YMMV / SpellForce III

• Better Off Sold: You'll be picking up a huge number of run-of-the-mill weapons and armor that're good for exactly one thing: being sold off for the gold you need to purchase actually useful stuff like upgrade blueprints. Gear that provides an actual improvement to your current stats is extremely rare and most often a quest reward or boss drop.
• Demonic Spiders: The Purity's Iron Ones are easily among the game's most annoying enemies. The big ones are massive brawlers that deal high damage to multiple targets, inflict knockdown to the point of trapping unfortunate heroes in a Cycle of Hurting, and are tough enough to give several true bosses a run for their money. The smaller ones are a bit less resilient, but they usually come in greater numbers and have powerful magical attacks at range that partly deal pure damage, combined with an assortment of status effects. If you manage to get your hands on the Might of the Giants artefact weapon (kills Iron Ones in one hit), equip it and never let go again.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Combining the Van'Karewa artefact bow with a maxed Ricochet ability from the Archery tree leads to hilarious scenes on the battlefield. The bow has a very high chance to summon a random animal (up to and including giant bears) on every successful hit it lands. The Ricochet skill works like a physical version of Chain Lightning; on tier 3 it can hit about 20 targets if they're close enough together, which the tightly packed enemy formations invariably are. One shot, and the enemy army usually finds itself beset by a dozen or more angry carnivores that deal a lot of damage, are quite resilient and divert attention away from your heroes, and you can repeat it every ten seconds. The ability also deals respectable damage all on its own, enough to critically wound most basic mooks and instakill particularly squishy ones like archers or arsonists. This combo alone makes soloing Purity bases with only your hero squad a cakewalk on almost any difficulty.
  • The Raze ability from the Brutality tree turns warriors from murder machines into one-man demolition squads. Maxed-out, a single use can lay waste to an entire outpost, heavily damaging or outright destroying most buildings caught in the blast. Two or more warriors with it can annihilate even top-tier bases in seconds. Combine this with the fact that all you need to do to win almost any RTS phase is to destroy the enemy HQ, and you have a combo that can end most battles before they've even really begun.
• Narm: For some reason, the devs saw fit to replace common swears like "Damn!" with "Blazes!". All of them. Every single blazes time someone swears without dropping an F-bomb. It's okay-ish the first three or four times you hear someone say it, but after the tenth time it just sounds ridiculous, and you probably hit that number before you finish the prologue.
• Obvious Beta: So obvious in fact that the main menu has a dedicated "Report Bugs" button. During the game's first year it was most likely in the top three of the most-used buttons, right up there with "Continue Campaign" and "Exit to Desktop". SF III's release version was so buggy it could give any Bethesda game a run for its money. The first patch was auto-installed right after installing the main game, and the next three patches followed within 36 hours. The campaign was still riddled with one devastating Game-Breaking Bug after the other, to the point that it became impossible to continue the story at several branches simultaneously - character abilities disappeared at random, plot-important characters couldn't be talked to, forced conversations never ended, characters glitched into areas they couldn't leave again by any means, and the screen turned black during certain events. It took quite a while before the game became an enjoyable experience.
• The Scrappy: Bertrand Carpel, to some. Do you happen to know some of those annoying Holier Than Thou types (Mormons, Scientologists, vegans, whatever) that just won't stop trying to save you from that sinful life of yours no matter how often you tell them to get lost? Yeah, he's one of them, taken up to eleven. That's a guy who was looking for something to fill a void in his soul and found it in a genocidal religious cult that gruesomely murders thousands every day for their twisted idea of paradise, yet he brushes it off as "sacrificing a few lives for the greater good" and continually treats you like a stubborn child too dumb to see the truth. Cue the Catharsis Factor when you finally get to curbstomp him right before the Final Battle.