PaladinNO: Then it's nothing for me, I don't do turn-based games. Period.
I have spent countless hours in SpellForce 1, with the rune hero system that was for some reason intriguing to me, and unique from my limited RPG experience. I loved it so much, I own 7 copies of it, including the original, individual physical releases, SpellForce Platinum and SpellForce Universe, plus the digital equivalents.
I played SP2 - probably just the main game, the "DLC" layout was just a mess to me - which was a bug-riddled console port that never should have seen the light of day as far as I'm concerned. Everything I loved about SP1 in terms of gameplay was either reworked or removed completely.
I do own SP3 "Reforced" - again, a mess of DLCs and a mix of apparently non-connected parts of games - but I am reminded of the SP2 fiasco every time I consider trying SP3, and have so far been put off it.
When / if they release the SP1 1.61 patch here on GoG, I will likely put every SP-related content released after that in the memory bin and do a purge, and just stick with the SP1 trilogy.
What's next? SpellForce the card game? SpellForce Battle Royale?
For all I care, they had a key to success with the first trilogy. And I am very picky about the games I play, so to make something that I enjoyed as greatly as SP1 is quite the feat.
I completely get your point, but you have to see that SpellForce is a Lore Universe and Francise IP. Its more then just one single gameplay formular. The mainline will always be RPG-RTS mix games, but all around SpelLForce can cover different gameplay styles too.
For example this is not the 1st turn based version of the Games. In the community a cardgame was even that much beloved that the community developed the analog game into a digital one:
So yeah, this is just the 1st one of many possible games to come. Who knows, maybe in the future we even get a full SpellForce RPG in the formular of Gothic or the Witcher.