What is the easiest nation to play?

[KissBlade]

Well. The answer is ... IT SURE AS HELL ISN'T MAVERNI!!!

[Aezeal]

Hmmm well easiest to play is still Niefel

[Sombre]

I always suggest abysia because you can learn battle magic without risk of friendly fire, it's mostly in one school and you have a variety of very solid infantry.

[Tifone]

For EA, I'm on Aby too, I'd say if it's your first games - take an Imprisoned pretender with strong scales and you'll learn a lot on using the shielded troops to protect the damage dealing unshielded ones from arrows - use battlemagic - straightforward rituals...

Still for EA, Ulm is generally quite simple too (you can pick decent scales and a dormant Red Dragon to help expanding in Dragon form or eventually casting Flaming Arrows in human form), and also Niefelheim for starting to get an idea of blessed SCs, Helheim and Vanheim for strong blessed troops, Yomi for straightforward battle magic, stealthy troops and mid-game SCs which make use of self-buffs and equipment.

[JimMorrison]

You know, I often see them overlooked, but my roommate learned the game by focusing exclusively on Tir na n'Og. Their glamoured infantry is a bit pricey (25g like Van et al), but if you go a pure scales strat for gold income, you can really do anything you want with the game, as long as you keep your troop count up. Those Sidhe are quite potent, and can generally defeat far larger AI chaff hordes with little bother other than forming a line with your squads, and setting them to Fire Closest.

[das123]

I'd also suggest using a mod or two. 'Deadly Seas' will keep water nations out of your game and water will be an 'out of bounds' area. And I wrote a small utility called DomBak (link in my sig) that easily backs up each turn for you. That way you can try a strategy, see if it works, quickly restore any past turn and try something different.

When I was starting I only used to play as MA Man because it seemed familiar.

[Ironhawk]

Yikes, dont complicate the situation with mods if its the guy's first time.

I think its fair to say at this point that Ulm and Man are probably the most recognizable and straightforward nations. Thier units all perform obvious functions and their magic is quite limited in diversity.

Next step up would be nations like Abysia and Marignon - again they have straightforward units. But in those cases, you should focus solely on Fire magic (dont worry about astral and blood for the moment), because fire magic has the most traditionally recognizable spells like Fireball and whatnot.

Once you have some base dominion knowledge then you can wander off and try all the crazy diversity of nations that exist...

[MaxWilson]

I'd say Niefelheim, except that blessing troops can be complicated without H3 casters (you have to learn to Hold and Attack instead of just Attack, and how to assess how many priests you need to bless everyone). MA Ulm or EA Abysia is probably a good choice, for solid troops and good recruitable-anywhere battlemages.

-Max

[Tifone]

Hold and Attack? Maybe it's just me but I use Guard Commander much more A normal h2 jarl with two Blessing will take himself and up to 5 giants I'd say, little groups like that are more then enough to start seeing how little groups of sacreds can chew up every indie and most AI armies

[Ironhawk]

Using a bless does make for an obvious strategy. But you are talking about a new player here. Let him get used to regular units before even worrying about blesses at all. For us, having played the game often, it seems super obvious, but in reality blessing is like just another small wierd subsystem of dominions that you have to get to know.