Having liked what I saw with Disciples 1 through GOG, I hunted down a copy of Disciples 2 gold.
Now I'm confused because it fails to consolidate the whole game into a single exe. You get one exe that has disciples 2 plus the guardians of the light and servant of dark expansion, then you get a second exe with rise of the elves that also happens to have the main campaigns from Disciples 2. Rise of the elves also seems to have more skirmish maps.
From what I've seen of the new elf race, I don't like them. They're too much like the empire, their artwork isn't up to snuff, super powerful sniper units seem like they would throw off the balance, and I don't like them having a source of magic that no one else can use.
HOWEVER, the reviews say that Rise of the Elves made balance changes to the original 4 races that "only hardcore fans would notice" without going into detail. They also said that rise of the elves makes "improvements" to the random map generator.
Could any "hardcore fans" here tell me what changes rise of the elves makes to the original 4 races? Am I better off playing the main 4 campaigns through rise of the elves at the cost of not being able to play the guardians of light and servants of dark campaigns? Or if I don't like the elves, should I just stick with the other exe? Is the random map generator really that much better in rise of the elves?
If GOG ever gets ahold of Disciples 2, and if they manage to consolidate ALL of the expansion packs into one super exe I would totally rebuy this game through them.

It is really confusing what Strategy First did with this series. The first 2 expansions to the original Disciples 2 (with the exception of Rise of the elves) were more like add-ons then full fledged expansions.
If my memory serves me well, their was first Disciples 2, then two expansion packs, Guardians of Light, and Servants of the Dark. With Light you got to play the original Empire and Dwarf scenarios from Disciples 2, and a couple of high level scenarios. And with Dark you got the other 2 races of the same stuff. Eventually they were combined to the Galleans Return expansion pack.
Rise of the Elves however is an actual full fledged expansion, with a completely new race, new scenarios, and new maps. With Elves you received the full version of the original Disciples 2.
And as you probably already figured out, the Gold version is everything. You have an exe for Galleans Return and exe for Rise of the Elves. I believe Strategy First considers these two separate games, so you probably wont see both games in one exe.

Well, Rise of the Elves was stand alone expansion, so no surprise it is count as other product.

which executable do i play first?
ive got two.
one is 'Dark Prophecy & Galleans Revenge'
the other is 'Rise of the Elves'
I've had a quick go on Dark Prophecy (which actually says Galleans Revenge in the game) and havent got a clue if im playing it in the right order or not :/

Dark Prophecy is first.

Dark Prophecy first, then play Gallean's Revenge with the leader you used in Dark Prophecy. And if you want Rise of the Elves to make more sense then I suggest playing through all of Dark Prophecy and all of Gallean's Revenge.

First playing Dark Prophecy and then using your hero from Dark Prophecy in Gallean's return didn't work for me (I have the original Gold retail pack however, not the downloaded one). I could import my hero in the expansion game but it fucked up to say the least :/
My advice would be to completely skip the Dark Prophecy's exe's, and get right to Gallean's Return, where you can play the Dark Prophecy campaign just as well.
Only use Rise of the Elves expansion to play the Elves' campaign or multiplayer.

When starting out as Empire the first mission is the same in both exe's. Based on that It makes me think that the expansion adds content to the original. I'm confused. Is rise of the elves just missing the "expansion" to the first EXE? what? :)
If Rise of the elves has everthing the first exe does I can save a gig by uninstalling the first one.
The million dollar question is, Is there any content in the first exe that isn't in Rise of the elves?

I'm not all that much clearer on what to do after reading this thread than before.
So I take it then that you can't play Dark Prophecy or Gallean's return from within Rise of the Elves?
Can you import leaders into the Rise of the Elves?

I actually think you can play Dark Prophecy from within Rise of the Elves. Just not Gallean's Return.
Don't know about importing. Don't think so. But I have never had any reason to try and it is possible it might work... Somehow.

I know you can import leaders from Gallean's Wrath into Rise of the Elves, and I suspect you can do it the other way around, too. What you do is look through the files in either Galleans Wrath or Rise of the Elves until you find the folder that contains exported characters. You can copy-paste those files from one game to the other.

Thanks, Prator.

You can use the Rise of the Elves exe to play all of them.

care to elaborate - I have the CD version of the game and all of hte different releases operate separate of each other. The campains for rise of the elves are only acessable if you run that exe - whilst if you run the original or elves you can't run any of the galleons return campaigns.

I have the GoG.com gold version so that might make a difference.