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Fire Snakes also work pretty well vs. Niefels.
A N3 oreiad have 18% chance to charm a Niefel giant. With eye of the void (5 astral pearls) it is increased to 30%. For the cost of fielding 30 niefel giants and a niefel jarl you should be able to field 10 oreiads with eyes of the void. Just put the mages close to the enemy with chaff with hold and attack orders in front, so that they are within your 20 range. With three giants deserting every turn you should be able to win the battle. Your average Oreiad should be able to cast charm 5 times before passing out. Those with nature random should be able to cast it 9 times. You can also forge rune smashers and spell focus with your mystics. With spell focus, rune smasher and eye of the void your Oreiads will charm 54% of the time.
With storm and storm power your Oreaiads with air random should be able to cast living clouds twice. On average it will take the niefel giant 13 attacks to kill an air elemental. Slightly less if the elemtal is attack several time a round. So if you manage to summon 30 air elemental, the giants will be stuck for a while. The air elementals will do AN damage and will not be hurt by lightning spells you cast. Air elementals will also work well as chaff if you are casting charm. You can give a crystal matrix to an Oreiad with air random. Use her with 8 mystics casting communion slave. After storm power each casting of living clouds will give you 7 air elementals. Theoretically you should be able to cast living clouds 8 times before your communion is to tired. But the AI will probably burn to many gems for that to happen. On the other hand if the AI burn more gems then needed you will get 8 elementals. -> Given that Niefel's sacreds should have a 19 MR after Antimagic goes off I really can't get behind an MR-spell based counter to them. It might work in this case since the Niefel player is new, but it's not a good general strategy. -> Strange, no one seems to have listed my favorites. Mages with two earths are common randoms in Arco. So mages with one fire and one astral. (With a Oreiad casting Wind guide and one mage casting Light of the Northern Star) Two earth mages: Summon Earthpower, Gifts from the Sky Fire/Star mages: Astral Fires Oreiads: Lightning bolt/Thunder strike Dead, dead giants. Forgot to say: All above are armour negating, or don't matter (150 damage kills giants, or anything) -> For Niefelheim to cast anti magic you would need a rare S2 Gygja or a Gygja casting power of the spheres and then sleeping a turn before casting anti magic. Arco should be able to kill the Gygja with magic duel. I would like to compare lightning spells to fire spells against Niefel giants. Niefels with E9 blessing have 18 in protection. Could be more in cold provinces. Fire darts, evocation lvl 1. 3 x 15 damage against niefel giants. That is 18 damage after armour. 20 fatigue. F1 range 25+ precision 4 lightning bolt, evocation lvl 2. 14 damage 10 fatigue, A2 range 35+ precision 4 Two out of three mystics will be able to cast fire darts. I do not see why I would like to recruit an oreiad for 400 gold to get some more range over a mystic for 150 gold. Seems to me that most things will be cost effective against niefel giants this late into to the game. Earlier in the game it would have been hard to mass the mages needed. -> One does recruit Oreiads rathers than Astrologers in capital because one can recruit Astrologers everywhere else. It's nice to have many Oreiads. Once you got, and giants are stomping your troops, you just use them. When giants come, and you have research, you send a castle of mages to the fight, and each script for whatever is best. (EE) -> summon earthpower, gifts from the sky (FS) -> astral fires (with Light of the northers star) (FF) -> phoenix power, falling fires (F) -> fire darts (AAA) -> thunderstrike (AA) -> lightning bolt (NN) -> thorn storm (won't hurt much, but will waste a move) (S) -> soul slay (-) -> mind burn Last ones suck, but hey, you fight with what you got. If you have bow and flaming arrows, you are better with them on the field than with them a province apart. -> I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, when it comes to air counters. Roughly a fourth of all Niefel Jarls will have access to air magic, and that's roughly enough to ruin your day if all you're trying is lightning bolts and shock spells. The biggest weakness Niefel has is it's provinces. Province defense sucks bigtime, you need a huge amount of gold and supplies to purchase and field your troops, and it's very hard to defend that huge area with those few, expensive troops. So, the best advice is to attack the infrastructure-hit them in their income and their bellies. Spellwise, curse works really well. They can also be Feared out of existence, so consider horror helmets. They have really good morale, but not ironclad, and less ways to