Spellforce: Conquest of EO Review (PsychoticSoul)
Anyone who has played Age of Wonders 3 is going to feel right at home here. The combat system is essentially the same, minus the ability to use spells in battle, and, also importantly, there are no multi-stack battles.
Your Domain (territory) extends from your base in an X tiles radius, very similar to how cities worked in AoW3. None of the 'sectors' nonsense that came with Planetfall and AoW4. A Major difference in this game, however, is that you only have 1 main 'city' (your tower) ever, but that it is mobile. And you will be moving it - a lot. Resource providing nodes on the map are mostly not permanent - they expire after being collected for some time, and so you are thus highly encouraged to keep moving your tower to collect other resources that are not yet expired. Its also encouraged to move your tower because staying within its radius helps fight your enemies.
Speaking of 'enemies', this is somewhat difficult from a typical 4x in that regard. Your Antagonists in this game (the circle mages) don't even pretend to play by the same rules that the player does. Yes, we all know they get all sorts of cheats in other games but functionally those cheats are numbers in the form of +X resources or some other buffs. In this game, the player is the only one with an actual 'economy' in any sense. Also because of this there is no form of diplomacy with the antagonists that you would see in other 4xs. You get events that let you get on their good (or bad) side, but not the typical form of diplomacy. Some circle mages are easier to stay on the good side of then others, though if you play long enough you will eventually run afoul of even the friendliest ones. You are not technically required to engage with any of the circle mages to win though, technically, though - although you most likely will take out at least 1 or 2 in a typical game. The game feels more rpg-ish in this regard.
With regards to what you play as, You're given the optiion of 3 different (and very distinct from each other) crafting classes. Alch can create items, nec can create undead, and artificers glyphs, which are essentially a form of equipment. They are all well designed and fun to play as. Secondary to this is magic schools, which are again well designed and distinct.
The game also (in its base state anyway), also contains only 1 singular map. This is good and bad. A Fixed map helps with campaign narrative on your first few playthroughs - something annoyingly lacking in AOW4 and planetfall, but the lack of random map generation massively hurts replayability in the *base* game. I say base game because random map option *was* eventually added, but its locked behind DLC.
Overall however, its still a game worthy of playing. Just be advised that if you want endless 4x replayability - you're gonna have to pay extra later.