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While I appreciated that Norselands was not just a simple re-skin like Shogun, I felt that the changes did not promote any appreciable change in tactics. Norselands is basically Two Crowns except the Catapult and Balista tower was eliminated. In exchange, we got Berzerkers and the Fire Tower. The Fire Tower is effectively a catapult stand-in. Its job function is identical in that it is supposed to mow down hordes of small Greed using Area of Effect attacks that would otherwise overwhelm even a very large army of Archers. The Balista was similar in that it had a piercing attack component but also dealt high damage to chunk down high HP units like Breeders. There is no equivalent for this in Norselands.
The Berzerker has an AoE/Pierce like attack allowing it to mow down waves of small Greed but struggles against Breeders. Moreover, it is a unit that can be damaged and with a high cost for deployment (10 coins total from Vagrant to Berserker), there is simply no reason for a player to sink that kind of investment when they get murdered by Breeders who will consistently show up in attack waves past Year 1. The lack of a viable high damage unit means that the player is stuck resorting to Archers...lots and lots of Archers backed by Area of Effect attacks to kill the small Greed so they don't soak up the arrow fire and instead can pour mass volleys into the Breeders.
The active defence option of the Shield Wall also makes little sense economically. Only available once you obtain Squires and can shield up sufficient numbers of Archers/Builders, they again offer little incentive. Squires are incredibly weak being able to only absorb 5 or 6 hits max even if fed the maximum number of coins before they lose their kit. Knights are much better able to consistently hold back and delay even Breeders, they represent a massive investment both in building the best Town Centre, and having to buy the upgrade at the Swordsmith. The defence of two Knights in Shield Wall mode backed by a large contingent of Archers can indeed stop a very big wave even into Year 2, the economic cost of constantly having to replace coins on the Knights makes little sense. Why not just pay more in building Ironwood Walls and a Fire Tower which offers effectively a permanent and invulnerable defence outside of Blood moon attacks? Yes, you still need a ton of Archers to support but you would need those Archers as well in a Shieldwall/Berzerker defence and you never have to pay upkeep.
The new enemy, the Armoured Snail/Crab, also does little to entice the player into building Berzerkers or using Shield Wall. While invulnerable to arrow fire until they attack, in which case they turn belly up and can be shot, the most cost-effective way to manage this is to simply have walls that can withstand multiple hits from the Snail and kill all the small Greedlings with fire before they can do enough chip damage on the walls so the wall can survive the hits from the Snail. I personally believe this enemy be a design failure.
It is important to note that a defence based on Knights/Squires, Berzerkers, and Archers -rather than walls, Firetower, and massed Archers - not only represents a constant coin expenditure to maintain and repurchase equipment, but it is vulnerable to the "death spiral" phenomenon where if your income ever falls behind the upkeep of the defence, you are essentially going to die. A defence based on Walls, Archers, and the Firetower is far more economical. Walls are repaired for free every day, and even if they knock down a wall, it is only 5 coins to replace no matter what tier the wall was.
All of this points to having players do exactly one thing. Rush as fast as possible to get the best walls as soon as possible to build a defence that is both effective and long-lasting. The faster you rush from one Island to the next, the more effective the walls are since the Greed power level scales with time passed and nothing else. Once you hit Island 5, your defence is impenetrable for the rest of the game and it becomes trivial outside of returning to old Islands or heading off to Island 6.
The difficulty has been lamented by many players in the forums. I personally think this is exaggerated. If you were slow in Two Crowns and tried to rely only on Archers and Towers....you were as dead meat just like in Norselands. In fact, Two Crowns can be argued to be more difficult than Norselands because the player has very few direct damage options in Two Crowns. There is only the Lizard available and I personally just preferred the Griffon. All the damage output that has to be done in Two Crowns must come from your NPCs meaning that you have to plan your defence well and recruit quickly and efficiently and build the correct buildings. You needed Pikes to counter wall hoppers, you needed covered towers to help against Floaters, you needed Balista to help punch down Armoured Greed etc. If you messed up and they broke through, the Greed can very quickly rampage into the heart of your base and there is little the player can do about it.
In Norselands, every NPC from the Builder to the Farmer will fight the Greed and do 1 HP of damage. You can give Archers and Builders shields to give them 2 HP and allow them to fight even longer. A breakthrough by Greed in Norselands very rarely results in deep penetration into your base as long as you have been recruiting constantly and equipping your NPCs with shields. This is not to mention having Squires and Knights tank once the wall goes down (why send them out when they can just tank afterwards if actually needed????). Even if you mistimed your build, the fact that a player can obtain two separate upgrades that allow them to deal massive amounts of Area of Effect damage means the punishment for making a mistake is low. My Monarch was responsible for probably 30-40% of all Greed kills in my One Reign. It could have been more if I wasn't lazy at times and just sat in the base instead to watch.