boost it-no morale, low numbers-than other nations. Etheriality is great: 1 because if they don't have fire bless, then it makes your troops a lot harder to hit, and 2, if they DO have it, then you don't even need to research it, it's already done it's part since Fire bless is not the best bless out there for Niefels. It's not bad, but it's definitely not 1st choice. Barbarians are terrific, and fairly cheap, against small parties of giants, or individual Niefel Jarls-even really tough, boosted, SC Niefels. Get enough barbarians together, supported by heavy calvaly, and you can pick Niefels off. Wolf Tribe warriors are even better, in numbers. Provinces being hard for nIEFELHEIM to defend over a large area, also leaves them somewhat vulnerable to dom-killing. The cheapest Niefel priest is 200 gold a pop, so consider a praying war, especially since every unit they use to counter you is another few pounds of gold you've just committed to *not* building an unstoppable army. It's worked against me, and it should work against your opponent. Finally, consider mass-producing the shields that inflict curse and blindness every time they're struck. These are great to pepper in with your chaff. So are medallions of vengeance and any cursed items you have lying around that a Niefel Jarl might pick up. -> The advice previously given that you attack Nief's provinces is probably the easiest to implement. You should be able to take 2 or 3 provinces for every one that you lose. It is a permutation of Russian strategy where you retreat to win, but it is effective. No one likes to lose 2 provinces for one, so that should reverse the advance. Then you will have the time to acquire the manpower and research to use the spells that were suggested. A good variant of this is to attack a province just behind the unstoppable force. Set the tax rate to 200. If they turn to attack you, you just keep your army moving through his provinces avoiding battle and he wastes his good army taking back his provinces unopposed. Another stategy that might work is to put up a castle in a wasteland or marsh if it has good blocking capability. Fill the castle with enough troops and engineers to offset the besiegers, give cauldrens and wines sacks to every commander and hope your opponent is foolish enough to starve himself into serious affliction issues. If this works it also buys you time to acquire effective head-on counters. -> A very effective tactic against Niefelhiem is ritual spells which cause unrest. Get unrest to over 100 in their capital and keep it there. Boom, no more Frost Giants. Rain of Toads, Raging Hearts, Plague of Locusts, Baleful Star, Blight and Hurricane are the spells you want. -> I had a 50 or so giant army of sacreds with a N8, E9 bless destroyed very easily by EA Ctis casting darkness and spamming raise skeletons. Up till then the army had been virtually invincible. EA Niefelheim is powerful but has many exploitable weaknesses. Many of which have been listed already. EA Nielfelheim can recruit specific troops for sieging, the rock hurlers. They get a decent siege bonus. -> Comparatively, although Niefelheim seems strong because you get big huge tough giants etc. they're actually the weakest of the Heims. The Niefels themselves are far too specialized to taking on individual, tough foes with their axes, one at a time, but they're so expensive that you're pretty much going to be throwing them against masses of troops. It's like outfitting someone with an elephant gun and having him go shoot rats. To expand upon this: the fact is, giants-especially Niefels, do NOT need to be specialized. They're big, tough, powerful, etc. They're basically tanks. To maximize their abilities and strengths, they should be equipped much differently than they are, with metal armor-preferrably scale, blunt impact weapons with spread effect-appropriately designed maces, flails, hammers, etc., and mounts, to increase their speed and protect their biggest weakness-their knees. It's doubtful they'd even see a real need to invent a combat axe or a sword, let alone use them exclusively in combat. Axes and swords are far too precise of weapons, not to mention fragile and expensive, and they do different kinds of damage-axes increase damage from impact, swords are versatile-than what such large beings would want to do in combat. Smaller giants might use those kinds of weapons for some combat purposes, but for Niefels, it's really inappropriate and wasteful. Swords and axes of that size would become stuck in bodies, especially armored bodies and mounts, which would leave the Niefel vulnerable and off balance in the middle of a combat. -> I disagree that Niefel is the weakest heim, especially now that glamour is nerfed. Firstly, the cold aura actually does kill people. It takes a while, but once it kills it kills a lot of people at once. Secondly, who kills large numbers of enemy troops with *swords*? This is