I played the base game and I have a conflicting relationship with this game, really liked the story, really liked some quests and some characters, the game has a gritty fantasy almost dark fantasy take similar to the Witcher that I like and the art direction is just gorgeous. Really nice ideas about magic and people relationship with it as you basically plays as the son of a mage supremacist genocidal dude and there are all sorts of complexity involved in there, it isnt the good guys vs the bad guys.
The gameplay however... this seems like a storyfag game. I wouldnt call it bad but every time there was a long RTS mission, I wasnt exactly pumped for it and it was becoming a chore that I had to force myself to deal than something fun. The main issue is that the abilities and the way you control your characters was designed with a RTS in mind but when you were doing RPG dungeon exploration for example, the lack of the RTS elements really shown as you have a limited number of abilities to use and you kinda go: group of enemies -> spam same 3 abilities -> enemies dead -> repeat and I dont think that was enough to make the RPG gameplay interesting on the long run.
The RTS missions, it was fun, using your heroes to demolish entire enemy armies and etc but my main issue was that this sector system leads to a slow as fuck pacing and the game is pretty simple in terms of RTS mechanics with some basic paper scissors thing with shallow base building, it is basically spamming the same buildings but on different sectors over and over, and oh Lord, some maps way too many sectors and as the Ai cheats heavily, the tactical value of stuff like harassing is really diminished because the Ai can almost instantly rebuild any base it loses so any tactic that it isnt rushing as fast as possible going for the kill or turtling with towers until big army is built is useless. So, it is slow and kinda of simple what really made me bored.
Basically, over time, I thought the slow pacing was making me bored on most of those missions longer missions and over time, if I had a good enough starting army, I was just agressive, and if it was possible, I moved my army right to the entrance of the enemy base and intercepted the infinite Ai armies in there instead of bother chasing them all over the map and moved to the kill as soon as possible to make the RTS sections as short as possible, the most annoying missions were exactly the ones I couldnt do that and boy, they took a long time. It was a fun game and there is nice stuff in it but the gameplay formula... eh... are the expansions better?