Counters to Niefelheim

[Edratman]

I am a little surprised that I haven't seen very many prior posts about problems with Nief giants before. As a SP, I have found them to be all but invincible against the AI. And I would just use a relatively inexpensive rainbow FWEN (4 to 6) bless.

In games when I would play myself, I found a death bless very effective in stopping invincible forces. You may not kill them right away, but if you can pile up 3 or 4 afflictions on a unit, they soon become quite vulnerable.

But this isn't useful to the chap who originally posted the question.

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.

[Folket]

I do not play with blesses against the AI. The AI has no way to adapt. Once you defeat him without looses you will not have any more looses.

[SelfishGene]

The real key to beating Niefelheim is making them build those Niefel Giants; it's almost impossible for Niefelheim to afford both building lots of giants and fortifying his conquests. When Niefelheim a dramatic reverse, a Giant based strategy tends to suffer total collapse syndrome and crumples not long afterwords.

[HoneyBadger]

That's a good point. You can't play Niefelheim successfully or competitively, purely by creating Niefel giants.

As tough as they are, they're too expensive to use as a main army until late game, and you've got lots of other tough, useful troops.

Niefel giants are there to make a good army unbeatable, they're not there to provide that army, all by themselves.

To do so would be like building a navy that consisted only of battleships.

[Sandman]

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.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Foul Air may be nice... Incredibly slow, but nice. And not readily available to you.

How good are these giants at sieges? Can they be starved easily? I know I tend to take death scales as Agartha and I have a province as low as 86 food- and this is only two provinces distant from my capital. Size five, 30 Niefels, 120 food? You could probably starve them.

On the other hand, with a strength of 25, they'd have a siege strength of 6.25 x 30, or 187. It would be difficult (though not impossible) to hold off that force, but if your armies will be defeated in the field, than why not fort up? (other than losing the chance to counter-raid).

[Meglobob]

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.

[Micah]

Quite right Folket, I'd completely forgotten about magic duel for some reason. That'd pretty much gank their MR though.

I still stand by Flaming Arrows though, they cut through E9N4 giants without any trouble at all...maybe the extra regen at N9 changes things though, I haven't tried it. A couple of volleys and their whole army is on fire though, which helps negate some of the regen. Even if you're doing some other strat dropping a FA only takes a single mage, so why not add it on?