Niefelheim - Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by thejeff

Inspired by this guide, I've been playing around with Skratti thugs in Jotunheim. MA doesn't have the skinshifters and the regular troops are resource intensive and unimpressive. This means it's hard to expand with the lousy scales Neifelheim can use: sloth3 particularly.

I was trying to see what was the minimum Skratti needed to be able to clear indies with some efficiency. In EA, they did well with Quicken Self and a pair of ice swords. In MA, you don't have the starting water income and my trials with other weapons ended in early death.
Anyone have thoughts on how to get quickly get them up and taking at least the weaker indies? I'd rather not wait for Const 4 & blood income.

Once you're using Baalz's Skratti build, how do they handle archers? It seems the lack of a shield would leave them vulnerable. I've used them before with Frost Brand and whatever shield I could afford and that was brutal.

You're gonna have a hard time fielding them effectively before const-4, really most of your options before that aren't much better than just using their default claws and as you say arrows/javelins are going to eat you alive if you're planning on attacking without support. Even at const-4 you've got a relatively fragile offense machine who's certainly not going to be soloing anything significant - the build I suggest at this point with no armor very much assumes no concentrated attack - Niefels are great for drawing fire and tanking it out, but you've still got some good well shielded hitpoint sinks in MA. For initial expansion you might try using a handful of hirdmen to draw the attacks while a quickened skratti does the damage from the flank...but that's going to be dicey. Once you've got some research leeway you're definitely going to want to tweak some of my default suggestions according to what you're expecting to face. Using shields trips up the very low gem usage target as you're looking at adding 50%-100% to the gems you need for each guy (not counting blood slaves), but obviously is the way to go anyway in some situations. One option to consider is that amulet which gives air shield, with a 20 protection and regen you're very resistant to occasional arrow hits. Nothing really beats a good shield though if you're expecting very heavy archer fire.