Problems with Breath of Winter campaign

[Aotrs Commander]

So After a looong time, I decided to come back to Spellforce 1 (I'd picked it up for a couple of quid on GoG, actually, to save aresing about installing it from disk). Last time I played, I just did the main campaign and order of the Phoenix, so I thought I'd to the BoW campaign this time.

I am finding it inordinately hard (and tedious).

I started out trying to do paladin (Heavy Combat, Heavy Blade, Heavy Armour, Shield and some White Magic) and after dying repeatedly (especially when I got to Frostall, trying to clear the map before ti started). In the end, I found a respec mod, had to go look up (as, y'know, I recall that being touted as strong build and almost all the guides say "go fighter, it's easy!") what I was doing wrong - very little, actually. I shifted around a little bit and to focus more on White Magic (thorns/strength aura) instead of heavy armour/weapons (with 2 points in Light Combat and WOW the single target damage and heal is SO much better than the heavy ones, I'm amazed the walkthroughs didn't mention that). That actually enabled me to not be completely unable to fight more than one enemy and only just barely win against one. (I have found frack-all geat for heavy armour and shields at that point.)

I have been waiting for a point to actually do some farming (as the game has not yet seen fit to ever give me any fracking towers), but it seems that you just don't get them in the first third of the game (if ever). I was actually going to try on Frostfell, having carefully left one ogre camp. Lena had levelled to the other, because she went into follow-me mode when I left the map to go to the fortress place to trade the coins in (for gear that is now functionally useless to me having rebuilt, naturally...) and I discovered that if you reload the map for any reason, she doesn't stand there with the question mark on. So when I cleared the south camp, she levelled it. But it didn't work - the ogre didn't even shift from the spot until the orcs died and the imperial forces gave me no chance to do a bit of farming before the level 18 heavies swamped the Elves.

I have got through to Tirganach and basically hit a wall - the trolls you have to get past are impossible to kill (they took out the paltry numpties that are my current rune soldiers in SECONDS) and I was really struggling to fight ANYTHING on that map.

(It is only NOW that I am finding out that death costs you XP - if it said that anywhere, I don't recall. (Hell, I only just found out there IS an attack-move (and I specifically looked for it in the maunal.) Which is really bad, considering that I've been eating a few deaths on the basis that reloading resets the fog or war, which I took to be punishment enough to prefer the tiresome job of running back from the bind-stone. Wrongly, apparently.)

I'm currently 75% of the way to level 12, and desperately trying to do the side-quests in Frostfell and maybe Mirraw Thur to get a level or two or something so I can get somewhere to get some XP.

This whole campaign doesn't feel fun at all, it feels like it's specifically designed to be a "gotcha" where if you're not following a walkthrough EXACTLY, you get completely screwed into a death spiral. (And "haha, you liked base building, well, you're not having that this time!")

Help?

(It is just me of is this campaign, like, the most punatively designed out of all of the Spellforce campaigns? (Well, I can't speak to the SF2 later expansions nor that most recent SF3 ones, since I've not played them, but certainly out of the rest). I know it's been a while since I played, but I really don't remember Order of Dawn being so utterly frustrating.)


Edit: And on a whim, checked and found a mod that saves the fog of war on a reload. Well, that's ONE massive pain out of the way...!

[janthailand]

Origineel geplaatst door Aotrs Commander:

I have done. Though, as you say, once the map gets loaded for the first time it doea save at the state it was, unfortunately; so without redoing 25 hours, it won't add in the stuff to the early maps. I'll cope, I think, from this point.

i assume you havnt change gamedata.cff file, so the ranged feather weapon i refer to for healers
will have the name 'null' and just look like a half green field, but the functionality is the same,
you can buy it from one of the merchants in dark elf city right when you enter,
it causes the healers to stand back and fling feathers at the same distance that aura of healing reaches in a support role, rather then charging hand to hand combat

[Aotrs Commander]

Well, finally finished it after 63-odd hours.

A lot of which was sitting twiddling my thumbs waiting for stuff to build up, or painting while I was waiting. As someone once said of another game, it isn't very considerate of your time. Perhaps I'm just old, but I don't like doing that anymore. (I would have been a lot more tolerant is, y'knoiw I was allowed to be doing some base-building (i.e. towers and such), instead...)

Yeah, not a fan of this campaign. Particularly not a fan of having to repeatedly use my absolute least favourites race (the dwarves) multiple times, simply because they don't have towers and only have one ranged unit. I only got to really use defenses, like three times, at the very end, and one of those was more or less pointless, since I cleared all the enemy spawn points with the Avatar before I started. Finished at level 30 anyway (not like I needed the farming, thanks to janthailand; I think it was quite clear that without that extra push, it would have gone into seriously tedious territory. *tips helmet*)

I could have spent another three-four hours (projected) faffing about destroying the last of the skeleton level 27s at Fastholme, or going back to Frosthall to build orcs to kill the level 18 crimson empire, but I decided after taking out a few of the former that I really couldn't be bothered and just wanted to finish.

ESPECIALLY disliked the final boss fight; I very nearly rage-quite when it basically said "you have to fight the final boss with archers heroes only and the only ranged units you have are out of range." That wasn't interesting, it was just tedious. (And one could easily see if being next-to-impossible if you didn't happen t have one to hand; plonking and archer rune hero in the chest next to the boss is all well and good, but if you don't got a bow...?)