Instead, the difficulty only really occurs in the first couple of days upon landing on an Island. Since the Monarch cannot guard both sides at once, the player has to figure out and rapidly build up a strong side defence that will hold long enough for them to bring their own high damage abilities before they can kill your early base camp and rob you of your income. Whereas in Two Crowns, the opening days were relatively easy and the difficulty grew higher as the days passed, Norseland front-loads the difficulty but once you are set up with your Firetowers and Ironwood walls, the rest of the Island is now a trivial task to clear and only involves taking the time to leapfrog the walls and towers out until you can kill the main Greed camp.
Part of this is the poor balance in the design of the units as mentioned as well as the upgrades. The Lightning Hammer and the Black Horse (fire) are overwhelmingly the best item combo in the game. Nothing else comes even close. While it may be possible to survive the first few days on a new Island with one or none of either upgrade, doing so makes the game significantly harder - if not impossible - to survive on a One Reign attempt. It felt like the entire game was balanced around the player having access to those two upgrades. Even if it is possible to do it without one or both (I am convinced you to need AT LEAST the Black Horse) doing so puts the player at significant risk.
The fact that the Berzerker is also not obtainable until more walls are built up is also problematic. Even if you wanted to use Berzerkers as a defence on day one and two of a new Island so you can mow down tons of small Greed, you probably can't afford it on a new island's economy. Even if you could there is no guarantee the building will spawn on both sides in the limited amount of time you have to build up.
The need for the Monarch to deal a significant amount of damage personally in the first few days of each Island also runs counter to and is anathema to the entire theme of Kingdom in my opinion. The original game concept is interesting because you have to affect the world through your workers. You give commands and influence their behaviour while they execute the task rather than the player being the Last Action Hero and destroying the enemy on your own.
Some quick fixes I have in mind:
1) Tune the waves at the start of each island to be less punishing so that the player doesn't need to interact with the Greed waves personally. You can keep the Hammer and the Horse intact as an overpowered option for the players that want it but give the city builders back the game they knew
2) If you are insistent on having units form the main defence then lower the cost of the Berserker and make them the first recruitable unit instead of Archers. They can run down rabbits or throw their axe to hunt animals or something. Or at the very least allow players to load them up on the boat when they travel to the next island so that they are available right away to defend the new camp.
Overall, I think Norselands was decent and worth the money. The art and music are excellent but design-wise, this DLC was a flop. For example, I think the idea of making the player mix more units is a good one but let us bring them with us and make their recruitment a requirement when attacking the Greed camp. Right now it is the most boring part of the game. Build the bomb, same 2 Knights and 8 Archers that are invincible to the Greed inside the camp and blow up the base. Give us the option to bring Pikemen or Berzerkers and make the Greed camps harder with more units so that they can shine.
I hope you guys aren't discouraged by the negative feedback (not just mine) and continue with this project. I personally believe there is a lot of design space left to explore.
Totally do not agree with this. At least tier2 tower (Breeders can easily kill the archers in tier1 towers) is a must for every encountered stone. As now the tower archers can hunt as well, every tower built in a cleared field is a constant source of free coins, adding much even to the several hunting archers (until you have a really huge horde of the hunting archers, but in this case you probably can afford these towers just for fun). It returns the invested money in 1-2 days max, after which you still have free coins and a piece of damage to every bycoming greed wave. The only possible reason not to do this is a shortage of archers, but this usually is a solvable issue.
This statement here leads me to suspect that you've not gone back to replay Vanilla Two Crowns. I say this, because that's changed substantially. Catapults have been greatly improved with a much higher arc and much longer range. Ballista towers are now tantamount to artillery, able to fire nearly a full screen and a half, over multiple sets of walls. Squad Leaders (as the Wiki calls them) will still form a shield wall when retreating, rather than running away. This isn't unique to the Northlanders. All Squad Leaders across all biomes do this. Unit-wise, the only meaningful advantage that the Northlanders have is "shields," which isn't significant in later waves where soldiers can take multiple hits in rapid succession. Invulnerability cheesing counts for a bit since the Cairn grants it temporarily, but none of that really compares.
