SpellForce 3 Reforced + Soul Harvest & Fallen God standalone expansions

[FreeKaner]

Love that there is no documentation anywhere what difficulty levels do. Is it just % damage modifiers (I.E the worst "difficulty" ever)?

 

[Lacrymas]

It's definitely not only % damage modifiers. The AI creates bigger armies and you have lower resistances (the enemies have them higher too?). The most bullshit thing I've noticed is how catapults can flatten your heroes in the matter of microseconds, so you always have to prioritize catapults. If the AI focus fires your heroes with archers, that is also a very fast way to die and you can't really do much about that.

 

[FreeKaner]

I feel like this game is what I have been looking for a while if not for this difficulty level problems. It feels like my units are paper while enemy units are tanky as hell. I don't mind more units & resource cheats for AI but tinkering with stats like this is just worse way to do difficulty.

 

[Parabalus]

Enemy ability casts times are lower on higher difficulties, the reduction is rather extreme. You go from having several seconds to just one or two to interrupt it.

You also have less time to revive your heroes, less revive charges and they refill much slower.

The most bullshit thing I've noticed is how catapults can flatten your heroes in the matter of microseconds, so you always have to prioritize catapults.

This was apparently a bug and was fixed, heroes were set to negative siege resistance.

 

[Lacrymas]

It feels like my units are paper while enemy units are tanky as hell.

I thought so too before I started liberally using units that require iron to train. "Tier 1" units are terrible and, while not impossible to beat the early levels with them alone, it's better to just rush for iron units. They are way tankier, do more damage, and resurrecting them with white magic is great.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

At least you can switch the difficulty at any time on the fly and compare directly what's going on. The easiest changes to recognize are the resistance and damage changes. But I also don't know if there are any deeper changes, like ai behavior or encounter setups.

 

[Infinitron]

From last week:

Choose your own adventure!

In SpellForce III Reforced, the Journey Mode is coming to Eo. Experience a new way to play the RTS & RPG hybrid with these untold tales of SpellForce. Create your own hero and play with up to three friends in coop.

SpellForce III Reforced is out now on PC and coming to consoles on June 7, 2022.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

At the very least from post game support this game has we can be sure that it is successful enough. A good thing considering that in general you can consider the game to be good

 

[Cyberarmy]

Full campaign co -op? Damn I wish I had that kind of time anymore.

 

[Alienman]

What is journey mode? Didn't the game get a mode like that already?

 

[Lacrymas]

Journey mode in Spellforce 1 was a non-narrative campaign basically. You go from map to map with the same hero and explore.

 

[vazha]

so you ditch the RTS part but get to play the campaign regardless?

 

[Lacrymas]

so you ditch the RTS part but get to play the campaign regardless?

No, you still engage with the RTS mechanics. It's like a series of skirmish maps with the same hero who gets to level up and get better gear. It's a different campaign altogether.

 

[Infinitron]

In SpellForce III, you are met with the challenges of both, an RPG and an RTS game at the same time. You will have to master both genres to succeed, taking control of a large army as well as 4 unique heroes simultaneously.

Choose your challenges wisely and emerge victorious. Eo is counting on you.

SpellForce III Reforced is coming to consoles on June 7, 2022.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

so you ditch the RTS part but get to play the campaign regardless?

No, you still engage with the RTS mechanics. It's like a series of skirmish maps with the same hero who gets to level up and get better gear. It's a different campaign altogether.

Kind of like Warlord's Battlecry then. Cool.

 

[pickmeister]

Playing it for the first time now (the Reforced one, didn't play the original). Playing on normal difficulty. I usually like to play RTS games on higher difficulties but I read that in Spellforce 3, the difficulty changes just numbers - opponents having higher resistances. No AI changes, just plain cheating. Can't be bothered with that. Allied the humans and now I'm in the middle of befriending orcs.

The game is fine overall but there are several pet peeves I have with the game. It's mostly autism but then again, this is Codex.

