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

I figured out the trigger for the orc circle mage turning hostile. After you set your tower down next to the big allfire node that’s the main quest and then defeat the mobs defending it, the orc mage shows up immediately with a big stack of tier 2 and 3 in your territory. Probably best to wait to grab that main node until after you get stronk.

Edit: Regarding glyphs, I’ve been using most of my best glyphs to upgrade my rooms. I just upgraded the barracks room to include a ballista to defend my tower. It also provides +3 tower vision. The other big one was an upgrade to the crystalline garden room to give all my units +2 focus, which is huge.

Yeah, that is pretty much what happened to me. Took the big node, then orc boy was showed up. I guess Ill avoid that in this new game for a good while.

That did not happen for me after taking my first of the bigger Allfire nodes. Is this another thing of Explorer difficulty vs Normal?

In many ways it’s a random map - in his case, he just got unlucky and had a roaming band of enemies nearby. My first game the first big Allfire node was smack dab in the middle of Red territory to the south of me. I ended up starting a new game because I could not deal with that and felt like it spawning there was probaly a bug/unintended. My next game it spawned still near her wizard tower, and I’m constantly having to run back to re-secure it.

The game has some design flaws - I still don’t like how much more powerful all the circle mages are, though I get it’s the story being told I would have preferred a more 4X style game with equal starting positions (like maybe we are all our masters apprentice fighting to recover the lost knowledge or something) but this is a fun/huge map to explore and I’m enjoying the struggle so far.

I wish you could find apprentice that aligned with your faction. Its odd that a alchemist apprentice will work with a necromancer master. Also their abilities do not work well with undead since they are all healing which doesn’t help undead. I think they should fix that. Also fix the facing change when you heal units.

Speaking of Dastactic:

Some tweaking of location spawning would do them some good. Your example seems especially like it needs fixing, but I get annoyed whenever the event/quest text describes the objective being at some kind of geographic location and then the actual location it spawns is nothing like that.

Are you talking about that first apprentice? Because it seems like they could at least give you a choice of two apprentices like they do elsewhere.

I am talking about the additional ones. The ones you need to find.
With either Alchemist or Artifactor then most any kind work, except for Necro.
However with a Necro, only Necro really work unless you want to lead a living army. Otherwise none of the support skills really work.

I’ve been playing my first game on balanced (middle difficulty) with the Artificer. I feel like I’m progressing pretty slowly. I finally was able to keep out of the red with my tier 2 army and I just now got my second apprentice.

Somewhere above someone complained about auto resolve not having heroic victories…I’ve had a ton of them. I was fighting out every battle for a while, but not I autoresolve when it predicts a heroic victory.

I haven’t gotten to the point of being able to move my castle yet. There are some tasks I need to resolve.

I’ve really been enjoying the game so far. While most of the unit skills and traits are things we’ve seen before in other games, to me the enemies seem to be well designed. I also like these smaller stacks, it keeps the battles moving. The fact that this doesn’t play like other 4Xs, really is a big plus. I think @KevinC would enjoy it if he could carve out some solo game playing time :-)

I have a feeling that I’ve been not progressing fast enough and someone is going to come along and stomp me.

tbh that is a big part of the appeal for me, a game that is very focussed on one thing.

I think ALOT of people got taken in by the talk of “this is like AoW3” and were expedting that.

Like how Planetfall was frequently described as XCom meets Civ, which is wildly inaccurate.

I strongly agree. I really liked AoW3, but not its massive multi-army combats.
I do wish there were an option for a smaller map and a quicker game with faster progression to the higher tier units. After 2 restarts I think I may finally have a winnable game on explorer difficulty, but it’ week 22 and the end seems far away.

With all the positive word of mouth in the thread, it’s been tempting! :)

Completely agree. In AoW3 and PF I did not like to fight more than 1v1 armies. I auto-resolved anything more than that. In fact I probably won’t get AoW4 because of it.

I agree with Coldsteel in that the more I play this, the more I like it. At 4 hours of play it’s getting its hooks in me. And I really like that it feels different than other 4Xs.

Bought it as soon as people confirmed it’s a fresh take on 4X games. God knows we need more of those!

According to Steam, I’m 29 hours into my first game now. I have become completely enamored with it.

The angry orc circle mage hasn’t been a problem for me so far. His stack just went and sat on my small node. I sent a hero stack over there and he immediately left the node and attacked them. I was able to kill his tier 2 troops with no losses and haven’t seen him since. As an aside, I’ve found that having the Holy Weapons enchantment on my archers to be a huge plus. They crush most enemies and absolutely slaughter undead.

There seems to be some very powerful synergies between different glyphs. For example, Corrupted Adamantium has a death recipe for Corrupted Glyph: Vampire - Grants: Defy Death (Revives at end of battle), Grants: No Regeneration. Doesn’t sound so great, right? But wait, Adamantium has an awesome recipe for the Lifegiver IV glyph - This unit and every ally in it’s stack gains: Heals daily to 100% Health.

So, put Lifegiver on just one of your stack and Vampire on all of them and now as long as a single unit survives a battle, all the dead ones revive after the battle and then heal up to full on the next turn. I love that the game has stuff like this.

I kept saying it’s not a 4X but it technically is as it does contain all 4 of the X’s. But it’s also going to mislead people who are thinking it’s going to be a 4X since you don’t ever control/build settlements and you aren’t playing the same game as the AI.

And I’m absolutely fine with that. I actually embrace that; I never liked the “settling with tons of cities” thing in most 4Xs. AI War has already shown how brilliant and refreshing asymmetrical games can be.

It just occurred to me that the semi-nomadic map presence/control with a single actual settlement and limited resources this game has is most closely related to what At the Gates did.

I haven’t trued Spellforce:CoE yet, but that was one of the things I liked in Sorcerer King, ans Warlock with the daemon endgame. Having an asymetric game felt much better than having AI get insane bonuses, like at the higher levels in Civilization.

Man, I upgraded a barracks to further reduce my gold upkeep costs from units, a few that also grant big XP bonus and reduce training times, and can now build the incredible looking Paladins, which have MoM-style regeneration (they don’t die permanently). I am casting a spell that will reduce gold upkeep for units an additional 25 (!) gold per turn (at the cost of 6 mana per turn) and I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m turning that corner that all strategy games have…?