a magic game with armies - you kill the enemy army with Falling Frost, or Soul Vortex or the like. That said, I agree that Niefel Giants are not that hot in the late game. They cost 150 gold for which you could buy an independent mage who could cast useful and destructive offensive spells. However, the Niefel Jarl, at only 500 gold, is still a bargain! You can get way more of them than any equivalent thug chassis, and five of them at once, equipped with items, will devastate equivalent late game armies. And with minimal effort you can outfit them with winged shoes, and they switch to utterly unstoppable raiders with ease. I should be clear that I am in-no-way calling for Niefelheim to be nerfed even a little bit. However, the other EA nations should get, I dunno, national summons or combat spells and things that make every one of them an equally fearsome proposition. -> Depends on how you equip the Jarls. Anticipating combat with astrals, my Jarls are MR 29, and could be higher. That means with a meager penetration basis of 15, you need to beat my DRN by 14 points. Odds of success are lt. 1%. Jarls have the same weaknesses as any other thug chassis and if you don't diversify you will lose, it's true. For example, in the above combat obviously I'd want to bring counters of my own: astral tempest maybe, undead mastery. So, yeah, Jarls are not *unbeatable*. They remain, well into the late game, a force significant enough to force your enemies to contort their strategy as-described. You can take advantage of this in turn, which is the strength of LG Niefelheim. That and the raiding, once they fly. And this is a 4X game, so the provinces you conquered earlier on give you more money and gems than your opponents, an advantage which propogates into the late game. So I don't think late game Niefelheim is weak. I'll agree that it is not as devastating as early game Niefelheim. A somewhat more successful counter I found was - F2 mystics spamming pillar of fire, Oreiads spamming Charm backed up by the penetration suite, and a *huge* communion (boosted the penetration bonus all the way to +8). I got a couple of his Jarls, and since he was MR-focused rather than fire focused, I even managed to keep them as I killed the rest (pity my bless sucked.) I still lost that game, though, as Ermor then proceeded to eat me alive with darkness + life after death (all of his magicians turned into soulless - who can then see in the dark! Ouch). -> 8.19.5 Niefelheim - Who¿s afraid of the big bad wolf? Article Author: Baalz It¿s really a shame that the Niefel giants are so good, if they were just a tad less awe inspiring Niefelheim would be more feared than it is. Come again? Yep, that¿s exactly what I meant, the Niefel giants as they are tend to hinder Niefelheim. Anybody who¿s had to fend off a triple blessed Niefel rush is probably thinking I¿ve lost it, but stop a minute and consider how often Niefelheim is a scary late game power. Those Niefel giants start being a whole lot less scary as research ramps up, and the mandatory dual (and often triple) blessing that you have to take for this nation really hits the opportunity costs not to mention the immense costs of each of those jolly blue giants. Bad scales, crappy PD, focusing on capital only troops, struggling outside of your dominion and lackluster research all conspire to make the giant usually fall hard before the race is over. I mean really, what the heck do you *do* with Niefelheim once construction is done being researched? Let me introduce you to the other Niefelheim, the one geared to win the game rather than scare the crap out of everyone for only the first couple years. Niefelheim has some amazing tools in its chest which are usually completely overlooked in the all consuming quest to field the most optimized Niefels. First, consider that regardless of your bless Niefel giants are not what you want to use for indie expansion. Blasphemy, I know. Now I admit, Niefel giants make great indie stompers, but my goodness don¿t you realize you¿re paying retail!?!?. You¿ve got another all star player on your roster who would be a defining characteristic for this nation if only those big blue spotlight hoggers weren¿t around. I¿m speaking of course of the Jotun Skinshifters. Now, on first glance it¿s maybe not apparent how incredibly awesome this guy is, but consider the following. He¿s got 35 hitponts, then he changes into A GIANT FRICKING WEREWOLF. This second form has 48 more points, raising the total to bring this guy down to 83 points (compared to a Neifel¿s 66¿but of course you¿re fielding two skinshifters per Neifel so it¿s more like 166 to 66). Further consider that they regenerate quite nicely in both forms without requiring a bless, and that 11 body protection (human sized troops have trouble hitting giants in the head I think) starts looking pretty nice when you realize how many times they have to be hit round after round