(Not as cheap and frustrating as the final fight in Divinity Original Sin 2, which I loathed, so points there, I guess...)

Could go on to Shadow of the Phoenix again, but I think I've had enough.

Still, as I basically paid about £3 for this campaign playthrough (I bought SFP on Gog on dirt-cheap because I couldn't be arsed to faff about installing off discs with the usual level of stuf you have to do to get old games to work), so it really doesn't owe me anything.

[janthailand]

your review wouldnt have been half as bad if you had my maps from the outset,
i can empathize with the aversion when you just arent up to snuff level wise.
if it can be of any consolidation, it would have been 5 times worse if you had attempted
BoW with an under leveled mage, that cant even buy the correct spells on original maps

[Aotrs Commander]

Oh, indeed. One thing I knew from talk around the game first time was Breath of Winter was particularly bad for mages in terms of spells (and I had to reload a lot the first time with Order of Dawn for my Death/Fire mage), which is why I specifically aimed for paladin build for this game. (As it happened, I virtually never used anything other than Thorns, aura of Strength and Greater Healing in terms on actual magic spells.)

The irony was I picked up SF1 again with the intention of doing a nice bit of base-buildings and happily sitting for a bit watching enemies splash across my defences while I slowly built up - I was actually kind of prepared to do some farming. But by the time the game actually deigned to let me have those levels, though, I'd about ran out of enthusiasm.

Having to build up the dwarves - TWICE - on maps to finish up sidequests was especially galling. (For the treasure quest and the mosaic, since I couldn't beat them solo (might have managed the mosaic, but I didn't try - not after getting splortched hard by the treasure guardians, despite being level 28.) As with the dwarves, there's literally nothing to do but sit and twiddle your thumbs while waiting for the food number to creep up. With literally any other race, you could at least amuse yourself building towers or something where the fight would be - which might have reduced the amount of net time thumb-twiddling.

It very much felt like the designers of that campaign were "base defences are for chumps, so you don't get any!"

I did grab the other versions of your mod for the other two campaigns, in case I change my mind later.

I do recall, though, when looking at the time that the Breath of Winter was not as well regarded as the other two campaigns, which is perhaps why I'd not raced to do it the first time around.

[Chocos Ramabotti]

can you tell me where you've found the mod that disables the fog of war on reload?

[Aotrs Commander]

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

can you tell me where you've found the mod that disables the fog of war on reload?

It was on Nexus mods here: https://www.nexusmods.com/spellforceplatinumedition/mods/12

[Chocos Ramabotti]

Origineel geplaatst door Aotrs Commander:

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

can you tell me where you've found the mod that disables the fog of war on reload?

It was on Nexus mods here: https://www.nexusmods.com/spellforceplatinumedition/mods/12

It seems to ask specifically for the gog version which is in fact the same than the steam version so it looks like it's incompatible with steam, did you get it somehow to work with steam anyway or are you using the gog version?

[Aotrs Commander]

Using the Gog version, I'm afraid. Sorry.

I have no coding skills myself, so I have no idea what you'd have to do to make it compatible.

[Farlon]

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

Origineel geplaatst door Aotrs Commander:

It was on Nexus mods here: https://www.nexusmods.com/spellforceplatinumedition/mods/12

It seems to ask specifically for the gog version which is in fact the same than the steam version so it looks like it's incompatible with steam, did you get it somehow to work with steam anyway or are you using the gog version?

It should work with steam version as long as you're on 1.54 version.

[Chocos Ramabotti]

Origineel geplaatst door Farlon:

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

It seems to ask specifically for the gog version which is in fact the same than the steam version so it looks like it's incompatible with steam, did you get it somehow to work with steam anyway or are you using the gog version?

It should work with steam version as long as you're on 1.54 version.

Nope, unfortunelately not, the patch explicitly says "(gog)" next to the patch number.

[Farlon]

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

Origineel geplaatst door Farlon:

It should work with steam version as long as you're on 1.54 version.

Nope, unfortunelately not, the patch explicitly says "(gog)" next to the patch number.

where does it say that? And it does work with steam, I checked it myself.

[Chocos Ramabotti]

Origineel geplaatst door Farlon:

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

Nope, unfortunelately not, the patch explicitly says "(gog)" next to the patch number.

where does it say that? And it does work with steam, I checked it myself.

How so? The game freezes while it's on pre loading screen, ya know where you see the phoenix, if tab back to my desktop I see this error message: https://imgur.com/a/ghH9xa9

As you can see in the screenshot i'm playing with the 1.54 beta branch.

[Farlon]

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

Origineel geplaatst door Farlon:

where does it say that? And it does work with steam, I checked it myself.

How so? The game freezes while it's on pre loading screen, ya know where you see the phoenix, if tab back to my desktop I see this error message: https://imgur.com/a/ghH9xa9

As you can see in the screenshot i'm playing with the 1.54 beta branch.

Are you using the german language version? I heard it uses the 1.52 exe for some reason.

[Chocos Ramabotti]

oh yeah that's i'm doing! Is there any way to change that?

[Farlon]

Origineel geplaatst door Chocos Ramabotti:

oh yeah that's i'm doing! Is there any way to change that?

Backup your german files, switch to english version and change the files manually but keep the .exe of the english version