Spellforce update

started a round of this again...was suddenly feeling curious about whether playing the game from the beginning without making bases and armies was a winning strategy...

Yes.

In fact, on several of the maps ("islands"), you can run the table without ever activating one of the elf/human/dwarf monuments. You probably always want to do your heroes, but they don't attract attention, unlike the other monuments.

In fact, there was one map where I had a really hard time because I started building an army immediately, last time, that turned out to be pretty simple if I ran it by myself. You have to destroy five commanders, which opens the gate into the big enemy base; there's already an army in there, which you cannot take on, and there's no need to try. That army goes hunting around for you, but the cool thing is that as soon as that army leaves the base, you can stroll in behind it, and destroy the entire place. Solo.

The other thing I decided to do this time is play it from first-person view the whole time. Well, almost the whole time. Turns out that's not effective for certain things, like placing your base buildings, or click-n-drag-select an army team; yeah, you do have to have them sometimes, but generally you can do all the hard work yourself, making it a lot simpler to build an army without being continuously attacked along the way.