SpellForce 3 - RTS/RPG with good writing - now with Soul Harvest standalone expansion

I felt the same way about the combat at first but it gets better by time. You can even change the alt-slow down into a pause from the options if you feel overwhelmed at first. Might be a good way to give yourself a breather and review your tactics.

 

How THE FUCK can I assign abilities/items to hotbar?

I like the ALT button tbh, but I set it to pause, not just slow time.

 

Press ''P'' and drag the abilities from the left panel to the right.

 

Thanks, but I'm talking about the hotbar at the bottom with the numbers 1-0. Although, I think it has something to do with the units we control.

Also, there is this weird bug (?), the game shows the buttons in Greek, probably due to having Greek as my system language. Not annoying, just weird.

 

Been playing a couple of hours now on hard, and this is my personal goty (so far). I just find it immensely charming, and I like the scale of things. A village actually feels like village, and the areas are huge. Feels like an actual place instead of a playground like in Original Sin 2. I was surprised by the ferocity by the orcs in the second RTS-mission. I thought I had a nice tutorial-esque moment and took it fairly easy, but the damn orcs really wanted me gone. They kept sending wave after wave of attackers, and they actually attacked in different places so I couldn't get a good choke-point going. Fun times.

Some of you seem to really dislike the voice acting, but I find no fault with it. I enjoy listing to different characters speak, and they don't drone on forever like in certain other games

 

The game is amazing but clearly rushed,there is tons of game/quest breaking bugs. Why the fuck devs don't play their own games?! This game is locked in very strange progression,people play the game until they come to a mission that is broken,they complane on steam and wait for a fix,devs patch it in for the next day,then players till the next mission that have bug and everything begins a new. It seems that there couldn't be more than two missions per day. Also their fix messed up my save,from a bearded man's man my dude became some bald fag . Sooo guys just wait a week before you get the game,it is worth it once it gets patched.The worst thing is that most bugs are just some basic triggers,devs should really begin testing their games. Why the fuck would you mess up your starting reputation when you can just fix this basic thing in a few days,it is baffling?!

PS: Did anyone found the Firenettle in Everlight? Also where is the beggar's daughter?
EDIT:Ok i found the girl,poor her.

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She is near the small river in the north west part of the map.

 

Yeah, been reading about the bugs. Real shame really, because it will drag down the score

 

How's the RTS part? I've been playing a bit of Spellforce 1 while waiting for patches and fixes and the RTS part in SF1 is ...kinda boring. It consists of massing samey units that you can't control the abilities of and overwhelming the enemy (which cheats on the highest difficulty in the most stupid way possible), at least the human part is that, I just got some elf buildings to try out. I also find it funny how SF1 has 6 races in the base game, maybe more with the expansions, while 3 has 3. The most boring ones at that, maybe apart from the orcs.

 

This does look good. I think waiting for the bugs to get squashed is the way to go.

 

I finished spellforce 1 a long time ago, and to this day I have no idea how I persevered. The rpg parts were quite shitty, and the rts parts were even worse.

Now people are saying this game is good, and I sooo want a good new rts. But hope is a dangerous thing.

 

Fuck that shit,even i will wait for the bugs. More than half the quests are bugged because of laziness. Just a bunch of no triggers,how retarded you have to be to miss half the triggers in your fucking game?! The QA should be hanged in some desolate forest! I am at 1.04 version and yet more than half of the quests are fucked up! It is mind boggling how they could release the game with all that shit,all this could be fixed in a few days! Why the fuck you would kill your game?!

I don't know what to say about the strategy,i have played 4-5 mission that have strategy element. The game is mainly an RPG until now. The strategy element is mainly sector rushing and putting down buildings for the resources. I haven't met any significant resistance until now, i am playing on normal. What i don't like is how little damage units are doing. It is stupid to see 20 guys attacking a single unit and having to do a more than one attack. Also it takes a long time to take down a single building. Also i haven't seen the enemy use big armies for attack,but that could be because i attack fast and denied his resources early.

 

Yes, hope is a cruel mistress. I finished 2 maps of SF1 and I'm already starting to get bored. There's barely any gameplay to speak of, the only thing you do is wait for your army to amass and then death-ball your way to victory. You can't control your units' abilities and they are all variations of the same unit anyway, they even look extremely similar, to the point of being unable to differentiate what unit is what if they are clumped together, only the spellcasters do something and look different. At least the human armies, but all I've been fighting is the orcs and goblins and they look very similar, too. There are some good sidequests that span a lot of levels, though, there's one on the second map where you have to kill progressively tougher ghosts of an army which plunged hell itself.

This is in all the other Spellforces as well. While I wouldn't have had a problem with it if you actually did something during the combat, but you don't because of the similar units and the inability to use their abilities.

 

You have the heroes though, and they has special skills and so does the enemy heroes. I guess it has a bit of a moba thing going here, that the normal soldiers are mostly meat shields, but it feels actually fun to be this badass magician. I rolled a necromancer and I just love spamming undead all over the place to overwhelm the enemy while I cast miasma over them.

The orc enemy had a hero too, a big guy with a axe and he just wrecked my normal soldiers. It was kinda awesome to see.

 

fantadomat dragonul09

Should I jump in or wait for a patch?

 

I actually prefer that.
It makes sure army composition and upgrades become more important than just how fast you can fire hotkeys (in SC2 you can easily win a fight with an inferior army if you click fast enough, which I really, really don't like about it). Or in other words, macro becomes more important than micro.
Which makes extra sense when you think that sometimes you'll be "adventuring" at the same time somewhere else with your hero.

