Hi, I'm new! And.. uh.. help?

[HoneyBadger]

You can never have too many giants...providing you set the game to +300% supply, so they don't turn into a plague of giant diseased locusts. Niefel's easy to play, but (and this is coming from a fellow newbie who also started with Niefelheim) watch that you have lots and lots of province defense. Castles and kindof important, as you expand, but you only need one castle for maybe every 12 provinces that you're investing a lot in. Also, don't overlook those boulder-throwers, they have higher accuracy than javellineers, which is good so you don't have to worry as much about creaming your Niefel Jarl with friendly fire. And you can get away with not hand-scripting mages, but be very careful about troop-placement. You won't have a lot of troops compared to everyone else, so you want to try to make every one count. Right now I'm using somewhere around 24 Niefel jarls, each protected by 3 skin-shifters, in a line across the right side of the battlefield, with boulder-throwers directly behind. I have the Jarls scripted to cast bless, then holy avenger, then breath of winter, which gives my throwers time to hit the enemy, without putting my jarls in harm's way. Spellcasters I have further back, in two groups, also heavily guarded by skin-shifters. That way, flying enemies get divided up if they want to attack my rear. My provinces are at between 40 and 60 defense, and I only hold maybe 14 at this time, with two castles since I'm getting ready to crush a neighbor. I looked at the Fenrir as a pretender, but I personally prefer either monolith, cyclops, or great enchantress. Vampire queen is another possibility, but I prefer to have crushingly bad scales and extremely high bless/magic. Also, I try to ignore the basic Niefel giant. They're great troops to have, but I'd rather spend the money on a Niefel jarl that I can put time in to, get more and varied use out of, and directly improve.

[HoneyBadger]

By the way, if you don't want to worry too much about magic for the first several turns of the game, create a pretender with high nature bless-it's a good idea for Niefel anyway, and then just set it on enchantment until you get Gift of Health. Casting that early in the game will help you deal with afflictions-which can be devastating to a giant army-and grant extra hit points to your already buff units. It also eases the effect of aging on my Gygjas. That's one of the reasons I use Niefel Jarls, because they make great researchers, on top of being some of the best fighting units in the game.

Currently I'm using a Cyclops with -3 in all scales (I don't have to worry about cold, and for a relatively easy time, I set money, resources, and supply to +300, which nixes out most of the disadvantages of bad scales, and grants me a little bonus to magic resistance, also important to Niefel Jarls. Curse is the bane of the Niefel Jarl, it's worse than a horror-mark, since one of my stronger Niefel Jarls, guarded by three skinshifters, took out the Devourer of Heroes quite easily.) My cyclops has 10 water, 9 earth, 9 nature, and 4 astral, with a dominion of 5.

The thing about Niefelheim is that it takes patience to win. It's easy to make a good start with them, but if you overextend yourself badly, you're doomed. Slow and steady is the way to go, building up your nation into a force which eventually become overwhelming.

[Nick_K]

Don't forget to build lots of temples. I've seen more than a few posts in Dom3 and Dom2 where new players have lost the game because their dominion became too weak.
Against the AI, I first conquer a few provinces - usually all the ones connected to my capital - and then expand at a slower pace while building up a province defence of 10 in every province or 20 in ones which border an enemy and putting a temple in every single province. It's worth cutting your troop production down a bit to build the temples.

Also, choose your enemies carefully. Underwater nations are a bit tricky to defeat when playing as land ones so you might want to avoid fighting them at first.

[Endoperez]

About the nations suggested:

Ulm, EA: nice troops, nice mages. Blade Wind rocks in the Early Age, so aim for Evocation. Some Conjuration or Construction could help after that, to get either Earth Boots (item) or Earth Power (spell) to boost your mages' Earth further. Your troops have nice protection for EA, and can deal with heavy-protection units quite well.

Ulm, MA: very tough troops, decent mages. You can do only few things, but you do those well. In Evocation, you can go for Magma Bolts, Blade Wind and eventually Magma Eruption. Conjuration and Construction are good as well. You wil probably want other types of units, like archers, because your units can have trouble actually killing your enemies. Also, you NEED Production 3, but thankfully will lose quite little from Drain 3.

Man, MA
Build Longbowmen and protect them with infantry. Alteration up to Wind Guide would work really well with your longbow armies.

Arcos, EA and MA:
Astral works well with Thaumaturgy. Random elemental magics work with many different paths, including Evocation. You have good heavy infantry units in both ages, and might want to try tramplers (Chariots or Elephants). The latter are often risky, especially because they have a tendency to rout OVER your commanders.

[Gandalf Parker]

Its interesting to see how some people overlap "easy to learn" with discussions about winning. Oh well, there is a reason for "Those that can, do. And those that cant, teach."

[Graeme Dice]

Taqwus said:
Ermor, Late Era (very VERY different from everything else)

There's absolutely nothing wrong with learning the game as Ermor, and you might as well play it against the AI where it's a powerful nation, instead of against people where it's not.

[curtadams]

I'd recommend middle age Man or Marignon for learning. They field good versions of the basic Dominions army, which is infantry in front of archers, with flanking cavalry to sweep up stragglers. Both have access to a decent magic set, with army enhancers, magic items, and summons, although the mix varies, so you get to play around with magic without having to know how to use it. Ulm is mostly a good start but IMO the magic is too bland apart from items, which requires good supercombant/thug design to use.

Vanheim has no archers but their high-defense infantry and cavalry are incredibly strong so it's also a good nation to learn on. It's a good nation to learn thug construction because the glamourous commanders are so strong.

Some trickier things to avoid:
Trampler nations: Arco, Patala
Blood nations: Mictlan early or late, Marignon late
Funky Dominions: Ermor or late R'lyeh
Cavalry nations: late Tien Chi

Many of these are quite strong but using their strength requires special tricks with magic or army layout.

[Taqwus]

Hmmm. I should offer one caveat with Sauromatia; it also applies to Pythium.

One has to be careful with hydras.

[Turin]

The easiest nation to play vs the AI is probably late era R´lyeh.
1)You are a water nation, so the AI can´t really invade you.
2)You get tons of freespawns, so the AI doesn´t want to declare war on you.
3)Setbacks don´t really hurt you, because of the many freespawns, which replace losses easily.
4) Your mages are very good at astral magic, which makes it easier to branch into other paths with rings of sorcery/wizardry to try out more stuff. Acashic record makes sitesearcing easy.
5) Void gate is a lot of fun.

Just make sure you take a dominion 10 pretender with good scales and you should be fine.

[nonsense]

Thanks for all the replies; judging by the fact that most everyone is recommending something different, I probably can't go too far wrong.

I have to say, avoiding R'lyeh is... well, it's something that won't last too long. Unleashing an army of shapeless ctulhoid horrors is probably what sold me on the game. Still, they sound fairly tricky, so I'll play around with more straight-forward stuff first.

So, to summarize:

1) I should research as much as I possibly can.
2) Temples everywhere.
3) Play a "standard" infantry-archer-cavalry race at first.