Graphically it looks great but as someone else mentioned, there tends to be so much on the screen (trees, bushes, barrels, fences, little rivers, road etc.) at the same time, it gets cluttered easily. It looks great on screenshots but playing it, it's easy to miss loot and paths behind all the stuff. Disabling depth of field in graphics settings helps a bit with that.

I like the RTS part - capturing points on the map for the resources and territory and slowly snowballing into a huge army. I'd appreciate a higher population limit but then it would just be about deathballing. This way at least I have to employ maneuver warfare so it keeps me on my toes.
It seems to me that AI sees the entire map because it happened to me numerous times that once I moved my units from one camp to another, it immediately attacked the camp I just left.
My first bigger problem is with the controls. The RTS controls by itself - no problem. The RPG controls is where it starts to go to shit. I'll use Warcraft 3 for comparison, where you had a maximum of 3 heroes (or 4 in bonus Rexxar campaign), each hero with a maximum of 4 abilities, bound to a specific hotkey. Easy to remember after a bit of time. In Spellforce, you have 4 heroes, each having from 1 up to fuckton of abilities (4 being pretty much a minimum) and you assign them to F1 - F12 hotbar (which is switchable with Tilde key, so you have two of those). So you have 24 abilities spread over F1 - F12 keys. So your choice is to either go nuts from constant dancing around your keyboard, relearning hotkeys due to switching heroes and their abilities as you learn new ones, or use just a fraction of them which then completely defeats the purpose of having such a huge number of them in the first place. The game could probably do with less active and more passive abilities.
Putting both RTS and RPG controls together starts to feel like trying to scratch your left ear and right nut with the same hand at the same time. Macroing base to produce units, workers to build, buildings to upgrade, microing damaged units from battle to not die and using their special abilities (like medics), and microing your heroes' abilities at the same time becomes quite a mess. I managed to get into Diamond league once in SC2 so I'd like to think it's not that I'm completely retarded when it comes to RTS games but in SF3 it quickly becomes unnecessarily convoluted.

Writing is mostly good but it has its downs. There are great moments. There are meh moments. There are "Hey, that's exactly like in that other franchise!" moments. And then there are cringy sob story moments. I understand that the world is cruel and sucks to live in it. The Witcher 3 had a very similar atmosphere in that regard but it also didn't feel like it wants me to care about every NPC's little sob story. In Witcher, people mostly understood that the world around them is cruel and bad things, sadly, do happen. In SF3, it's amplified by over the top voice acting. For example, a guy with damaged legs (didn't say why) asks me to find his lost daughter. I later report to him that I found her dead and he hysterically yells at me to fuck off, that I'm lying and once his legs heal, he'll go look for her himself, likely getting himself killed as well. And that's it. Can't do anything about it. The game purposefully wants me to feel bad for the guy. He's worried for his daughter so in his head, he probably understands that she might not be well. Therefore his complete denial is strange but okay. However, there's no other choice to, I don't know, let's say carry him to her body, get him on a cart and drive him there or at least something silly like chop her head off and bring it to him as evidence. Nothing. Just depressionporn. I detest this way of writing.

The writing is also full of these little tropes that people incapable of good writing like to use to stretch it out. So if a character mentions a previously unknown fact, instead of responding "What?" or "<Unknown fact>?" the response is "Hold on a minute .. did I just hear you say that <unknown fact>?" and it just drags on and on. I don't understand why writers do this. It sounds unnatural, completely breaks the flow of the dialogue, and it sounds downright retarded.
And with that, there's voice acting which, just like the writing, has huge up and down swings. I used to work with audio equipment and do some mixing + mastering in the past so bad audio is difficult for me to ignore. In general, male characters sound pretty good. Except for Bertrand who I can tell is a faggot in real life. If I can tell the actor is a faggot when he's acting, he's a pretty fucking bad actor in my book. But overall, they sound really great. Especially the main male character I find excellent. Even borderline material Isgrimm, while typical American trying to sound Scottish, sounds pretty alright.
But the women, oh my god! The director is either a gigantic pussy or a simp. Pretty much all of them have an audible echo from an untreated room and they talk way too close to the microphone, making it sound completely unnatural, deep, and boomy (proximity effect, might be fine in radio but sounds jarring as fuck in acting), and in addition, they sound like hysterical independent WAAAHmen, constantly bitching and having black and white opinions on anything you encounter or do. Especially Yria, couldn't wait for the moment I can finally ditch that cunt. I can forgive overacted emotions as that's a matter of taste (and probably what you get when you hire actors from California) but the low recording quality is unexplainable. Would be better to completely cut these lines out and leave them silent.

