Northgard – Strong Economy and Upgrades Build

A build order and guide focused around a strong economy and upgrades. A good basis for any victory condition.

Vrijwaring:  I don’t play multiplayer, so I’m not sure how well this build does against rushes, but generally I have a solid economy with upgrades/tools by year 802, which to my understanding is the timing of a standard rush. This works pretty nicely against the AI though.

Orde opbouwen

1. At the start, build a scout camp, wood camp, and a house.
2. Use two scouts to explore adjacent tiles, then put them on wood.
3. Grab a food tile, preferably one with iron or stone, but the food is the priority.
4. Build a food building and assign two villagers immediately.
5. Get a trading post and assign two villagers immediately. We need krowns for our warchiefs. Once built and assigned, use feasts as they’re available to increase krown production for warchiefs.
6. Build a Volund’s forge and another house. once you have the krowns, buy a warchief and start mining. If you have iron, mine 10 and build the horse’s unique relic. This will delay your 2nd warchief, but it’s worth it. If you have stone, consider saving it all until you have the Carpentry Mastery lore, but it’s not a requirement by any means.
7. House and Brewery are likely needed at this point so build those.
8. Scout out more and build a healer’s hut, you’ve probably got a decent number of wounded units from wolf invasions and the like.

Van hier, I typically start expanding towards the next stone and iron nodes as the ones near my start are usually depleted or close to it. Improve tools of the most populated first, Maar in het algemeen, you’ll be able to improve most, if not, all of them. Upgrade food buildings first and your necessities after that (gebruikelijk, krowns, make sure there is room for a market, upgrade markets and trade posts affect merchants and both of their workers are merchants).

With a solid economy, you can work towards any victory condition you want.

Lore

Algemeen, I go in a pretty fixed lore order with Horse.

• Metalcraft – By the time I get my first lore, I either have my 1st warchief, or I’m very close. De 60% mining and forging speed increase works very well for rushing a relic.
• Coinage – The additional krown income works nicely to pay for the relic (100) and your 2nd warchief (150).
• Excavation – The only time your warchiefs at this point aren’t mining is when improving tools since the relic has been built at this point. Dus +8 lore is a very large increase.
• Carpentry Master – Now that we have the 20% reduced cost for upgrades we can start upgrading all of our buildings and spending that stone we’ve been hoarding. By saving it all up we can upgrade 6 buildings for the cost of 5 had we not saved it all.
• From here I play to the situation. If I want a stronger economy I start down Sharp Axes through Hearthstone and Ancestral Influence. if I want a military I do Weaponsmith through Legendary Heroes (which is twice as good as normal since we have two warchiefs). When I need happiness is when I circle back for Quality of Life.

Ways to Improve From Here

Here are a few ways you could improve beyond this guide.

• Quality of Life Lore – This lore gives you +1 Happiness for each territory with an upgraded civilian building. You could plan around this from the start if you want to take it early, by ensuring that your town hall, food building, trading post, and house that are upgraded are all on different territories.
• Excavation Lore – By the time you reach this lore, if you’ve already mined your starting stone and iron then you could probably take Carpentry Mastery first and circle back to Excavation once you get the additional nodes from 500 Fame.
• Ancestral Influence Lore – If you plan to eventually take this lore you can plan out where to place it since that zone and adjacent zones receive a +5% production bonus. Aanvullend, you can save 10 iron and build a second one which may cover all of your mid-to-late game territories if planned well (and if circumstances allow for it).

Algemeen advies

• Invasies – If a wolf invades one of your tiles, just let your villagers fight it and pull the weak ones away so they aren’t focused on the wolf. This will be necessary to start well with any clan because you don’t want to have to spend early resources on a healer or military when you could be getting your warchief or economy improved instead. The most important thing is to not let your villagers die of these invasions. Even if a Draugr invades you can defeat it with 3 full health villagers if you pull them back so it targets the next one. It takes a bit of practice and awareness, maar jij kunt het!
• Huisvesting – Try to time houses so that you’re never at your housing capacity. As soon as you’ve got 1 population capacity left you should start building a house asap.
• Lore – Lore isn’t a priority for this strategy; Echter, I do occasionally throw a villager on a lore stone when one is available to get the +8 from Excavation a little sooner. Sometimes if the map has multiple stone circles, you can spend your stone on building a few extra lore stones and have your warchiefs mining, for a large lore income that competes with the clan of the boar.
• Fame – With all the upgrading you do with this build, you will have plenty of fame and are likely able to compete with a fame victory pretty easily if you squeeze in an alter and kill a neutral faction or two.