SpellForce 3 + Soul Harvest & Fallen God standalone expansions

Spellforce 1 is pretty garbage tbh. The RTS portion sucks so bad you are forced to play it like an RPG, and it's not a very good RPG. I really don't know what sustains the series, or are the later games really that much better?

 

Read my retrospective.

 

I'd recommend you use cheat engine to speed the game up, the earlier entries, especially the 1st one, can be really slow with the movements.

 

The movements are fine as long as you aren't backtracking, the maps are mostly designed with forward motion in mind (but they aren't corridor-y), it's the RTS production times that are slow.

 

In SF1, literally on the first map it takes >2min to traverse the city from end to end. Trying to check out what the sick hermit does (nothing) took 5, it's atrociously slow.

 

I pretty much played the RTS sections of all three games the same way:
Build base defenses while my heroes godzilla stomp across the map.
So the RTS only existed to build defensive units, basically.

 

Yeah, there are places where you backtrack or take forever to traverse, but it's usually not that bad because you are always moving forward. The game as a whole is painfully slow, it took me 2 hours of non-commitment to finish that map with the 4 flames I won't ever stop complaining about because base building and troop production are tortuously slow. Not only is it slow, but it's also uneventful, especially on this map because you get attacked by 1-2 shadows every 5 minutes and then they stop altogether. It does feel like a gigantic waste of time if you sit in front of the screen instead of doing something else in the meantime and casually come around to issue new orders. It's a mess, but it's a charming mess that you'll want to eventually finish in a 3-5 year span (I started my playthrough in the beginning of 2017). I'd say the worst offender is how you produce units from a monument, the troll elite units for example take like 2+ minutes to train, so getting a 50-man strong army takes more than an hour of just waiting around. I know you can speed up production by building more than 1 of the appropriate buildings but I never got how that works exactly and when I try it I can't really feel all that much of a difference.

 

I just began playing Spellforce 3.
the UI in this game is beautiful

 

Next time you say it should be turnbased instead?

 

The whole game is beautiful.

 

Did they rework the base game yet? Both games are on sale on Steam right now. I'm not sure is it worth getting the bundle or just Soul Harvest.

 

Not yet:

 

Were there any major changes in Soul Harvest ? I have played and enjoyed both but i can't remember any large
improvements of Soul Harvest in comparison to the main game. I actually disliked that they made the groups of
units smaller in number but i am not sure if that was only a skirmish thing or also in the campaign.

 

The second standalone expansion:

 

Stop, I don't even have the base game yet.
There has to be a niche for Spellforce games that has stayed strong ever since the first one considering they kept up with the expansions from way back when.

 

All original races will be in when this releases. Which would be kinda cool if the trolls weren't VERY lackluster in Spellforce 1. I'm still going through Spellforce 2, so this might release before I get to 3 at all, lol. The price of this should be appropriate too, 1 race and 15 hours of an RPG (which wastes time with base building on top of that) is a piece of DLC, not an expansion.

 

Wow, has it really been almost 3 years since I played this game? I started replaying it just now and it's still just as fun as before. I haven't gotten to the standalone expansion, Soul Harvest, yet and I see there's another one coming soon? I'm definitely picking them up once the Steam sales hit.

 

Gor is a bro. Refined orc.

Uram is a edgy. He reminds me of the average codex poster. But I like him.

Overall this is some of the best writing I've seen in an RPG in a long time.

 

I'm still wondering how and if they're going to get into how the Circle starts to turn against each other and start the Rune Wars.

But overall the writings been pretty great

 

Did they ever update the base campaign with the expansion features?

 

Nope. Still being worked on.

 

I do hope to see the old rpg/skill system making a return,it is better than the new one. Tho the new rts mechanics are better.

 

Just realized I think Spellforce 3 is the only new game out there where each of it's expansions actually progress the timeline forward from it's base game instead of being prequel or side story.

At least from the ones that I've played.

 

Eh, what was good about it was the potential for specialization and the mindbogling amount of spells you have (that you never use due to the nature of the game) which could be found while exploring. The downsides were everything else - lackluster mages, outright useless categories (curses, nature), critical balance issues among the useful ones, hybrids not actually all that viable. If those were fixed, I'd definitely prefer it over Spellforce 3's basically linear trees.

Speaking of Spellforce 3, is it just me or is this game crazy pretty, especially the maps? These are the only 3D maps in an isometric game that 1) I actually like and 2) leave me awestruck. They look almost 2Dish but 3D, I don't know how to explain it. Massive props to the environmental designers and whoever else worked on the maps.