by spear wielding humans (the overwhelming bulk of indie troops) further compounded by that length 5 Jotun spear and 12 attack skill (which quickly builds up with stars) doing a good job of repelling. Of course they¿re nowhere near as tough as the Neifels in a cold-3 fight, but how much of your initial expansion does that describe? I¿m not exaggerating when I say just 3 of these guys can reliably conquer weaker indies, and 6 of them will take any but the toughest. They don¿t need a blessing so can be herded by cheap indie commanders and require barely any resources so there¿s no reason at all you can¿t rapidly be fielding 3 expansion parties per turn from your capital. Try that with Niefels! Now, I would like to point out that they have no shields and can struggle against heavy archer concentrations, but just use one or two Jotun Militia set slightly ahead of them set to hold and attack as arrow catchers your werewolves will run forward and do the killing while your otherwise useless militia does an outstanding job of completely ignoring any arrows. Now, you don¿t have to think too hard to come up with some very, very nasty ways to use these werewolves as your research progresses using Gygja buffers. Protection/Wooden warriors brings these guys up to a 15 protection in human form which given their regeneration essentially means they can¿t be stopped by normal troops in any reasonable numbers. You¿re using them in smaller numbers, so body ethereal & luck likewise tip the scale in their regeneration¿s favor, bringing them well up into the ¿absurdly hard to stop¿ range using fairly modest research. They¿ve even got a 14 MR, so are relatively resistant to typical big unit counters. Now note, you can do all that with Gygja buffers, but it¿s usually not too hard to line up some indie n1 and s1 mages to do all that buffing which is a good bit more economical that is until you start getting into will of the fates/mass protection/mass regeneration (yes, it stacks nicely) range¿.but then I¿m guessing you¿re not gonna balk at splurging on a Gygja or two there. These guys hit like a ton of bricks from turn one and only get better as research progresses, and you¿re basically only constrained by gold to recruit them so as your nation grows you can rapidly recruit a fearsome force in one turn if an unexpected threat materializes. They¿re capital only, but costing 5 resources and not being holy even with sloth-3 you can pretty much have as many as your heart desires. So, now freed from having to cater to those big blue prima donnas lets see how this versatile nation unfolds. Another great strength to Niefelheim is that the cold from their dominion pushes out past their dominion. This lends itself fabulously to having a strong dominion push, even if your neighbors manage to push back to a dominion stalemate they¿re gonna be bleeding gold from the temperature drop all along their border. If (in the much more likely case with you actively pushing your strong dominion) you manage to push your dominion into their territory it doesn¿t take much to cover half their nation in a wintery blanket with devastating impact to their economy. Note, using skinshifters instead of Niefels also means that while fighting in your dominion is nice, it¿s not crippling to bring the fight outside of it so pop those temples he¿s trying to put up outside his castles! Now, since we¿re intending to actively push our dominion to the unbelievers anyway, let¿s consider the impact of the scales. Ideally, we want a dominion that is great for us and terrible for anybody else. Cold-3 is obviously mandatory. Luck-3 I think fits wonderfully here, as the way the game mechanics work a hostile dominion with luck functions as misfortune (my good luck is my opponent¿s bad luck). So pushing our lucky dominion is pushing misfortune-3 to them! Death -3 I think also fits perfectly in that it doesn¿t really hurt us too much but death-3/cold-3 scales make plenty of armies get reeeeeal hungry, and makes old mages real irritating. Sloth-3 probably won¿t hurt your neighbors too much, but it¿s basically free points and it¿s not gonna help them any. Finally, we¿ll want fairly standard magic-1 and order-3 scales so we¿re very happy to have our dominion all over our own territory (they won¿t benefit our neighbors). So, we¿re pushing cold deep into enemy territory, and death-3/misfortune-3/sloth-3 following on its heels accompanied by all those really nifty random events those scales unlock. Meanwhile we¿re sitting pretty in an order-3/luck-3/magic-1 dominion not really noticing the death/sloth scales. Huff and puff and blow that icy wind straight to the bone. BTW gold income events from luck will hopefully supercharge your initial skinshifter expansion you¿re only constrained by gold. So, without having to bend over backwards to afford a ridiculous blessing lets see what doors our pretender can open. Niefelheim has some pretty decent