[Felgar]

To all,

Thanks for your thoughts. Instead of answering 1 poster at a time I thought I�d address everything I can in a single post.

As to my scale picks, I agree they are probably less than optimum. I chose growth +3 because giants need to eat and the Niefels cost a fortune to build. Nothing increases income over time as well as growth +3 in my opinion.

Its spring in the year 11 in my game and my starting province has a population of 63,000 (I have no idea if bad events have killed any pop there). I think I started with about 25,000-30,000, so I�ve already doubled my population in about 10 years. Of course double pop means twice the gold and supplies as well, so this is far better than 21% gold for order +3 or 30% extra recourses for prod +3 since its gold cost that prevents me from building more Niefels, not recourses.

Sure order or Prod gives you gold right away, but over time you�ll make far more money with growth than either of those two. Growth is also giving me +6% gold, so order would only be +15% more gold without the growth. Also the extra 45% supplies (the manuals stated 60% is wrong) make life a lot easier until you can start making some broth pots.

I don�t like to take negative scales if possible, but I guess it�s possible to come up with a good negative scale strategy tailored to the race. I�m simply not familiar enough with the game to feel comfortable taking a negative scale.

The fire and astral picks were basically forced upon me as I wanted 10 nature picks no matter what. There just weren�t enough points left to get two other magic paths both to level 4, so I went with the magic path he already starts with some skill in (astral) and then chose fire since the giants have no fire mages.

After reading everyone�s posts here, perhaps earth would have been better, but my question is why? I haven�t seen a single giant fall over from fatigue yet, so is earth really that essential?

I tested this strategy with lower level nature picks with 10% or 15% regeneration, but lost far too many Niefel giants to make it a cost effective choice. If you�re going to go with lower level nature picks then don�t bother using Niefels as you�ll lose too many to make it cost effective.

You�d be better off using Skin Shifters instead for your main force. Their ability to shape change into werewolves when killed is pretty awesome in itself. A large pack of 40 Skin Shifters would do almost as well as 15 or 20 giants without the huge gold cost associated with the Neifels.

With 20% regeneration, your opponent has to do more than 14 damage to a unit every single turn if he hopes to eventually kill it. And with 50+ hit points, even then chances are the giant will kill you before you can whittle down his hit points enough to kill him.

The only time I lose giants right now is when they are massively outnumbered. If enough units swarm around them their total damage adds up (8 little guys doing 2 damage each is 16 a turn), that�s why I upped my army to 25 giants and 5 leaders, it guarantees I have a solid line across the entire field which prevents their opponents from swarming around to the sides and rear.

The +2 berserk guarantees units will not retreat since they inevitably go berserk long before their hit points are low enough to threaten death.

I�ve never seen my giant troops fall over from fatigue, so I can�t see Reinvigoration +2 being that big of a deal. By the time powerful magic rolls around, I can equip all my jarls with reinvigoration items so they won�t fall out due to hostile spells. I also doubt +2 reinvigoration will help the troops much against powerful mages later in the game.

I don�t know the magic system all that well yet so I could well be wrong, but the difference between 14 hit points a turn and less than 10 is too good to pass up. I was losing about 1 or 2 giants per province at the lower levels, but 20% seems to be the sweet spot. I now only lose a giant if my bless fails and I�ve seen these armies defeat huge enemy armies filled with powerful troops.

The only time I ever lost with this strategy so far was to some kind of fear spell. I had initially bunched up my commanders in the center of a large squad, but the spell forced all my commanders to flee and my army fled after them (no one died, they just ran away). That�s why I split my squads into small groups and spread them out. If one or two Jarl�s flee due to a nasty spell, you still have a chance at winning.

I should also stress I play with level 9 neutrals and the hardest possible research, so if you play with default settings large armies like this won�t be needed. But with level 9 neutrals I�ve seen over 30 knights plus heavy infantry and longbowmen both with squads of about 50 each, so a small force of giants at that level won�t work for tougher provinces.

Against militia or other low damage troops you can probably start an earlier expansion than I did, but be warned Barbarians are your nemesis if you don�t have large numbers of giants. They do enough damage that they can wipe out 5-10 giants easily even if they are 100% all blessed. Those blasted great swords and mauls do lots of damage and can chew up giants better than most other neutral troop types if they can gang up on them.

As to the Skrattis I too use them for bloodhunting and research. Their werewolf form allows them to command more troops and gives them regeneration abilities, but what good is the wolf form? Does anyone have a use for the wolf form? I thought perhaps wolves come to their aid in battle or something, but I�ve never used them in wolf form yet so I don�t know.

That�s a good trick with the scout. I prophetized the starting general so he could go around with my magic site search party and search for holy. But I like your scout idea better. He can head into neutral territory and get the cold scale up for the early attacks, so perhaps only 10 or 15 giants would be good for a starting army. I�ll test it the next time I play a game as the Niefels.

About the leaders in the front row. I tried putting them 1 pixel behind or in the center, but it scrambles the setup and I had trouble getting everyone blessed. The above formation is the only way I could get everyone densely packed enough that 95% of the time 100% of them get blessed with 5 casters casting. If there is even 1 more rank of giants (3 rows instead of just 2), it screws up the casts.

This is also the reason why I set them up all the way in the backfield. The enemy archers that can reach that far generally miss and I haven�t suffered any afflictions by archer fire yet.

All my Jarl�s afflictions came from melee combat, that is why I have now switched their orders to bless, bless, bless, cast spells. Early on they don�t really have many spells to cast, but now that all my research is up to level 6 they are better off as spell casters now than melee guys. In future games I may just nix using Jarl�s in melee period. I have 5 heroic Jarls with afflictions now, and they do nothing but research until I can heal them. Not a game breaker, but a nuisance for sure.