LA Utgard guide

[Agema]

N9W9 will have significant problems, surely? It'll go through indies and most AI, but the minute you face another player you'll have severe trouble.

Woodsmen are large and few in number, so they'll rack up fatigue very quickly. Spammed summons and chaff will exhaust you, particularly if they have high defence or are ethereal (75% of hits don't count). Stun damage spells will be devastating. Once fatigue gets high, your woodsmen will be much less effective and become very vulnerable. Virtually every other nation will have at least one magic path to readily exploit your fatigue issues. You can make things slightly better with size 2 troops to accompany and mix in with the giants, but it doesn't fully resolve your big tactical weakness.

You're also a major thugging race with a bless of 1.5 attacks and more defence, but that's minimally useful for a thug: he mostly needs to stay alive (Def will not help if you're attacked multiple times) dishing out damage steadily until the PD runs.

[Viajero]

Does this mean that giant races are doomed tacticlaly becasue of the fatigue/focused dammage issue? or just Utgard in particular?

Or is it simply that N9W9 is not good enough and a different bless could work?

[Illuminated One]

Not really.
Take an earth bless for reinvigoration instead of water and the fatigue from chaff is no (or a very small) issue. Meanwhile, while the enemy is just trying to fatigue you down you are killing his troops.
Mages with fatigue spells are more dangerous but every unit has a weakness and being vulnerable to fatigue is hardly worse than being vulnerable to archers or fire or having low mr.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Viajero

Does this mean that giant races are doomed tacticlaly becasue of the fatigue/focused dammage issue? or just Utgard in particular?

Or is it simply that N9W9 is not good enough and a different bless could work?

I think it's the Woodsmen rather than Utgård. Earth bless would reinvigorate your giants, but berserk and quickness are also good, and you don't want to spend too much on bless.

This means you'll have to be ready to do something else if you face summons (example: 10 Death2 mages casting Raise Skeletons, the Ench 3 spell), high-defense troops etc. Some Skratti thugs with reinvigorating items (enough to keep them at 0 fatigue throughout the battle) and area-of-effect weapons look like good options, but fatigue-causing spells will also hurt them. Against those, you might want to switch to using your own undead.

And so on. You can make a different pretender, but that means you will have other weaknesses you won't know about. W9N9 Woodsmen are good for expansion, so make the most of that. Start a couple of new games and try to get as many provinces as you can in the first 15 turns. I don't know how many you should aim for, perhaps 20 or 25. Once you can do that, see how much and how fast you can research, and find different ways to use it, and have fun.

If you don't like the sound of that, you can also keep playing single-player, and not worry about trying to find the kind of strategy you won't need against AI any way.