Well, those are my gripes for the moment. I'll leave the game rest for a bit and enjoy some Anno 1800 autism before I get back to it.
Hopefully, it gets better later in the game or in the expansions.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Nothing. Just depressionporn. I detest this way of writing.

Sounds utterly German, to be honest.

 

[pickmeister]

Sounds utterly German, to be honest.

To me, it sounds more like "Let's not interrupt players from their post-modern self-hating white syndrome."

 

[Daidre]

Hopefully, it gets better later in the game or in the expansions.

SF 3 controls are pretty weird but there are two things that could help:

1) There is radial menu that is called up by holding ALT or CTRL iirc. It helps to target spells and abilities a lot and it slows down the game while doing it, or even pauses it depending on options. Menu is context-dependent so it has only healing spells + buffs from active panel when you mouseover friendlies and everything nasty when you call it over the enemies. Imho, players are supposed to use the wheel instead of hotkeys or panels, because high difficulties rise importance of interrupts to "do or die" level and pulling it off with consistently within reduced time-window without the pause-wheel would probably require being some real RTS-champion.
Well, I also bound skill-panel-switch to side button on my mouse so I have both sets of skills easily available on the wheel with minimal effort.

2) There are small 1-9 buttons next to the map that could be used to create shortcuts to unit groups and, most importantly, buildings. Binding barracks for unit production to 1-5 and circling through them to upkeep non-stop production made a huge difference for me in late RTS portions of the game.

PS It is not like Spellforce's AI is cheating... it never even pretended playing the same game, right from the first game in the series(

 

[Lacrymas]

RE: Voices - it's a Spellforce tradition to have shit English VA. The German one is better in all Spellforces.

 

[Aries]

Also, speaking about being blind, at some point in orc section of Nexus there was built scaffolding to previously unrechable chest and there was Reinforced Dwarven Pads.

I am joining you in the club of the blind. Thanks a lot, I scoured all the maps, but did not think to look in the home base

The game REALLY does not want one to find the artifacts

 

[Infinitron]

Eo is yours to discover. SpellForce III Reforced is OUT NOW!

Experience the perfect blend between RTS & RPG for the first time on consoles. Join the battlefield now!

 

[Lacrymas]

Оut on consoles*

 

[Lacrymas]

Hot take (?) - Undergast is the best healer and outclasses Yria hard. He has 2 healing spells and a better buff.

 

[vazha]

Just finished the original campaign Circle Mage difficulty (on rts parts switched to hard here and there). Have to say I am disappointed with the Reforced update. Instead of adding more ways to circumvent the atrocious rts part, they ensured that it felt even more imposed on you. Not too impressed with the reworked skill trees either. Archery is still lackluster and cannot compete with melee, esp early on when you dont have tanks.

Said it before and will say again: this game would be a masterpiece if turned into a Myth-like. And it wouldnt even be that hard methinks. If only all maps were like Everlight :/

P.s. agree on undergast, he is a superb healer & buffer and his ability tree is amazing. Pair him with gor and you have a very impressive array of healing / offensive / summoner options. Gors own tree is a trap option though, albeit you have no way of knowing that until later i the game.
My endgame party was Tahar the Crushmaster, Yanna the crit /stasis archer, Undergast and Gor. Never needed a tank because of a veritable army of summons (9 elite undead + devourer + tribe eater)

P.s. question: out of the two addons, which one is lighter on the RTS part?