[HoneyBadger]

You can never have too many giants...providing you set the game to +300% supply, so they don't turn into a plague of giant diseased locusts. Niefel's easy to play, but (and this is coming from a fellow newbie who also started with Niefelheim) watch that you have lots and lots of province defense. Castles and kindof important, as you expand, but you only need one castle for maybe every 12 provinces that you're investing a lot in. Also, don't overlook those boulder-throwers, they have higher accuracy than javellineers, which is good so you don't have to worry as much about creaming your Niefel Jarl with friendly fire. And you can get away with not hand-scripting mages, but be very careful about troop-placement. You won't have a lot of troops compared to everyone else, so you want to try to make every one count. Right now I'm using somewhere around 24 Niefel jarls, each protected by 3 skin-shifters, in a line across the right side of the battlefield, with boulder-throwers directly behind. I have the Jarls scripted to cast bless, then holy avenger, then breath of winter, which gives my throwers time to hit the enemy, without putting my jarls in harm's way. Spellcasters I have further back, in two groups, also heavily guarded by skin-shifters. That way, flying enemies get divided up if they want to attack my rear. My provinces are at between 40 and 60 defense, and I only hold maybe 14 at this time, with two castles since I'm getting ready to crush a neighbor. I looked at the Fenrir as a pretender, but I personally prefer either monolith, cyclops, or great enchantress. Vampire queen is another possibility, but I prefer to have crushingly bad scales and extremely high bless/magic. Also, I try to ignore the basic Niefel giant. They're great troops to have, but I'd rather spend the money on a Niefel jarl that I can put time in to, get more and varied use out of, and directly improve.