What Spellforce games are worth playing?

I'm confused. There are so many games that I can't figure out where to start and what's good or bad.

What are your thoughts?

Many thanks in advance.

Spellforce is a hybrid. I've played the first and second games a bit (but never beaten either). It's a combo of RPG, RTS, City-management.

Personally i'd start at the beginning, the feel is similar to Warcraft, when you run a single small party it's more like Neverwinter Nights, at points your main character will just be a figurehead and you'll make tons of lesser soldiers to fight for you.

Beyond that, don't know. I'm sure 2 and 3 are far more refined than the original, depends on the graphics and if you care for the story or not at that point. (And price)

I only barely started a campaign in Spellforce 1 and ... same thing in Spellforce 3, although I got a bit farther in that one before I wandered away.

If story and voice acting are important to you, you may want to skip 1. I'm sure the gameplay is neat, but there were some cringy moments. Spellforce 3's story won't set the world on fire from what I've seen but it's competent and the VA is good, they even have Doug Cockle (Geralt from the Witcher series) in it. Also, it's damn pretty. Nice parallax effects.

Spellforce 1 and its two expansions are solid and definitely worth playing, although the graphics are pretty dated (Spellforce: Order of Dawn is the base game, Breath of Winter is the first expansion, and Shadow of the Phoenix is the second expansion). Some gameplay elements are also a little janky, and AI deficiencies easily exploited. Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars and its first expansion, Dragon Wars, are also worth playing; formula is pretty much the same as the first game, with updated graphics and some small gameplay upgrades. Storytelling and writing took a bit of a hit, though, and can be a bit cringe at times (not that story or writing were a particular selling point on the first game, mind you). The second two expansions for Spellforce 2, Faith in Destiny and Demons of the Past, are hot garbage and should be avoided. Spellforce 3 is still the same general formula as the first two games, but once again with greatly updated graphics and gameplay updates. Spellforce 3 and its two expansions (Soul Harvest and Fallen God) are all solid and worth a play. While within each game + expansions series its recommended to play the base game and expansions in order, you can jump in at either Spellforce 1, 2, or 3 and not really miss anything around gameplay tricks, story, or lore, so just pick whichever of the three looks most appealing to you.

And i remember taking something like 3 hours to beat one level due to a chokepoint and having to build more and more towers and inch my way forwards, sometimes just making tons of free peons to do attack waves... Or maybe there was a mechanic i was missing that i was suppose to do and was doing it the hard way.

Though i guess the real annoying bit is later when you leave, all your buildings and created minions for working just go away, along with all the resources so you can't rebuild anything later to protect you.

Spellforce series may be more fun with a group of friends where you all play heroes and you can all do the RTS management at the same time; The multiplayer component. is listed, but I've never had anyone else to play with it so i can't say if it would make a difference or how it changes it.

Yeah, this was hands down the worst part of Spellforce 1. Any RTS portion pretty much needed to be completed in a single sitting, since as you said, once you saved, quit, and came back *poof* all your units were gone. The other big element of most of the RTS maps that was really silly was that you usually didn't face an opponent with a base and buildings similar to your own, but rather just a bunch of creature spawner structures scattered around the map. However, these didn't actually activate on any of the RTS maps until you built your main base structure. In the later parts of the game this could be horribly cheesed by just taking your group of heroes and clearing the map without ever touching any of the RTS elements. From what I recall, though, they fixed both of these things in the two expansions, with the RTS portions playing much better as a result.

Ack! Even worse! I meant when you go to another map and have to come back to find something you missed, just saving/loading does it too? Dern... Plus not only that resources (trees for example) don't respawn (or if they do they are very slow) so you can't even rebuild after that point. You could literally screw yourself over and have to start over in that case.

Ah, so it seems Spellforce Platinum Edition, Spellforce 2 Anniversary Edition, and then Spellforce 3 and it's two expansions. Yeah, think that's probably best. I'm tempted to jump into 3, but am fighting it! Yeah, 3 definitely looks beautiful!

Well if you play the newest stuff first, there's bound to be features you won't find on the older ones. And yes it's probably prettier.

But i doubt the story would make less sense if you played it out of order, as i'm sure a general recap or important bits will be explained to make it well enough to play. Though it may have names/references to the older games you won't get.

In terms of lore and story, Spellforce 3 actually takes place before Spellforce 1 and 2. It also takes a pretty lite touch where the events it covers intersect with some of the history mentioned in the first two Spellforce games, so it won't act as a spoiler for the lore. Those who played the first two Spellforce games will get to recognize some people, places, and events mentioned in the first two games, but otherwise you're actually perfectly safe starting with Spellforce 3 and not having to worry about either catching up on lore or running into spoilers.

The only thing I hated about SF3 was the vile swearing - damn, f**k, s**t and use of words like heck, crap in dialogs.

I do not why, but every similar game with that hybrid concept ends up abandoned in my HD. They are always walking between two worlds gameplay and concept wise and I never really get it, it is hard to explain.

It is and was a very popular mixture, indeed, so It must be me. You can't enjoy all you want.

It's usually hard to get everything right when there's a lot of pieces; Which is why a lot of games usually focus on one really good mechanic/concept.

Nevermind, post retracted.