Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

I posted some first impressions in another forum and thought I’d cut and paste some of it here for perusal.
Basically I’ve found a near invincible nation setup, here’s the text from the other forum, I’ve slightly edited it
to take into account some things I’ve learned since posting it originally:

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I am currently happily playing a game on the large 480 land province map
(over 100 sea provinces) that comes with the game, and I may have found my
first nearly unbeatable race strategy.

Play the Giant Niefelheim race in the early era. For your pretender choose
the monolith and put him in jail. Then give him +3 cold +1 Order and +3
growth. For magic picks give him 10 nature, 4 astral and 4 fire, and you
should end up with no points left to spend.

The Astral pick lets you cast archaic record later in the game so you can
find all the gem sits and the fire pick allows you to forge fire armors for
your giants to negate their inherent weakness to fire. Taking picks of 4
instead of 2 or 3 lets your blessed troops gain a bonus from the picks. +1
Magic resist for 4 astral and +2 attack skill for the 4 fire.

The 10 in nature gives your blessed troops 20% regeneration and +2 berserk
which will make you Niefel Giants almost invulnerable in combat. They will
have a regeneration of 14 hit points a turn once blessed with the above
nature mod and it takes a real special enemy troop type or overwhelming
numbers to cause any kind of real damage at all to them once blessed.

I then do absolutely nothing for the first 10-20 turns and save up my gold
until I have at least 4,000 on hand. Then I queue up 20 Niefel Giants and 1
Niefel Jarl leader. I then build three more Niefel Jarl leaders over the
next few turns while my giant troops are being built and I end up with an
army of 4 Jarl’s and 20 sacred Giants (later in the game I upped it to 5 Jarl’s and 25 giants).
The Jarl’s themselves are also sacred, so my entire army is sacred and all troops will benefit
from the 20% regeneration buff along with the other buffs.

Give your Jarl’s (bless, bless, bless, attack closest) orders and you should get
all of you giants blessed in about 95% of your fights. The giants should
have (hold and attack) orders and be set up at the back of the battlefield
to keep enemy missile fire inaccurate while your busy blessing your troops.

Place 5 giants in a squad under the command of each commander and evenly space them
across the battlefield from top to bottom. Then place the commander into the middle of the
squad and then move him 1 pixel forward from the center.

http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/6...rmationzn6.jpg

This will create a line of 2 giants deep across the battlefield, thus maximizing your combat potential.

http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/2...tlelineee6.jpg

Bunched up giants are susceptible to fear spells and other area affect spells, so better to spread
them out. Also bunched up giants only see about 1/3rd of their number reach the melee while the
rest mill around behind. With this formation if you give the two end squads hold and attack rear
orders, you should see most of your giants engaged in the melee. This maximizes your damage
potential and also spreads damage you take out over as many giants as possible.

Once in a blue moon one or two will fail to get blessed and you’ll take a
loss. But in my current game with neutrals set to level 9 (the max), I’ve
only lost 3 giants and 1 Jarl while capturing in excess of 40 neutral
provinces.

These armies are almost unstoppable, I’ve seen them defeat regular armies
with more then 200 normal troops in them without taking a single loss. The
above army can capture 1 province a turn and once you have 2 or 3 armies
going you can dominate the province rush part of the game.

By not doing anything for the first 10-15 turns of the game, it seems to
make the AI players less aggressive towards you. I’ve gone without being
attacked for almost 50 turns. But once I started to close in on the leader
(the player with the most provinces) I was then attacked (they declared war
but not all invaded) by about 1/3rd of the AI players. But by then I had
three of the above armies in operation and easily pushed back any incursions
into my territory.

I’m not saying this is the best race or anything, it’s just a very winning
strategy with this particular race. I tried a nature bonus of 10%
regeneration, but ended up losing quite a few giants (too expensive to make
it a winning strategy). There is a big difference between 6 hit points
regenerated a turn and 14 in tactical combats.

I’m sure I’ll experiment with lots of other races in the future, but this is
my first at bat strategy and it’s been very fun to play. The AI has two
nations still ahead of me on provinces, but I feel confident I’ll be able to
hold my own whenever I finally come in contact with them.

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Since I wrote this I’ve gotten to about level 6 magic research (toughest level of research) and
these armies still stand up pretty well. My worst battle against an AI opponent saw 300+ of
his troops attack one of my 25 giant armies. I lost 3 giants and killed over half his troops and
won the battle. Of course I have to put a minimum of 1 broth pot with each army, but once I’ve
done that only severely poor provinces see these guys starve.

