How to play Northerners

Share and discuss strategies for playing the game, and get help and tips from other players.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

User avatar
Sorrow
Posts: 230
Joined: July 25th, 2006, 12:07 am
Contact:

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Sorrow »

They get a minor weakness to fire in the next version. Which I guess is out now? I dunno whats going on recently as i've been aschoolin.
Let us all measure in milliyards, that way we can all get along.

Replay Archive: http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Replays
Coz
Posts: 10
Joined: April 17th, 2007, 8:50 am

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Coz »

I'm going to add something else to this thread: the northerner defense line. I assume that you know the basics of using the northerners.

I usually make my line of troll whelps only.

The troll whelps should be placed on favorable terrain as long as there are not more than 2 hexes between whelps, but 1 hex is of space between them is best, even more than no space at all. Note that the defense 'line' doesn't has to be a straight line; you just have to make sure that all your other units are behind, protected out of reach.

The only time when you want to avoid having spaces between whelps is when a enemy unit is trying to squeeze itself through and the units behind your defense line are too weak to kill it or sometimes if the enemy has a skirmisher unit.

I type sometimes because if the skirmisher isn't going to kill in a single turn and it doesn't survives, there's little benefit for your enemy. The loyalist skirmisher( fencer ) is worth 16 gold so only the assasin and the wolf rider are worth more by 1 gold, the knalgan skirmisher is a level 2 thief not worth the sacrifice, and the saurian skirmisher is easy to kill. Plus there might be better ways to handle skirmishers.

You can cover the holes left between the whelps with other units so that skirmishers don't penetrate; in this case the lvl0 spearman is just as useful as any unit, so I'm thinking that this might be a proper use for around 2 goblins, but I have yet to test it.

I typed that I usually made my line of troll whelps, but there are two exceptions: when you have a water village or a body of water, you should use a naga, and on any kind of village or to fix a hole in your defense line because of lack of units, you should use an orc grunt instead.


You should also have assasins behind your defense line, unless you are fighting undead and in this case they should be archers. Since you left at least one hex between your whelps, you can use that space to attack non-ranged units with poison or archers. This should probably be done only once per defense line, since your enemy might attack those units.


This should be obvious, but this happens so often that I'm going to point it out: if you are hopelessly outnumbered, even during a favorable time of the day, retreat! You might be able to hold during that favorable time, but as soon as the time of the day turns against you, your units will be slaughtered. As a side note, this means that if the time of the day is favorable, and you are defending instead of attacking( or even worse, forced to defend ), things are going to get ugly.

Don't attack while you are defending! any unit that gets weakened will become the weakest link to break on the enemy's turn; if you get lucky you might kill a enemy unit, but when it's the enemy's turn you'll probably lose more units. Exceptions are when you can get free hits, when the enemy has a unit about to die, or when you are defending and the time of the day is bad for the enemy( which is not the same that the time of the day is bad for you, for example, if you are fighting northerners or undead ).

The opposite is not to defend when you should be attacking. If the time of the day is unfavorable for you, but you can surround each enemy unit with 4 or more of your own( yes, 3 units are too few to ensure victory during the day ), attack. If your enemy has 2 weakened units and you have 2 fully healed units, attack.

I usually create the defense line during Dawn and make sure my attackers are just behind the defense line during Dusk( but I don't attack or break the defense line ). Why just two turns to attack? by the time the night ends, your own units will be damaged and should go heal anyways; also it maximize the difference between the damage given and damage taken. It's very rare when you have fully healed attack units that can attack during Dawn and survive the Morning, so 2 turns are enough.

Finally, keep ready your attackers behind the defense line in villages or fully healed so you can counter-attack as soon as the time of the day is favorable.
Yogibear
Retired Developer
Posts: 1086
Joined: September 16th, 2005, 5:44 am
Location: Hamburg, Germany

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Yogibear »

I agree with a lot of your points and disagree with some others. Basically it boils down to less trolls, more goblins and grunts.

