Yet another new person with a question...

[thejeff]

As opposed to Neifelhiem, where you have essentially 2 useful troop types? Skinshifters and Neifel Giants? And Neifel Giants only if you've taken the right bless. Everything else might have some use as meatshields for your mages, except that your mages work better as thugs than artillery.

It's also not immediately obvious how lousy the troops are. Some of them look quite nice, but they're expensive and giant, which means they'll be easily swarmed and due to the way the combat mechanics work, they get slaughtered.


So your troops are capital only. For anything else you really need to rely on thugs. Which is fine. It's what Neifelhiem is about. But it's hardly an easy into to the game.

Neifelhiem is also pretty unforgiving of mistakes. Especially if you're running a bless. The Neifels are expensive. If you screw up and lose a group that really hurts. If you wait to recruit too many of them to be sure, it'll take forever to expand.
And as was said, the PD is crap. That may be a good thing to learn in training for MP, but it can turn a minor setback into a rout. Especially since PD helps convince the AI not to attack, even if the PD wouldn't stop it. Having little or no PD is an invitation for a multi-front war.

On a larger scale, if you're thinking of this as hard-core training for MP, Niefelheim might be a good choice. A lot of things you have to do with this nation are the basics you'll need to learn for MP. For a more general introduction, I'd recommend anything that doesn't rely on thugs or a bless. Good solid troops, maybe archers and mages that work well as artillery. And no blood. Play around with the basics first, then branch out. This may not be the quickest way to good MP, but a lot of people play SP more than MP anyway.

And who cares about the complication of subtly different troop types? You're fighting the AI. It's bringing pile of random junk at you anyway. Recruit some of each, maybe buff them a bit and rain destruction down on the enemy from behind them. Ulm is actually good at that. And it works well in SP.

I'd really echo Foodstamp's advice from earlier. Pick something that sounds interesting or just pick a random nation. See what you can do with it. If it gets boring or too frustrating, switch to someone else. Maybe the nation that was beating you. If the game does grab you, you'll soon have more nations you want to try out than you have time to try them.