Counters to Niefelheim

[Nikolai]

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)

[Micah]

Good call on Gifts from Heaven.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

In the category of smackdown...

The original poster mentioned an army of giants... I'd made a mistake. I'd thought of them all as a giants, but the op was probably refering to the Niefel Giants, not Jotun Huskarls.

Well... I'll withdraw from commenting for now. My advice was geared to somewhat wimpier units. I don't have much experience facing the big guys with a regen.

[Folket]

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.

[Nikolai]

Folket, 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.

[HoneyBadger]

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.

[Saxon]

This won’t help in this game, but you might want to re-examine how you research. You state you have level 6 in almost all the areas. There are times that strategy is useful, but there are other times that you would prefer to have a certain high level spell and have built a strategy around it.

Next time you are creating your nation, think about where you want there magic to be in mid game. Look at the high level spells and how they will work with your nation. Then plan your research to get those spells early, focusing all your research on those key spells. What usually happens to me is that I get “the spell” and can implement a powerful strategy much earlier than if I spread my research around.

Many people plan an early, mid and late game plan, even as they are designing their god and nation. What you need and what you have available at each stage is different.

[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.