A replay is worth a thousand words, so:
Ladder_wiv_vs_Yogibear.zip
Yogibear vs wiv on Fallenstar Lake (Northerner defensive line vs Elves)
(25.27 KiB) Downloaded 471 times
Smart persons learn out of their mistakes, wise persons learn out of others mistakes!
Coz
Posts: 10
Joined: April 17th, 2007, 8:50 am

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Coz »

I'll have to start getting replays, since I have none :p

I didn't even watch the whole thing, but you can tell from the beginning that the elves are going to lose when they took more damage during the day than the northerners :p

so your answer seems to be that your defense line should be made of attacking units? your use of the goblin spearmen was to overload the enemy with damage with so many units that he took significant damage and they were too many units to attack :p

Edit:

So I thought a bit of that tactic, and it seems like it can work if you have plenty of villages( which is not the same as saying more than the enemy ), if you have the space to attack with your own units. The reason this can work is first, because you have more units than the enemy and because exchanging units usually favor northerners.
Caphriel
Posts: 994
Joined: April 21st, 2008, 4:10 pm

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Caphriel »

Generally speaking, a troll-heavy army is too slow and has too low of damage output in most cases. Their regeneration plus high HP plus some resistances at low cost is very tempting, but they have generally terrible dodge and to awful damage. These disadvantages are magnified in the early game when there are less units on the field and it's easier to gang on up on them. It takes time to build up a solid line, and if you're only/mostly recruiting trolls, your opponent should be able to exploit that.
Coz wrote:so your answer seems to be that your defense line should be made of attacking units?
What I think Yogibear is probably getting at is that you can't have a separate defense group and attacking group. By recruiting mainly defensive units, you're sacrificing offensive power. So while trolls are good in defensive lines, you need more grunts and goblins because they're damage dealers.
Yoyobuae
Posts: 408
Joined: July 24th, 2009, 8:38 pm

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Yoyobuae »

The problem with trolls only is clear if you consider what happens after the enemy attacks. How can you achieve a strong counter with units that only deal 7-2 damage? What if the enemy has impact resisting units?

Defense in Wesnoth consists of deterring the enemy, making his losses greater than the kills he could possibly achieve on an attack.
Caphriel
Posts: 994
Joined: April 21st, 2008, 4:10 pm

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Caphriel »

Well, if you can muster enough trolls and have a few grunts hanging around, it might be an effective stalemate tactic. Troll regeneration becomes more significant as the number of units on the field increases, because there aren't enough villages for healing dozens of units, so theoretically you could win a war of attrition by wearing down their entire army, but my own experience says that sort of unit count rarely occurs, and never with that many trolls.
Yoyobuae
Posts: 408
Joined: July 24th, 2009, 8:38 pm

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Yoyobuae »

The enemy can respond with gold hoarding then. Those large number of trolls would surely eat up more upkeep than whatever the opponent needs to threaten you.
Caphriel
Posts: 994
Joined: April 21st, 2008, 4:10 pm

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Caphriel »

Yup, that's one way to respond, that takes advantage of trolls' low offensive power. An alternative would be to use more maneuverable units to defeat sections of the Troll Horde in detail. Or you could just spam wose :mrgreen:
User avatar
Zarel
Posts: 700
Joined: July 15th, 2009, 8:24 am
Location: Minnesota, USA
Contact:

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Zarel »

Caphriel wrote:Well, if you can muster enough trolls and have a few grunts hanging around, it might be an effective stalemate tactic. Troll regeneration becomes more significant as the number of units on the field increases, because there aren't enough villages for healing dozens of units, so theoretically you could win a war of attrition by wearing down their entire army, but my own experience says that sort of unit count rarely occurs, and never with that many trolls.
Wouldn't troll regeneration become less significant? I mean, troll regeneration is only significant when the troll survives to regenerate. As the number of units increases, it becomes easier to gang up on trolls, so the ones you do attack will die before they can regenerate [much].
Proud creator of the :whistle: smiley | I prefer the CC-0 license.
Velensk
Multiplayer Contributor
Posts: 4002
Joined: January 24th, 2007, 12:56 am

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Velensk »

On the contrary: as the number of trolls increases the ability to make a formation where trolls cannot be attacked from as many directions increases. It also means that there will be replacements to put on the front line when you retreat your wounded ones to heal.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Coz
Posts: 10
Joined: April 17th, 2007, 8:50 am

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Coz »

Okay okay.