I've run most of a Dead Lands campaign so far until the game bugged out and stopped spawning Blacksmith buildings for me (I've cleared up to Island 4). At no point did I face a significant difficulty spike that walls and catapults couldn't handle, even if I do it badly. Sure, I didn't complete the game in one reign (nor did I attempt to), but the difference in difficulty was significant. I didn't feel much of any pressure until Winter 2 where armoured Greed started spawning in multiples each night, and even that was only an issue when moving to Island 5.
I don't know what's supposed to have happened to archers and how they're supposed to have been nerfed, but Vanilla Two Crowns is both easier than it used to be and drastically easier than North Lands. In Norse Lands, I was struggling by day 20 and survived Winter by sheer luck. Maybe I would have done better if I rushed, but I never had to rush in Dead Lands. I didn't rush in Dead Lands in my current playthrough and that didn't seem to hurt me much at all. The difficulty spike people are facing absolutely is specific to Norse Lands, largely because the player loses access to vaulable tools and gets not a lot in return. There's the Fire Horse and not a lot else.
There's also an undocumented change (or possibly bug) that's easy to miss. The day counter doesn't reset when travelling between islands, leading me to believe that enemy difficulty doesn't decrease (or doesn't decrease much) when arriving on an uninhabited/decayed island. You get hit with near-full-force (if not straight-up full-force) Greed on Day 1, which is the single biggest point of failure.
That's not how Two Crowns used to work, nor indeed how Vanilla Two Crowns works now. In my current Dead Lands campaign, the counter resets and the first few nights send me nearly nothing for Greed waves. I was getting a Breeder every night on Island 3. Moving onto Island 4, the first wave was a handful of unmasked Greedlings. It took nearly a week for Breeders to start showing up on Island 4, if memory serves. By that point, I had solid defences.
Norse Lands is drastically more punishing when travelling than Vanilla Two Crowns. That's part of the issue.
That's not necessarily aberrant, though. Dead Lands gave Monarchs magic powers long before Norse Lands did. Granted, not directly offensive powers, but still. Moreover, the Dead Lands magic powers are on a much shorter cooldown and have a much lower cost. You START with Miriam's ice wave, which is arguably more powerful than Thor's Hammer. No, it doesn't kill, but it freezes Greedlings and slows Breeders significantly. It's also spammable, meaning it can keep enemies frozen ~50% of the time. That's significant.
The Fire Horse is also itself not as aberrant. You mentioned the Lizard, which is I'd argue quite well-designed. It's a combat-capable mount but it's pretty slow and tires easily, plus it can only "graze" during the day. It also doesn't require you to clip into the Greed to use, which makes it safer. Arguably even stronger is the Dead Lands Golem, which creates actually really sturdy stone walls. I'm told the Water Horse can do something like this, but only during Winter. And then there's the Beetle which can lay worm traps.
I know you're comparing against Europe/Shogun. I just mean to point out that this design has been tried before. Dead Lands has mounts and powers comparable to Norse Lands, but the player isn't as heavily reliant on them. The powers themselves are more utility and more situational and - crucially - the static defences are far more reliable. Sturdier walls, stronger artillery, limited use of cheap "disposable" units. Dead Lands allows players to be nearly as "active" as Norse Lands, but without forcing players into doing it by dint of stripping all other options.
Agreed. Going back to Dead Lands really makes me miss the high-fidelity pixel graphics of Norse Lands, but it makes me appreciate the simplicity of design that the game started with. Norse Lands feels like a series of solutions looking for a problem. I can sent my soldiers in front of the walls... OK, but why would I do this? "Because your walls suck" says the game, but it feels like my walls suck solely TO give the Shield Wall a reason to exist. I can hire Berserkers... OK, but why would I? "Because they're the closest you have to catapults and pikemen" says the game, but that's only because you took away my catapults and pikemen. Both of those did far better than Berserkers ever could.
It feels like systems are put in because someone thought they were cool, rather than because they served some greater purpose. The Shields mechanic is a perfect example of this. In theory, every soldier and citizen owning a shield and being harder to kill is cool. It's perfect for the hardy Northlanders where everybody fights. In practice, however, it makes every soldier 2 coins more expensive and it... doesn't seem to matter. In a massive melee, soldiers take multiple hits at a time and go down instantly, shield or not. Visually, it's hard to tell who has a shield and who doesn't. It's hard to notice shields getting knocked down because "melee" in this game is a smear of stacked sprites. So I can't see it happen, I don't notice it happen and it doesn't seem to matter. I'm sure statistically it does, if I were to record footage and run the numbers. Moment-to-moment, though, this system makes no difference.
