[Edratman]

I am a little surprised that I haven't seen very many prior posts about problems with Nief giants before. As a SP, I have found them to be all but invincible against the AI. And I would just use a relatively inexpensive rainbow FWEN (4 to 6) bless.

In games when I would play myself, I found a death bless very effective in stopping invincible forces. You may not kill them right away, but if you can pile up 3 or 4 afflictions on a unit, they soon become quite vulnerable.

But this isn't useful to the chap who originally posted the question.

The advice previously given that you attack Nief's provinces is probably the easiest to implement. You should be able to take 2 or 3 provinces for every one that you lose. It is a permutation of Russian strategy where you retreat to win, but it is effective. No one likes to lose 2 provinces for one, so that should reverse the advance. Then you will have the time to acquire the manpower and research to use the spells that were suggested. A good variant of this is to attack a province just behind the unstoppable force. Set the tax rate to 200. If they turn to attack you, you just keep your army moving through his provinces avoiding battle and he wastes his good army taking back his provinces unopposed.

Another stategy that might work is to put up a castle in a wasteland or marsh if it has good blocking capability. Fill the castle with enough troops and engineers to offset the besiegers, give cauldrens and wines sacks to every commander and hope your opponent is foolish enough to starve himself into serious affliction issues. If this works it also buys you time to acquire effective head-on counters.