One point about Trolls is that I'm talking about 1-4 Trolls, depending on the size of the map, and usually 2 or 3, as somewhere along the line usually you have a village to place a Grunt.

Early in the game, it seems to me that you shouldn't attack; the only faction that I have seen sucessfully recruiting and attacking with the recruits of the first and second turn as soon as they meet the enemy are the Drakes, and this is usually a gamble.

So during the first turn you would recruit 1 or 2 Trolls, and in the second turn unless you are fighting units that perform poorly against Trolls you shouldn't have more than 2 Trolls in your army.

The other thing is that I usually recruit the slow units first( except the scout ) so they reach the front earlier, after all, there's no point in starting the fight with a lone assasin unless you have a guaranteed escape.


However, the reason that I came back to the thread was because there's a huge flaw in a 'Trolls with range( archers / assasins )' defense line, besides the 'Trolls are too slow to reach the front of the battle in large maps'.

A group of Drake burners, easily tears down a Troll defense, even on a Hill( didn't try on a mountain ). The Trolls simply are not enough to soak the damage, probably not even a Dwarven guardsman, and with the Trolls getting a fire weakness this makes things worse. The same goes for the Adepts, and I expect the same from Mages.

The problem grows bigger as the Drakes have more movement, than Northerners in general. In this situation I think that the only sensible 'defense' is to place assasins or archers in the front, so that even if they decimate your units, the Drakes take enough damage to fall quickly before a spearmen counter-attack at night.
Yoyobuae
Posts: 408
Joined: July 24th, 2009, 8:38 pm

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Yoyobuae »

One thought: Even if you don't manage to pull off a sucessful attack early in the game, having plenty of units right in the opponents face will limit their ability to advance.

Even better if game starts a dawn, since you get to the enemy as night falls. At that point you can decide whether to continue the attack, or just pin the enemy on their side. This "offensive" may not achieve village steals or kills, but will slow the opponents advance for the next day.

And if you do manage enough early village steals, northies become simply unstoppable. The only hope for the opponent is to level up off the swarm of units that will surely come.
Caphriel
Posts: 994
Joined: April 21st, 2008, 4:10 pm

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Caphriel »

Coz wrote:The problem grows bigger as the Drakes have more movement, than Northerners in general. In this situation I think that the only sensible 'defense' is to place assasins or archers in the front, so that even if they decimate your units, the Drakes take enough damage to fall quickly before a spearmen counter-attack at night.
Try grunts and goblin spearmen for your line, with archer and assassin support. Fighters and clashers will tear right through assassins and archers.
Elvish Scientist
Posts: 62
Joined: February 18th, 2005, 11:06 am

Re: How to play Northerners

Post by Elvish Scientist »

When I am playing vs drakes, I consider assassins as expandable. I allways put them on high defense ground, but they will die. The point is that you have to make the drakes pay for that. If you poisoned 3 or 4 drakes it's worth the price of the assassin. Even if they escape, they won't attack full strength the next day. This changes of course if there are augur nearby.
I recruit goblin spearmen only sparingly versus Drakes. They die to easily because of there low HP en low movement: they just cannot follow the day night cycle. A few of them are nice, if you have enough grunts to protect them. Otherwise they are easy prey.
For me a mixture of mostly grunts, a significant number of assassins an few goblins is the Northener army versus Drakes.
Post Reply