Neifel giants suck?

[PvK]

Ordinary Jotun giants are plenty deadly, even without very high attack or defense. Not only do they have high resistance to damage, but they have very high strength and huge weapons, which squash other units with ease. I've lost many good units and decked out heroes to them. I haven't encountered Niefels yet but with blessings they sound like they could be very potent.

PvK

Unless you are using another strategy. A strong bless plan isn't *needed*. There is Blood Giants with Nifel that work very well. As well as a few others.

Nature 9 is what you would like to assume since it makes the already strong units stronger; but I don't like playing the assumptive theme/races, just because they fit very well means that people think of that as a standard or norm.

Try Neif with 9 Fire pretender; that's fun

[Keir Maxwell]

Niefel Giants suck? Nah!

Like most other bless units Niefel giants are not that effective unless you abuse the whole bless concept. An important point to take into account in Dom II is that the value of sacred units includes the possibilities created by powerful bless effects and so if you don't use them they are often not great value.

My Niefel Giant strategy is Earth Mother (Earth9, Naure9) or Son of Niefel (Nature or Earth9, Water9). I have not found nature9 alone particularily impressive. You need a very high dominion with this race as well or else the warmth well melt away your protection and you will die due to low defence - beware of lizards!

I have found that only the most rounded sacred units (such as Machakan Hunters or Palidins of Marignon) or powerful (Van, Tuatha) work well with just one school of bless effects. I tried C'tis Dancers with just water 9 (no death fear effect) and found the increased length of combats a major concern and trashed that attempt.

My difficulty with bless effects at this point is how few genuine options there are to the Earth Mother. I don't like using the same pretender engine over and over and I like to limit myself to thematically appropriate pretender choices. However I'm only just starting to test astral and blood bless effects so I should find some more alternatives.

Cheers

Keir

[ November 25, 2003, 23:22: Message edited by: Keir Maxwell ]

[LordArioch]

What I meant by strong bless plan was not necessarily 9 nature as such, but some race design with good bless effects. Like ulm IF theme, niefelheim isn't fully effective unless you have a good bless. The giants are still decent unblessed, but are pretty weak for their cost without any bless effects.

[geo981010]

Joonie73-
The NGs are not supposed to be uberunits by themselves - their big problem is the low attack so high defense units can stall them. But like Zen said - with a strength that high they just destroy HI that have lower defense values and depend on ~18-20 protection to save them. And the chill effect means that if a high defense unit can't hurt the NG quickly, they will likely get frozen which reduces defense, so now they will get hit - hard.

But the bless effects can correct their weakness, and Nature is my fav there for them too. The +3 beserk is probably better than the +4 armor from earth or +4 attack from fire - they get +3 armor, +3 attack (which means now they can hit most high defense units every couple of rounds!), and +3 strength and no chance of fleeing. Their defense is only fair to start off with and they are so big they will get ganged up on, so the -3 defense is little loss IMHO. And 10 HP+ regen and high armor means that without high damage units around, they will win against most opponents with little loss.

Keir-
For a fun dual bless choice, have you tried a Baphomant with Marignon yet? Cheapest dual 9 magic pretender there is (I think - only 468 points), and twisted fate flaming attack flagellants are a whole lotta fun It's good being the Astral King, too! Too bad no one else gets to choose him as a pretender...

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by geo981010:

Keir-
For a fun dual bless choice, have you tried a Baphomant with Marignon yet? Cheapest dual 9 magic pretender there is (I think - only 468 points), and twisted fate flaming attack flagellants are a whole lotta fun It's good being the Astral King, too!

Marignon has always been a favourite of mine and Baphomet is certainly interesting now.

To be honest I had a few dissapointments when I tried out a race shortly after getting the full game. My race theme was "In you we trust" with Paladins running around questing. Unfortunately they kept dying to lucky blows (or Xbows) after having already used up the twist of fate. ToF works best with decent numbers of sacred troops with very high def as Paladins defence gets overwhelmed and they have to rely on their Prot which isn't quite high enough. The most successful Paladin I recall (Heroic ability Quickness) lost his arm to an archer (the shame of it!) while finishing off a battle and was quickly butchered. Low HP supercombatents don't seem to work very well.

I have been intending to have another try in which each questing Knight is accompanied by a small band of Zealots, who wish nothing more than to die in battle fighting beside their chosen hero, and a couple of Men at Arms to attract Xbow bolts. At present however I'm distracted by the tricky Tuatha and the intricacies of Mictlan.

I suspect it will take me awhile to get a setup I like with Marignon as I don't like depending on the throw away Flagellents - in general I don't like losing my troops. The trouble with using the Paladins is that the need for decent productivity really puts the squeeze on points. In search of more points I tried the Lady of Fortune water9, nature 4 and Turmoil3/luck3 and retitled the race "In Fortune we trust" but it wasn't a great success.

I have a nasty suspician that the best pretender for using Paladins with might be the Earth Mother (earth9, nature6-9) which is too inappropriate for me.

It's good being the Astral King, too!

I thought they had made immobile pretenders truly immobile? I may well have misunderstood and being Astral King with Marignon would be very reassuring. If you are indeed right then Baphomet is significantly better than I had thought.

Re Niefel Giants:

I wouldn't underestimate the value of the reinvigoration effect of earth magic. I have also found that its hard to get too much prot. Often in the early game when my Niefel Giants came up against things that could kill them they died in moments (lack of support) and so the regeneration is perhaps not as important as berserk which is, as you point out Geo, very important - although it only
gave +2 prot in the examples I remember checking for Niefel Giants. Prot bonus from berserk seem to vary alot depending on starting prot so I suspect its a percentage adjustment and the difference could be what cold scale the Niefels are in - or I could just be completely confused. The reduction in the amount of battle afflictions from regeneration is pretty key in the long term and in a mid-game big battle the regaining of HP's can be huge.

I have tried Son of Niefel with water 9, Earth 9 and it seemed to be very smooth early as the enemy get broken quicker. However it was only one test and though thematically appealing it just doesn't seem as tight as the Earth Mother approach - stay alive and freeze them.

Good to hear of anothers experiances with a dual bless race.

Cheers

Keir

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
Re Niefel Giants:

I wouldn't underestimate the value of the reinvigoration effect of earth magic.

I've wondered how much use earth 10 could be with pythium's mages, as a reinvigoration of 5 on every mage and communicant might be useful, although not in the early game.