Niefelheim Strategy for the Early Era

[Felgar]

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.



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



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.

[Endoperez]

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.

[Taqwus]

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.

[KissBlade]

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 ...

[Felgar]

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 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.

[KissBlade]

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.

[Gandalf Parker]

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

[Kelan]

A neat idea there, Felgar. I normally go around with smaller armies like some of the others here have mentioned, but I bet that is fun as heck wielding a large army of that many Niefels.

The only thing that struck me when looking at your battle formation is that with your leaders being forward a bit, most AI armies will target those first and especially with their archers, it seems. Even if other troops move out in front during the battle, archers seem to continue to target the troops that were at the front at the start of the battle, even if they fall back later. This may help you avoid some lucky hits on your more expensive and more valuable commander units.

Another thing that works well at times is to put your Jarls on the flanks with personal Quickness casted and let them try to flank and do some damage that way. Even if they push ahead later in the battle, the other giants still take the brunt of the armies attacks if they were positioned a little forward at the start. This is from a single-player perspective anyway. I have yet to play around with MP yet. The quickness will make them tire out faster, though, so now you have a new problem in trying to keep them invigorated. That is where the Earth blessing can help and some of the nice easier to create reinvigorate boots which seem to be easier to get than in Dom 2.

[Felgar]

To all,

Thanks for your thoughts. Instead of answering 1 poster at a time I thought I’d address everything I can in a single post.

As to my scale picks, I agree they are probably less than optimum. I chose growth +3 because giants need to eat and the Niefels cost a fortune to build. Nothing increases income over time as well as growth +3 in my opinion.

Its spring in the year 11 in my game and my starting province has a population of 63,000 (I have no idea if bad events have killed any pop there). I think I started with about 25,000-30,000, so I’ve already doubled my population in about 10 years. Of course double pop means twice the gold and supplies as well, so this is far better than 21% gold for order +3 or 30% extra recourses for prod +3 since its gold cost that prevents me from building more Niefels, not recourses.

Sure order or Prod gives you gold right away, but over time you’ll make far more money with growth than either of those two. Growth is also giving me +6% gold, so order would only be +15% more gold without the growth. Also the extra 45% supplies (the manuals stated 60% is wrong) make life a lot easier until you can start making some broth pots.

I don’t like to take negative scales if possible, but I guess it’s possible to come up with a good negative scale strategy tailored to the race. I’m simply not familiar enough with the game to feel comfortable taking a negative scale.

The fire and astral picks were basically forced upon me as I wanted 10 nature picks no matter what. There just weren’t enough points left to get two other magic paths both to level 4, so I went with the magic path he already starts with some skill in (astral) and then chose fire since the giants have no fire mages.

After reading everyone’s posts here, perhaps earth would have been better, but my question is why? I haven’t seen a single giant fall over from fatigue yet, so is earth really that essential?

I tested this strategy with lower level nature picks with 10% or 15% regeneration, but lost far too many Niefel giants to make it a cost effective choice. If you’re going to go with lower level nature picks then don’t bother using Niefels as you’ll lose too many to make it cost effective.

You’d be better off using Skin Shifters instead for your main force. Their ability to shape change into werewolves when killed is pretty awesome in itself. A large pack of 40 Skin Shifters would do almost as well as 15 or 20 giants without the huge gold cost associated with the Neifels.

With 20% regeneration, your opponent has to do more than 14 damage to a unit every single turn if he hopes to eventually kill it. And with 50+ hit points, even then chances are the giant will kill you before you can whittle down his hit points enough to kill him.

The only time I lose giants right now is when they are massively outnumbered. If enough units swarm around them their total damage adds up (8 little guys doing 2 damage each is 16 a turn), that’s why I upped my army to 25 giants and 5 leaders, it guarantees I have a solid line across the entire field which prevents their opponents from swarming around to the sides and rear.

The +2 berserk guarantees units will not retreat since they inevitably go berserk long before their hit points are low enough to threaten death.

I’ve never seen my giant troops fall over from fatigue, so I can’t see Reinvigoration +2 being that big of a deal. By the time powerful magic rolls around, I can equip all my jarls with reinvigoration items so they won’t fall out due to hostile spells. I also doubt +2 reinvigoration will help the troops much against powerful mages later in the game.

I don’t know the magic system all that well yet so I could well be wrong, but the difference between 14 hit points a turn and less than 10 is too good to pass up. I was losing about 1 or 2 giants per province at the lower levels, but 20% seems to be the sweet spot. I now only lose a giant if my bless fails and I’ve seen these armies defeat huge enemy armies filled with powerful troops.

The only time I ever lost with this strategy so far was to some kind of fear spell. I had initially bunched up my commanders in the center of a large squad, but the spell forced all my commanders to flee and my army fled after them (no one died, they just ran away). That’s why I split my squads into small groups and spread them out. If one or two Jarl’s flee due to a nasty spell, you still have a chance at winning.

I should also stress I play with level 9 neutrals and the hardest possible research, so if you play with default settings large armies like this won’t be needed. But with level 9 neutrals I’ve seen over 30 knights plus heavy infantry and longbowmen both with squads of about 50 each, so a small force of giants at that level won’t work for tougher provinces.

Against militia or other low damage troops you can probably start an earlier expansion than I did, but be warned Barbarians are your nemesis if you don’t have large numbers of giants. They do enough damage that they can wipe out 5-10 giants easily even if they are 100% all blessed. Those blasted great swords and mauls do lots of damage and can chew up giants better than most other neutral troop types if they can gang up on them.

As to the Skrattis I too use them for bloodhunting and research. Their werewolf form allows them to command more troops and gives them regeneration abilities, but what good is the wolf form? Does anyone have a use for the wolf form? I thought perhaps wolves come to their aid in battle or something, but I’ve never used them in wolf form yet so I don’t know.

That’s a good trick with the scout. I prophetized the starting general so he could go around with my magic site search party and search for holy. But I like your scout idea better. He can head into neutral territory and get the cold scale up for the early attacks, so perhaps only 10 or 15 giants would be good for a starting army. I’ll test it the next time I play a game as the Niefels.

About the leaders in the front row. I tried putting them 1 pixel behind or in the center, but it scrambles the setup and I had trouble getting everyone blessed. The above formation is the only way I could get everyone densely packed enough that 95% of the time 100% of them get blessed with 5 casters casting. If there is even 1 more rank of giants (3 rows instead of just 2), it screws up the casts.

This is also the reason why I set them up all the way in the backfield. The enemy archers that can reach that far generally miss and I haven’t suffered any afflictions by archer fire yet.

All my Jarl’s afflictions came from melee combat, that is why I have now switched their orders to bless, bless, bless, cast spells. Early on they don’t really have many spells to cast, but now that all my research is up to level 6 they are better off as spell casters now than melee guys. In future games I may just nix using Jarl’s in melee period. I have 5 heroic Jarls with afflictions now, and they do nothing but research until I can heal them. Not a game breaker, but a nuisance for sure.

[thejeff]

If you're not going to use Neifel Jarls for melee, I probably wouldn't even buy them.

Honestly I wouldn't even buy them to use as melee army commanders. With the right bless and a few items, they make SCs. Short of that I wouldn't use them.
Regular Godes should be able to handle the leading and blessing job and are much cheaper.