Spellforce: Conquest of Eo is like Age of Wonders and Thea made a baby

I just played about half an hour – had a great time by the way – and there are in-game tutorials as well.

And one of my preferred types of in-game tutorial too! As soon as a new feature becomes available or you click on something that exposes new something it’ll pop-up a window that gives you a primer on that feature.

Yeah the game is awash with those kind of tutorials and tooltips, which I like very much.

OK cool. It looked like the one on the main menu was more of a reference since it’s just an alphabetical listing. I wish I could play now but I have to go get my son for a dentist appointment and then do some errands. Hopefully, by early afternoon I can play.

I’m shocked this is only at 50%/mixed reviews - though I’m also confused/frustrated that every written review is a recommendation, and no one (seemingly) that didn’t like it bothered to write why, especially after playing it for what can’t have been more than an hour. WTF.

Weird. Maybe people are just upset about the lack of a random map/campaign or something? Initial impressions certainly are very good. My cat using my arm as a pillow and limiting my ability to type(and work) certainly gave me a good excuse to load up the game and try it out. Problem was I’ve had a really hard time stopping now.

I went with the second starting location since I’ve seen the first one on streams a few times. Nice mix of challenges so far, and sending my parties out on the map to explore/harvest is great fun. Battles are snappy and seem varied enough, which is exactly what I want in this type of game.

I do have a couple small UI complaints. Lots of screens aren’t set up for widescreen leaving the sides of the screen black. Even just throwing a background onto it would help here. I also wish I could rename or add a tag to my units to help me remember which is which at a glance. I’ve built one of my starting melee goblins as a speedy flanker and one as more of a standard melee brawler. Problem is I have a hard time keeping track of which one is which and am not familiar enough with the icons yet to recognize them at a glance. Being able to name them or give them a “class” title or something would help immensely there. I’m sure unit variety later on helps somewhat with that but juggling more stacks might offset that again and make it confusing. Like I said, minor things.

I tried to look at that it and all of the negative reviews, except 1 guy dinging it for not having sandbox mode, are in Chinese (I think). Need to look at them in the browser and see what it says. It looked like some were mentioning system specs, so maybe performance or crashing.

Edit: Also there are only 30 reviews total right now. Most of them don’t make any sense to me using the translate from vivaldi :)

The retro game is too early for me to design and not play

The first day of Ju Lei can’t play at all. Loading the map is to die or retreat

If you can’t enter the game, you will report the mistake when you start the battle

1070 did not flash, there was a tutorial UI English is okay, Chinese is very different from full of ugliness。The battle screen is rough。Modeling is so good that I can’t play it anymore. What’s wrong this year? It feels like a game more than 20 years ago

It pops up directly after half a minute of loading, and it’s like this after several trials. Ha ha, put it up without testing?

Identification result: cheap and not good。
Test environment: 3080ti + 5900X
————————————————
After a simple experience, the following problems were found:

  1. The text tutorial is relatively simple. There is no tutorial battle, and it is all based on the experience of playing strategic games。
  2. UI is ugly; when the picture is full, the game picture is still very rough, such as the trees and pumpkins on the big map. After the indentation is narrowed, it can be clearly seen that the edge is straight。The recommended configuration for such a ridiculous picture level turned out to be 2080.
  3. The combat system is relatively simple, and there are some inhumane places. For example, after issuing an attack order to the unit, it will automatically consume all action points to attack, which means that replenishing the blood-resided units often causes waste of action points; it seems that there is no Common highlands are added。
    ——————————————————
    Individuals like SpellForce 3 very much, but the production level of this THQ is disappointing。I have another game of THQ in my wish list Knights of Honor II – Sovereign, and I will probably not buy it after reading the level of this work。
    As for the problem of poor optimization that others have said, I have not encountered it, and the whole process is very smooth, which may not be enough to optimize the low configuration。

So, sounds like some were having some long load times, another was stuck at loading, and then a couple not liking the UI and a complaint of a simplistic combat system.

Skimming the discussion, I think I know what the deal with the reviews are (many of them, at least) - there are a LOT of folks super angry that this isn’t an RTS like the other games have been. I suspect this is a spin-off (I don’t even think the Fantasy General devs, who made this, are the ones that make Spellforce). For all I know there is a proper Spellforce 4 coming that’s the RTS game all these folks are clamboring for. But anyway, I think think that’s the deal there.

Umm? Literally the first turn of the game provides you the option to fight a tutorial battle. I don’t think the UI is ugly at all either, it all looks just fine to me outside of my mentioned issue with widescreen.

Wonder if there is just something wrong with the Chinese release of this?

Some have been loudly screaming about this on the forums for awhile so I suspect you’re right. It’s unbelievable how petulant and stupid some people can be. It’s pretty common for an IP to have games of many differing types released. Look at Warhammer, for example. I hate to see the reviews trashed by such idiots. I’m 3 hours in and loving it a lot so far.

I’ll never understand the idiocy of people that don’t bother to read the game description before buying. It clearly states in the description that it’s a fucking turn-based game!

Wait a minute, it’s a game? I thought it was a cartoon movie about wizards and warriors! What a ripoff.

But seriously, I see a lot of stupid reviews in the scale-model building world that the kit is not a toy car or tank or whatever that doesn’t need building. Or what a ripoff that no paint or glue is included. People just don’t do enough research before buying.

It looks like a lot of bunk reviews have been removed, and now it’s sitting at Mostly Positive.

and the negative reviews are still dumb:

Instead of evolving the RTS genre, this game was turned into the most generic of 4X games by the makers of some of the more generic 4X games.

Spellforce is not a turn based game, it is not a 4X game. And this game isn’t even a good 4X game, it’s so reductive.

Well, this isn’t actually even a 4X, so I guess by definition it’s not a good 4X game. It’s not a good RTS or truck driving simulator game either.

Here, I’ll write some other bad reviews based on taking a universe and making a game in a different genre from the originator: Warcraft is not a MMO! Halo is not an RTS! Gears of War is not a tactics game! Mario is not a tactics game! Mario is not an RPG! Mario is not a puzzle doctor game! Mario is not a tennis game! Mario is not a racing game! Mario is not a soccer game! Mario is not a party game! Warlords is not an RTS! Disciples and Kings Bounty are not RPGs(okay, this one actually hurts me)!

Playing it and so far, it looks and feels like a smoothie prepared from the ingredients of Fallen Enchantress, Warlock, Fantasy Wars and Thea 2.

A tasty smoothie.

It also has something I dearly wish more and more games would have. Both the text and UI can be enlarged, using a sliding scale. I play on a 55 inch TV, sitting a couple meters distant, and this is terrific most of the time, but some games have tiny and unscaleable text and UI. This one is excellent.

is there a quest log somewhere?
and is there a way to see the calculations behind the damage numbers?
finally, how do I activate the “shaper secret “quest? the location says “ you have an adventure here. Unlocked by your towers domain. (And then in red) Control of this location is conflicted! But it appears to be in my domain and I don’t see an adjoining domain to cause the conflict so I’m puzzled.

No quest log - all quests are labeled on the map though.

The location probably needs to be explored/cleared out.

too bad about the lack of a quest log, it is easy for me to loose track.
that location wouldnt let me in. i decided to restart.
after getting a second apprentice, what are good intermediate golas?

So, the question I have is, do I need to buy this game today for 20.00, or can I wait until it goes on sale?

Does it need more time to get some patches?

Is this a game that needs to be played in the next few weeks?

I’ve played a good chunk of the day today (oops) and haven’t run into many issues. Small UI annoyances but nothing that seems broken. I’m happy I bought it today, if that helps.