more on Spellforce...

I finally gave up on this...it crashed one too many times...

I played through the original game, the first expansion, and into the 2nd expansion. Still too many crashes, and they pretty much always occur when you take a portal to a new/other island. You really have to do a save just prior to exiting the portal.

I had just finished playing an island that was particularly hard, in fact so hard I had to use the god mode cheat to complete it.

Why? because of two things: you have two companions on this one, but they can't be controlled. They follow you everywhere, run into camps of opponents as soon as they see them, which then draws attention to you sneaking around.

This map has four groups of opponents. Two of them you can eliminate by yourself, although your companions make that a lot harder. You want to do this because otherwise if you activate the Orc monument, the patrols start, and you waste resources on them.

SPELLFORCE LESSON: ALWAYS ELIMINATE ALL OPPOSING FORCES BY YOURSELF TO THE MAX EXTENT POSSIBLE.

Opponents are created via these "magic fountains", which are activated when you touch a monument. Usually. Sometimes they are activated anyway...usually quiescent, once you touch a monument, the patrols begin, with a single sentry at first, but then more, and stronger sentries. Avoid that problem by eliminating them support buildings yourself. You have fairly long-distance version in the ground-level almost-1st-person view, and they are easy to spot a long ways off. Generally you can sneak up and destroy the buildings that support the fountains, and then they go away.

On this map, you have to use orcs, and they aren't very strong (no idea what level, but probably not more than 15), whereas your opponents range from 22 to 36. I too am 36, so *I* don't have a problem with the opponents, as long as I don't get surrounded by too many, but the 3rd and 4th groups of opponents also have magic fountains, albeit no random patrols.Group #3, the demons, are level 34-36, so even an army of 80 orcs doesn't really have a chance against them--the orcs are primarily a distraction, while you go fetch something the demons were protecting. Same with group #4, the mummies; they are level 25, which means I could take on a bunch, they'd not have all that much health, but they are surprisingly well armored--at best I was only doing 40 pts of damage. An npc you are supposed to help warns you that you really want to burn them (ok, mummies=bandages=flammable, makes sense), but your orc fire mages are still pretty weak, and run out of mana quickly, and you encounter these mummies primarily in waves of ten, in narrow chasms.

All of which was annoying me further and further, and then I forgot to save before taking the exit portal, and it crashed, I lost hours of work on it, and said--enough is enough!

So it is possible I'll come back to this at some point, I doubt it. I have the Spellforce 2 demo, now I'm less likely to try it out...Unreal Tournament calls me instead--it runs fine, doesn't crash...