magic diversity, landing level 3s in Death, Nature, Blood & Water, with a few level 2 astral Gygjas and a Niefel Jarl or two with level one air. The glaring deficiency there is earth, which also of course fits nicely with our sacred troops (which we will eventually be using). Still, instead of going for the very expensive E9 bless, lets say the primary point is magic diversity and go with a much more modest E4 which will give your Niefels plenty of staying power in cold-3, we¿re planning on having gygja¿s buff regeneration when it matters anyway. This covers the most urgent thing your pretender needs to do, but to really get diversified into earth you¿re gonna want to start out awake so you can site search in the turns before you really need your pretender to be doing other things. This fits well with an early dominion push, an awake pretender pushes your dominion early in a way that¿s hard to match. Looking at using a high dominion score and an awake pretender, I originally really wanted to use the bog mummy few things are as nice as a high hitpoint immortal SC on turn one. Thing is, I can¿t think of a nation that needs extra SC chasises less than Niefelheim and there are other things your pretender can contribute which add much more. Taking an awake master lich with a dominion score of 9 and magic paths of E4 D5 S4 buys us a lot of things. First, as mentioned you start right out the gate pushing your dominion and site searching. Having a W random Skratti and a 3N gygja accompany you on site searching and you¿ve got a very impressive spread of E/D/S/W/B/N. Next, your immortality and astral magic folds right in with your intent to push your dominion far and wide you¿ll be teleporting in to lay the smack down wherever needed with no fear of death. Speaking of which, the smack you can lay down is impressive imagine something like soul drain, undead hoard (yep, those are Jotun skeletons), marble warriors, weapons of sharpness, darkness. Or invulnerability, earthquake X4. Or power of the spheres, soul vortex, bone grinding X3. Or use him to drop in and buff those skinshifters for important fights you thought they were tough with barkskin? Or¿well, just use your imagination, there¿s loads of fun stuff to do in battle and he¿s like the energizer bunny he¿just¿keeps¿going. Now, this pretender is going to give us several very nice things outside of combat as well. Obviously earth magic gives us dwarven hammers which is a massive benefit to cranking out large swarms of SCs. Combining with the astral gives us a very important access to crystal coins low and behold with a coin and cap each of those very common astral-1 gygja¿s is up to that critical S-3 level suddenly becoming a very capable air drop thugs and able to spam vengeance of the dead. The less common S2 random Gygjas are now gatewaying troops around (there goes the last objection to tying yourself to cap only skinshifters) and laying down will of the fates which is kinda nice for highly regenerating troops. Crystal coins are huge for Niefelheim, you¿ll be spending several turns forging them with your pretender. Crystal shields also work great for the widely diverse Gygjas, not only allowing the lowly S1 gygja to lay down will of the fates, but also making it easy (along with a thistle mace and moonvine bracelet) to lay down all those really big nature buffs. Another thing you¿ll be doing with your pretender which is not typical pretender work is summoning ghosts. With a skull staff and cap plus ring of sorcery (which you¿re gonna want anyway) your pretender gets up to an impressive D8 and can spit out ghosts very economically. Ghosts are generally not the most cost effective thing that you can spend D gems on, but they are a marriage made in heaven for skinshifters. If you position your troops right your size 2 ghosts will filter in among your size 4 skinshifters. The skinshifters, being larger will take more of the hits, while the ghost¿s etherealness, high hitpoints and life drain will give them incredible stamina for the amount of attacks each is taking. What you¿ve essentially just done is not only add another damage sink to make your skinshifters last longer, you¿ve added a cold and fear aura to your skinshifters¿! Throw in that wooden warriors you were gonna cast anyway and the ghosts are every bit as tough to bring down as the skinshifters. Half a dozen skin shifters plus a like number of ghosts and a buffing mage is *terribly* effective for the cost. You can of course summon ghosts with mages other than your pretender, but it¿s tough to scoff at getting ghosts for about one gem apiece. Used like this ghosts make great counters to any SCs which don¿t have morale-30, they¿ll whack a few skinshifters then quickly get surrounded by ghosts and run off with a negative 20 something morale. Download 5.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
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