Double post, to report my first proxy game with Conquest. Bat rep is here:
http://privateerpressforums.com/show...ers-50-Points)
A fantastic debut for Conquest, all things considered. I was somewhat concerned when I found out when I was fighting Gorten with his blast immunity since so much of Conquest's offense relies on blast damage, but thankfully the damage from Crit Devastation gets around that (not that it mattered, because I didn't shoot at troops all game.)
Sentry on Conquest is pretty damn nice. Lucky as hell crits aside, it's an out of activation shot with a big, powerful gun, so you can either soften up heavies that are trying to encroach on your space, or try to thin out a unit that is vulnerable to the blast damage. In a perfect world, Superiority on Conquest would allow it to go after pretty much anything, and with Strakov's feat you can get a drop on something if you really need to bring his (not inconsiderate) melee power to bear.
It lends to an interesting playstyle paradigm for Strakov, where you can play more of a midfield game, and try to leverage your feat more for breaking their army than trying to sneak an assassination. Since you're anchored by Conquest, you have a great shooting platform, a great melee model, a durable objective holder, and something nice to hide behind, so you can play more conservatively than you'd normally have to, I think.
In general, I think Conquest's abilities are really well suited to where it wants to be: in the back, shoring up your endgame. It's not fast enough to really get out there, but that's okay; you don't really want to be leading the charge with your expensive model! It definitely felt a lot more effective and useful on the table than my initial impressions led me to believe. The Main Guns are really awesome (even crits aside,) and I can definitely see where the Secondary Batteries would be useful (god help me if I ever remember the Linked Guns rule correctly.)
Overall, I'm really excited to use Conquest in future games. I still think it'll have crummy matchups (notably: masses of good ARM weaponmaster infantry,) but I'm hoping that can be tempered by including other elements in the list. Very interested in seeing how the colossals in general change how players have to approach the game.