[DrPraetorious]

Depends on how you equip the Jarls.

Anticipating combat with astrals, my Jarls are MR 29, and could be higher. That means with a meager penetration basis of 15, you need to beat my DRN by 14 points. Odds of success are lt. 1%.

Jarls have the same weaknesses as any other thug chassis and if you don't diversify you will lose, it's true. For example, in the above combat obviously I'd want to bring counters of my own: astral tempest maybe, undead mastery.

So, yeah, Jarls are not *unbeatable*. They remain, well into the late game, a force significant enough to force your enemies to contort their strategy as-described. You can take advantage of this in turn, which is the strength of LG Niefelheim. That and the raiding, once they fly.

And this is a 4X game, so the provinces you conquered earlier on give you more money and gems than your opponents, an advantage which propogates into the late game.

So I don't think late game Niefelheim is weak. I'll agree that it is not as devastating as early game Niefelheim.

A somewhat more successful counter I found was -
F2 mystics spamming pillar of fire,
Oreiads spamming Charm backed up by the penetration suite, and a *huge* communion (boosted the penetration bonus all the way to +8). I got a couple of his Jarls, and since he was MR-focused rather than fire focused, I even managed to keep them as I killed the rest (pity my bless sucked.)

I still lost that game, though, as Ermor then proceeded to eat me alive with darkness + life after death (all of his magicians turned into soulless - who can then see in the dark! Ouch).