Some questions on demo walkthrough

[ceremony]

Originally posted by LintMan:
Hello, I'm currently playing the demo walkthrough game, about 30 turns or so in. (Ie: I'm past the walkthrough part).
...My pretender is water-8/earth-4, so I'd think that should a fairly reasonable thing, but I don't see many spells that will help. Is Nifelheim (is that the giants race's name?) a bad one to play for any underwater capability, or do I have the wrong set of magic skills?

Just to clarify - if you're playing the walkthrough game that you downloaded, you should be playing Jotunheim default theme, not the Niefelheim theme. So you will not have access to Niefel Jarls.

Your pretender has water 8, so he should be able to bring water magic skill * 2 size points of troops with him underwater. Since giants are size 4 that limits him to 4 giants. Your troops will also perform poorly underwater.

The best way to take underwater provinces is to find land provinces that let you recruit amphibious units like Ichtyids. Then take those units and capture a single sea province. You can then start recruiting Tritons or whatever is in that sea province, and go from there.

As far as commanders not showing up, are they simply so far towards the back that you can't see them? Zoom the map out with the arrow keys when you're in the battle.

[LintMan]

Thanks everyone for all the answers/tips!

Originally posted by ceremony:
Just to clarify - if you're playing the walkthrough game that you downloaded, you should be playing Jotunheim default theme, not the Niefelheim theme. So you will not have access to Niefel Jarls.

Yes, Jotunheim - I got the names mixed up, after I noticed the "Son of Niefel"/Niefelheim connection. Sorry about that!

Your pretender has water 8, so he should be able to bring water magic skill * 2 size points of troops with him underwater. Since giants are size 4 that limits him to 4 giants. Your troops will also perform poorly underwater.

The best way to take underwater provinces is to find land provinces that let you recruit amphibious units like Ichtyids. Then take those units and capture a single sea province. You can then start recruiting Tritons or whatever is in that sea province, and go from there.

Ah, OK! I didn't realize that water magic skill automatically granted some amount of underwater breathing. I was looking for some spells, but this is better. Cool.

As far as commanders not showing up, are they simply so far towards the back that you can't see them? Zoom the map out with the arrow keys when you're in the battle.

I think I did scroll all around the map looking for them, but it's possible I missed them or didn't send both when I thought I did, or something. Oh, well. I'll pay more attention next time for sure.

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
That's quite low. I would probably try to have over 150 research points by that point. One of Niefelheim's major weaknesses is that they have expensive non-sacred mages. The way around this is to use mages recruited in other provinces for your research. Sages, which can be recruited at a library are extremely effective for this, but most otther independent mages will be more cost effective than Gyga and Skratti.

As a follow-up question to this:
Do you (and/or anyone else that cares to reply) dedicate those research mages to just research, and have dedicated others for site search, spells/summoning, and item production? Or do you shift divert some of your researchers to those other tasks on occasion?

You can only move one province into enemy territory, unless the commander and all his troops are flying. Other than that, mountains, forests, and other difficult terrain reduces troop movement to 1, unless all units in the group have the "survival" trait for that type of terrain.

Aha! It must have been the terrain type that was slowing me down in some places; I hadn't realized that it was a movement factor.

Thanks a lot, everyone!

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by LintMan:
As a follow-up question to this:
Do you (and/or anyone else that cares to reply) dedicate those research mages to just research, and have dedicated others for site search, spells/summoning, and item production? Or do you shift divert some of your researchers to those other tasks on occasion?

I tend dedicated a few mages to site searching, and a few to other spells. It's often most cost effective to use your cheapest mages as researchers, as they are often not capable of casting very many rituals and mage time is expensive. If I need a few mages for some other reason for a turn or two though I will take them off of research duty. Taking a magic scale of +1 or +2 also helps a great deal with the default theme of Jotunheim, as the Vaetti hags are the cheapest mages in the game and with magic +2 they have 5 research points per turn.