Look…up?
How does this compare to SpellForce 2? Despite JoWooD’s brilliant decision to release it in the same month as Oblivion and some Star Wars RTS it was my GOTY back then.
I did read your posts.
You said the rts part was…competent.
I was hoping you or someone else would explain why.
My problem with it in the beta was that the units seemed pointless, and the entire rts part of the game seemed like a design from the 90’s, super clunky and hard to manage.
I saw your review on Steam, and was looking hard at buying it finally, but I’m still leary of the game breaking bugs being reported. Some of the most recent reviews still mention them. Have you not run across any at all?
I was also a little surprised they didn’t throw up at least a 10% discount to participate in the holiday sale. I imagine it’s because they want to fix it completely before drawing too much attention to it. Maybe I’ll wait for the spring sale.
I might grab this after I beat spellforce 2.
No bugs on my part yet, but while it seems it hits people at random, they HAVE made a LOT of patches since day one.
No idea, sadly - I can’t remember a single thing about Spellforce 2.
I’m not an RTS guy - meaning, I don’t care that much for that part, but it works, so far. I do like that I don’t have to make them attack, like RTS units of old - my units attack others if the enemy is near, so not THAT old-school.
So, I have 6 hrs in now. Enough to have some sort of opinion.
The rpg part is light, but works ok.
The camera rotation keys suck.
The rts part has some good ideas, e.g. not controlling workers directly. That’s great.
Ditto sectors, also cool, gives you something directly to fight over.
Less good is the fighting part. Disposable, trash soldiers, fighting in a mob, no formations. It’s like they’ve purposely gone backwards here.
I’m no developer but would it have been too hard to lift the Kohan system? That had less micromanagement, less mad clicking, and more strategy, and naturally developing lines of battle.
it’s 2 inferior halves smooshed together to make an okay whole. I don’t think there’s any other game that does what this does right now, so congratulations on THQ taking the risk, and congrats on the polish. They’ve clearly taken alot of time and effort to create the environment, the characters etc.
Shame that once I finish with the campaign, I’m unlikely to ever play it again.
I haven’t looked at the skirmish part yet, but the consensus among friends is that the factions are literal copy paste jobs? I recall the first spellforce having different resources to use, and losing a fight with elves because I ran out of lenya. I also recall horrible lassoing of workers so there is that.
So, not 2 steps forward and 1 back and more 2 steps to the right, and move other stuff to the left?
Edit: well this made me laugh, so that’s a plus point in their favour.
Edit: Well I’m in probably my first real large fight, and it shows up the bullshit rts part of the game. There is no strategy to the units other than clump them and focus on one other unit at the same time. All your melee will group around a unit and all your ranged will form a crescent around them.
Formations are non existent.
It’s terrible, and really gets exposed when you have a large fight in multiple sectors, because you as a Human only have so much control, and while you’re busy fighting off the literally endless hordes of AI (which is total bullshit because they have fewer sectors than me, but somehow have more and better troops? ) your heroes just died.
Like, honestly, this can’t be an oversight, and must therefore be by design, and therefore, in my book, bad design.
Take a game from 1999 and it has more strategy and better unit control. Like, seriously. I said it earlier, but they could have, and should have, taken the system from Kohan. You had regiments there, and, the pace was much slower, so you could actually do stuff.
Here the pace is fast and there isn;t much to do. it’s just numbers.
strategy part is terrible.
The standalone addon is out now. 25$. You’ll get it for 15$ if you own the base game. That’s nice! The strategy part seems to be somewhat overhauled - for the better, they say. Basic units now have some abilities. Well, I just - to my own surprise - bought it. I liked the base game well enough and the German press (although always a bit biased because, you know, it’s made in Germany) liked this new Spellforce a lot. So no ‘Conan’s Billions’ but some Spellforce this weekend. Yep!
How is the skirmish? Also, how does skirmish work if you only have the standalone expansion and not the base game?
It seems like the standalone is the game’s new foundation. The old campaign seems to be integrated at one point. Skirmish’s there. ~12 maps etc.
I might try that out, thanks. The base game has been on my wishlist for a while, but it’s nearly always at $49.99 and whenever it was on sale I was distracted with another game. I might bite for $24.99.
I desperately wanted to like this but the real time strategy part of it felt tacked on, boring and repetitive and so very late 90s.
The heroes and their abilities weren’t bad, but the units and their interactions were just mehhh…
Anything new on that front?
Hmm this is 74% off for me over on the Humble Store, tempting…
Was the game improved since launch? I saw they put out a stand alone expansion called Soul Harvest.
I did not expect this.
I still haven’t picked up the base game or expansion, but someone must be enjoying it for them to keep making expansions.
I know @BrianRubin has played the fallen gods expansion, has anyone else? I’ve played through the Soul Harvest Expansion, and its a bit on the short side, which might be a good thing. I’m going to try out the skirmish mode, but I was curious about how the Trolls Play since I won’t have access to them for a while.
Humble store has the Spellforce 3 and Soul Harvest for 75% off, so $20 for both right now.
I bought Spellforce 3, Soul Harvest after recomendation in the RTS thread. I wanted to play coop with a friend. We spent 1h trying to join each other lobby. We fiddled with router forwarding port, firewall but we were finaly able to start a game. It feel laggy, you click to move and it takes a little bit of time for the game to register your action. Controls are fiddly but I could get use to it.
The game seems nice, lots of options for skill and loot, but in coop if your heroes dies,the game just breaks down. You see the defeat menu, with load/restart/quit, but load/restart don’t do anything, you hear a sound for the click, but nothing happen. We have to leave the game, start a new lobby and then load the last save game.
I’ll try a bit more solo to see if it’s better, but for the coop experience, it’s quite bad.
Anyone else tried it?
I think the original and SH games are gonna get a patch that brings them into parity with Forgotten Gods, so multiplayer might improve then.