The only - ONLY - difference that shields make is letting Workers act as makeshift Squad Leaders. OK, but you could have easily just given everyone a shield upon recruitment and just made that a natural aspect of the Worker... and nothing of substance would have changed.
The same goes for Berserkers. Pikemen are hired at the wall. When they lose their pikes, the building's right there. They just grab another one. Flame barrels are bought right near the wall. When the catapult is dry, it's simple enough to buy more. Berserkers are made at the town hall, meaning that a worker has to travel all the way back to town, then turn into a Berserker, then travel all the way back to the wall... at which point he loses his hammer in the first fight he's in and has to go all the way back to town for a new one. I've had Berserker potions sit unused for over an in-game week just because no workers happened to wander by.
For some strange reason, Berserkers have the complexity of Knights but the disposability of flame barrels. They're super expensive for how little effect they have, they're super complex for how quickly they die. I can invest 20-30 coins into a Knight because I know he's going to last for weeks, if he ever dies. That's a worthwhile investment. A Berserker - let alone an enhanced Berserker who costs something like 26 coins - is worth about 3-5 fire barrels, except fire barrels don't need to be rolled all the way from my keep every time I make them.
I don't regret buying Norse Lands and would buy another paid biome DLC if the developers release one. I am, however, disappointed in the lack of cohesion apparent in its overall design. There's a reason most "git gud" players' "advise" boils down to "just use the fire horse." It's indicative of a problem when the best way to use all of the new tools is to not have to use them. I know that the developers want us to discover mechanics and strategies for ourselves. It would, however, help to know that they actually build new strategies into the game, rather than just throwing new toys into the pen and expecting us to come up with gameplay, instead - which is what it feels like.
"What is this thing for?" is a question that NEEDS to have an answer for every new thing added to the game. Even if players don't use it as intended, every new things need to have AN intended use of some sort. North Lands has the feel of cool toys that don't really have any specific use other then being cool. And they are... but it makes for a chaotic, unfocused experience that Dead Lands already did and did better.
I think the fire towers are OP while the beserkers/walls are a little underpowered/costly.
A single firetower put further enough from an outer wall can destroy a whole entire wave before they even touch the wall.
A single beserker that might only last one night needs > 3 coins for an axe > 6-7 coins for the potion > and if he dies another money sink to equip him again. And you've lost a builder while h has changed forms. You can even destory yourself by accidentily having too many builders consume a beserk potion.
Perhaps fire dmg can be reduced /or the amount of enemies that can be set on fire can be reduced - while walls have a 20% health buff/beserkers only cost 2-4 coin and turn back into a woodcutter afterwards.
Or perhaps the hermit can upgrade the beserker station instead of a whole tower.
I looked up my old posts here, and they say my best run on the other biomes was 95 days (Caveat: I never played Dead Lands). So I was able to clear all islands in Norselands 10 days faster, despite the extra island.
I think what accounts for the faster time is the fire-spreading mount and the skull lantern, which allows you to take out Portals without sending knights/archers. I also found that I had to expand less in Norselands for various reasons, including the bomb shop now spawning directly on the main town hall.
Island order was something like 1-2-1-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-6 (I went back to 1 immediately to get the Archer upgrade). I used the Reindeer mount to gather deer until I got the Fire-spreading mount. I used the Brewmaster upgrade as necessary (it's improved over the old Bakery). I used 0 berserkers and 0 fire towers.
Norse Lands has significantly smaller items by quite a wide margin. Island size doesn't really grow much beyond Island 1 and Island 1 is tiny. Having run most of a Dead Lands campaign (until the game bugged out and now it won't spawn Blacksmiths), JUST Island 1 there is larger than any of the Norse Lands islands. There's SO MUCH running, since large islands with few portals means next to nothing for teleportation and everything is more spread around.
This is one of the reasons why I argue that Norse Lands is deliberately designed for rushing. The islands are smaller, the portals are jammed together and a lot more of the player's core tools are locked behind gem buildings. Norse Lands is as close to "a completely different game" as you can get while still staying within Two Crowns.
Also, the Bomb has spawned at the Keep since Aug 29, 2019, as per the Wiki.
that is very quick..especially taking into account the winter season.
when you were arriving on the last two islands (to destroy greed as opposed for the first time) how did you deal with waves coming from both sides on days 1-2? especially given the wave strength would be strong as you've destroyed all the portals on the 4 previous islands?
I think a very important point is I only destroyed portals leading to the bomb site/cave side of the map. My understanding is the enemy waves get stronger based on the number of portals destroyed (in addition to the number of days spent on the specific island and the number of days total).
By moving fast and only destroying the necessary portals, the enemy waves are significantly weaker.