Also... what's bad about having a nice break and just watch your soldiers or workers going at it?
It doesn't have to be that hectic.
Relax. Take a sip. Get raped because you built spearmen against armored units...

 

Hmm this is hard one. You could jump in and hope that they patch the game before you get to the bugged sections. First 5-10 hours are pretty well patched from what i have seen. But there is a lot more bugs. I just met yet another fucked up trigger and decided to wait for a new patch. From what i see devs are pumping up patches constantly so if you play a mission or two a day most likely you won't have problem with the bugs. Still the game is a buggy mess even if it is a great game. If you want to be sure that you get all the quests and shit in one go i would recommend waiting a few days.

I to don't like much the "every unit special ability" shit. I am more of a old school strategy fan. AoE,Tiberian sun,Red alert and Supreme commander don't have that shit and are superior games to the blizzard's mediocre games. I do like Heroes having skills but units having them is annoying.

 

Actually, I mind that quite a lot unless there's a fast forward button. I play games to play them, not periodically provide inputs and watch two armies slowly kill eachother.

 

They DO have abilities, you just can't use them. Enchanters have some kind of stun, Magicians have lightning bolts and novas, Paladins have some kind of aura, Clerics can heal etc. But you can't use them tactically because you can't use them at all, they fire automatically, most of the time all the clerics will focus heal one unit while everything around them dies, it's pretty frustrating.

It's not about that, it's about the total lack of tactics, you just right click the the enemy army and watch the enfolding action, you can't really do anything. The issues is exacerbated by the fact that controlling the units is finnicky and very imprecise, they sometimes just stand there doing nothing while you've explicitly told them to attack. This is all in SF1 mind you.

 

I say go for it, they already churned out 4 patches in 2 days and almost everything is going to be fixed by the end of the weekend,I've played quite a lot and I still havent encountered any broken quests, seems to vary from person to person.

There's already another patch that seems to fix a lot of these bugged quests

 

You need siege damage to take down buildings. Earthquake is a pretty powerful spell that destroys buildings in a big AoE range and the damage oriented melee tree also gets a skill that does lots of siege damage. Furthermore I found an upgrade tech for Elven Archers that turns their damage to Siege as well vs buildings which makes them really chew through them, and I'm sure they aren't the only common unit to get an upgrade such as this.

 

Yeah it depends on what side quest you take on. In Everlight there are a few broken quests in the latest patch. I am on the one with the ork and the butcherhouse ....and the boss fight doesn't trigger. Another broken quest is the one with the Firenettle. I am just going postponed this quests until there is a nice patch . Still there is a lot of broken quests. I have seen 5-6 until now.

 

Yeah... SF1 was... old?
Really, it was not a prime example of RTS nor RPG, but I still found it very charming.

However...

That is IMO what a true and pure strategy game should be like.
A general on the battlefield cannot place every single soldier or guide every single soldier's actions. At best, you can give commands and hope that they get executed.
Once the armies meet, things are more or less out of your hand. Real battles were mostly fought before an enemy meets another, possibly still are.

If SF3 is more in that direction than say, Warcraft 3 was, that's a step in the right direction. More indirect commands instead of direct control - a bit like Kohan IIRC.
At least to me.

Of course, I'm always for options. What would be best if both an autocast of every ability as well as a manual cast was possible.
How is this handled in Spellforce 3?

 

A lot of RTSes that were older controlled better than SF1. Not to mention that it's not that old, it came out in 2005, 3 years after even Warcraft 3, let alone games like Starcraft or Age of Empires 1 and 2, Empire Earth, etc. The game you seem to be describing is more along the lines of Grand Strategy or 4X games, where tactics don't matter at all, it's all about strategy. I have no idea how this is handled in SF3, I only played the demo and there were no units with special abilities in it.

 

Sure, but how many of those did what SF1 did, basically being multiple games or genres in one? None.
That doesn't make it better, but I can easily see how a not too experienced team back then wouldn't have been able to pull off both aspects as well as we would've liked

No, the game I am describing is an RTS that places more importance on the strategic decisions than on APM / microing.
As I said, Kohan ( this video shows it fairly well ) is probably the best example for this. You are still fairly busy, but not with annoying shit that should be automatic like ability targeting.
It's quite obscure and never really had a big campaign behind it, so I'm not surprised it isn't as well known.

Another one would be Warlords Battlecry (WBC) where there are a shitload of unit stances (also telling if abilities are to be used automatically) and you could set them in the production facility instead of having to it via unit selection. E.g. you could set a facility to produce "rampant" units, which would lead to every unit coming out of the facility starting to roam the map randomly, attacking whatever enemy it sees. The downside of this is that if unit AI is bad, this doesn't work too well - and it is fairly bad in WBC.

Or another one, SunAge - at least before the developer caved in to a vocal minority of ADHS kiddos, there was a beautiful indirect targeting control where you could set preferred targets for groups of units. Those units would then shoot as they wanted, but if the preferred target was in sight & range, they'd focus on that. Way less need for micro, same result.

Or the very recent Tooth & Tail where you have no control except for placing buildings and telling your army where to go. You ARE the cursor, in a way.

However, all of those games managed to screw up their concept in other ways, so that the whole experience never was as good as it could've been. Bugs, bad AI, weird design decisions, etc. The usual.
I'm definitely not describing a Grand Strategy or 4X here, but what I describe hasn't really been done yet. At least not well.
BUT, maybe, Spellforce 3 is a step in that direction, don't know (yet).

 

Is it good, guys?