the MCV can't maneuver, if a mine is in its path and you haven't upgraded its resistance to mines, the only way to avoid damaging the MCV is to have an escort vehicle tank the damage instead.
• Technically a Transport: It's possible to eventually upgrade your MCV to this, increasing its hull and armor and fitting it with super-heavy weapons.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: The destruction of your MCV instantly ends the game.

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