Now that you point it out, I agree the maps felt smaller in Norselands. Much less running back and forth time on later maps.
The issue isn't how soon it does or does not refund the money. The issue is the opportunity cost in investing 3+5 coins into the tower which can - and should - be used for other things to speed up island progression. Simply put, the tower is unnecessary from both an income generation point of view (8 coins is 2 extra archers hunting on either side plus change), or a defensive one (archers are more than sufficient defence against anything before Autumn of Year 1).
I am sure you can invest in towers and still be fine but for a new player, towers represent a significant risk of misuse of coins - and therefore time - so it is best to just skip building them, focus on massing archers and building out walls to get the ship built and move out.
But this isn't relevant to pre-Conquest patch Two Crowns. Two Crowns has significantly bigger islands as you point out and the stuff like the catapults and balistas weren't nearly as good. I played Two Crowns in January of this year and I recall many, many times where I just died unexpectedly when I thought I had a decent defence. In Norselands, you literally beat the game if you get to Island 3 and activate the Horse and Hammer.
It may be that I was a super noob back in Two Crowns but in Norselands, after figuring out the landing strategy it was very easy. Mistakes were always covered up by the Monarch's crazy DPS abilities. If you choose to not use the weapons they give you then yes, Norselands can be very difficult. I honestly don't know how anyone manages to advance Islands after Year 1 Winter without the Horse.
Yet the Horse is better than any other tool they could have given you in the past. It is only harder if you artificially make it so by denying yourself the tools they provided. Not an excuse for terrible balance of the other mounts but the tool is there.
Well, I will not agree again. The archer in the tower 2 screens away from the fence still does the same damage to the greed wave bypassing him as he would being behind the fence (actually IMHO he does more damage, because it seems to me that he misses much less in this case). And - he's hunting 24/7. There's not much difference between the generated income if the tower is a half screen away from the fence, but there's a very significant boost to your income if the tower is 1-2 screens away, where the free archers do not reach or reach for a very short period.
I just propose you to try and see for yourself.
Of cource, this strategy has its boundaries and I don't think it's suitable for new players, because it requires to completely understand what you're doing and why are you doing that.
Well, all I can speak to is my own experience. I played Two Crowns somewhere in 2020, prior to the Never Alone update. I was never able to complete the game in a single reign, but I could easily survive for two winters doing nothing really that remarkable. Build a catapult and Archer towers (didn't use the Ballista much due to gem availability), hire Archers and Squad Leaders and walk away. Outside of Blood Moons, nothing could breach my walls. Even when the game started spawning Masked Breeders every night, all I had to do was stock up on Fire Barrels.
That was Two Crowns. I didn't play Dead Lands until much later and found that to much easier on account of Monarch abilities and the more versatile mounts. I didn't really play Shogun until just before the Conquest update and that felt fairly easy. "Easy" from the perspective of I didn't really have to do much but build fortifications and soldiers.
In Norse Lands, I need to do a LOT more. If I don't secure the Tier 2 building material by the end of Winter, my walls basically don't hold up and my Squad Leaders aren't tough enough. Yes, I have monarch abilities, but I have to be at the wall to do that. I did survive Winter 1 relatively easily using the Cat Chariot, but that was mostly because I'd destroyed the Dock Portal on all islands I controlled. It's much easier to guard my Kigndom when it's only being attacked from one direction, where I can be present to help. Most of the time, I relied on a combination of the hammer + Shield Wall.
I'm not claiming to be good at the came and I'm certainly not claiming that you're bad at it. Far from it. It's just that going back to Dead Lands was a culture clash. I approached it with the same "rush" as I initially had in Norse Lands, grabbing Stone and Archery within the first 20 or so days. Nothing - BUT NOTHING - came even close to scratching the paint on my walls that entire year. And even then, I didn't start struggling until Year 3, where Masked Breeders spawn every night and Blood Moons spawn a lot of them. I did four islands in one reign in I think 160-170 days, then voluntarily gave up my crown since Winter was coming and I wasn't going to survive landing on Island 5.
Then the game bugged up and stopped spawning Blacksmiths, but I'm already in contact with Customer Support over that :)
Long story short, Norse Lands is - to me - far more difficult than pre-Conquest Dead Lands and DRASTICALLY more difficult than post-Conquest Dead Lands. It requires a lot more manual interaction on both sides of my kingdom and I'm simply not up to that. I don't see myself replaying that biome any time soon, outside of the co-op game I started with a friend. It's far too reliant or rushing and mount balance is the worst I've seen it in this game.