I know it’s hard to sit on your hands for those opening turns, but trust me it’s worth it. Don’t
stop and search any provinces with your giant armies, build hags and other mages and
follow up behind with them. Keep you giants going every turn and you’ll easily surpass most
opponents in no time.

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

A smaller force of those giants is enough to advance in the early game. In single-player, this is good enough. In multi-player, you'd be devastated. High Nature bless with Niefelheim is good, of course.

Remember that you can make one of your starting giants a prophet and thus don't have to recruit an expensive Jarl or Gode for your first army.

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

Might be problems in the case of Death Weapons or curse. Fight long enough, and you will accumulate crippling afflictions, even with regen.

Niefels are nasty, 'tho... and can be quite long-lived, which is good for the HoF. I've got a Jotun Scout with heroic obesity. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

Wow ... your strategy can use some tweaking ...

Mainly due to your not very optimal scales, lack of earth bless for the giants, lack of early expansion, extreme weakness to f9, no real mention of their battle mages, niefel thugs, etc ...

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

Yeah, eventually you have to rotate your armies’ home and bring fresh blood into the mix. Since my god is fixed in place, I’ve created an old guard corps for him consisting solely of old veteran troops that have accumulated many afflictions.

I’ve got 5 on guard and about 15 on hold and attack currently, but the corps is slowly growing. Eventually I’ll cast Faery Court and Gift of health to try and heal them but for now they serve Lord Slab http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif in his personal guard.

My wounded Jarl’s are all heroic leaders (one has 337 personal kills) so they sit at home with Lord Slab and do research awaiting the healing spells.

Overall though I’ve only lost perhaps less than 10 giants and maybe 1 or 2 Jarl’s. I’ve taken well over 60 provinces now and have fought three major wars with huge (50+ provinces) opponents and held firm on all fronts.

Magic is becoming more potent now however, so I’m waiting to see if they can hold up in the end game or not.

Basically the 14 hit points a turn regen makes each little giant a mini SC.

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

You can teleport monoliths to wreck provinces if they have the appropriate buff spells. With astral 4, you get body ethereal, luck, shield and f4 gives you fire shield.

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

Sheesh people. How about a rule that you have to say something nice before saying something nasty? He got some things right. Its a nice effort.

Felgar. All of these are opinions. The game is big enough for everyone to come up with their own strategies (and no one to come up with the perfect killer one).

Your plan looks 90% in line with how I would have gone. Nicely done. One thing Id mention is that during those first few turns when you are building up, you can put your armies on patrol and turn your taxes to the max. Be sure and turn it back down when you leave with them though.

Gandalf Parker

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

I would make some skinshifters, give them a cheap commander and sendthem after the weaker (militia ect) provinces to give you a gold boost. I agree that some earth fitted into the bless somehow would be a great help but your bless is fine as it is. As said you could easily expand with far less than that and, you do start up too slow. Send out armies of 1 jarl and 4 giants and that should be enough for most provinces, before that use your skinshifters, they are very powerful for their cost (and great at soaking up attacks)

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

As was stated I would definately try to work something out for early expansion. The more you take the bigger your income is. Even if you want to run with that strategy, you can cut the wait time down significantly.

Re: Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era
 

That's strategy looks like a real overkill. I've tried Niefels with one of the human pretenders, imprisoned N6E4S3 or something like that. Dominion 5 or 6, Order+3,Cold+3,Sloth+1,Growth+1,Luck-2,Magic+1. Those Niefel Jarls is a real power from early on. With nature (regeneration is more to prevent afflictions than anything else) and earth (reinvigoration) blessing and with quicken oneself (alt-2) they can handle most of indies (and early AI army) alone. So I bought few Gigjas and Skrattis, went for Alt-2 while my starting army went to conquer indies from turn 2 (with scout who became prophet). In a 5-6 turns I had enough income to recruit Niefel Jarl per turn, Alt-2 was researched by that time, so they just went conquering everything around. Further research targets are Con-4 and Alt-6 - Niefel Jarls don't need any extras to deal with low-end armies, but when facing more advanced (and larger) armies they need soul vortex and few cheap items. Nothing AI can do against that. It will probably work as initial expansion plan in MP, might be a decent plan in blitz as well. If you attack your neighbour with 5 jarls (one per province) many nations will have problems defeating more than one jarl per turn so early in the game, which means they'll quickly lose their territory.