Countering Northerner Push

[Noskillz]

On large maps or those that force you to split your army, how do stop the Northerners from pushing first night and taking your villages?

This is very difficult for me when i random Loyalists due to their low mobility and high cost for mounted units. By the time night starts, I usually suffer heavy losses if I remain in range of the orcs.

So far, I've tried both retreating to good terrain but the orcs decimate my units in one turn, I've tried fleeing beyond range and waiting for day, but then I lose all my villages. When I push at day, I never manage to kill as many if they stay on hills. Are there any other general strategies that could work?

As well, I find that as orc units are cheaper, the opponent can bear on you with greater force after the first night if he gains an advantage. Providing he doesn't screw up, a come-back is almost impossible as he has more units and/or greater income. How often is the point-of-no-return in the game from the first night?

Any help is appreciated.

[Radament]

There's basically two options here:

1) Holding the line: Viable against northerners, as they have no magical attack (meaning they cannot reliably remove you from your positon) and their main unit has only two attacks. If no more that 2 units can get to your defenders you should be fine, but watch out for strong grunts as they deal 12x2 at night, meaning two lucky strong grunts can kill your spearman. Assasins will also mess up your formation.

2) Retreat: Leaving a village for a northerner to park a grunt in is always bad, but superior to loosing half of your army. As Loy, mages and HI are your friend here. Mages are self explanatory. HI should operate close to villages (poison) but are pretty robust and can initiate attacks: if the HI hits, go for the target with other units. If the HI misses, think of something else - the HI will usually survive and can be brought back for healing.

First night is hard, but if you survive it, the odds are you'll win. Northerners are kinda explosive, they start out really strong with lots of units, but over time the advantage of cheap units turns into a disadvantage, because you pay the same upkeep for that measly grunt as you do for mages, HI and other more competent units.

[StandYourGround]

What he said.

Basically, fight at day, and form defense lines at dusk. Always try to keep some higher ground nearby to retreat to. For example, standing on hills/mountains and restricting the orcs to grassland will help a lot.

[Caphriel]

Generally, the best choice is map-dependent, so what map(s) you were playing on would help me answer... If you know you're against Northerners, your first recruit should include lots of basic melee types. If your opponent is random, you should still have a decent number of those. Generally, they won't be able to attack with much the first watch because of map spacing, of if they do, they weakened themself somehow to accomplish it. You want to form a good line that limits the northerner player to attacking any of your units with more than two units if you can, or three if you can't.

Well, breaking it down faction by faction (loyalists first):

Loyalists:
Spearmen and cavalry. Put spearmen on terrain, and put cavalry on any exposed hexes you need to hold to maintain your line. Cavalrymen have more HP than spearmen, and 30% blade resistance, so they'll take 8 or 9 per hit from grunts at night, and can survive 4 hits from strong grunts (unless they're quick), and can retreat to heal easily. If they manage a strong attack at first watch, you might want to consider retreating after that turn. Zone of control is critical to preventing them from using their numbers to full advantage, so check the ranges and their chances to kill critical units in your line. Most likely, though, they won't be able to mount a full attack at first watch, so don't be scared off by a few grunts. The ideal outcome for you is that they attack at second watch, and you can trap them and bring in your bowmen and mages to start killing them during the day.

Drakes:
The way for drakes to respond to a grunt rush is too hotly contested for me to risk discussing it

Knalgans:
Dwarves in the hills and mountains, poachers in the forests, thieves and footpads wherever. Don't be afraid to counter-attack. You won't have as much of an advantage at day as a lawful faction, so it's more important not to yield as much at night. A guardsman on a village can hold against a lot of grunts if necessary, and attacking dwarf fighters in hills from flat with grunts is hardly cost-effective. Because knalgans are the most terrain-dependent faction, what units to use and where depends on the map.

Rebels:
Fighters, shamans, and an archer or two should do it. You can either try to kill a few grunts by weakening them with archers or slowing them, then attacking, or you can slow a few grunts and plink at the rest to reduce the effectiveness of their next turn's attack.

Undead:
Skeletons, skeleton archers, and dark adepts should crush a grunt rush. Seriously. They should be defending at night, not you. If they come to you, take advantage and smash them. A DA-heavy initial recruit might have some trouble, but the rest of the bread-and-butter undead units will do fine.

Northerners:
Shouldn't need comment. Trolls if you can get them there, or just force them to attack grunts in superior terrain.

[Noskillz]

For Lawful factions - say you hold the line for first watch but you take heavy damage, would it be pointless to retreat? If you can actually retreat, you lose the advantage as you cannot counter-push at day as most of your units would be too weak.

Also, if holding a defensive line, would it be suicidal to attack at night (for Lawful)?

[CragHack]

Against Northerners: Place the line as far away from the enemy as possible. That means, if you feel you are not able to hold all the villages without losing many units, at least you should be the one who decides which villages the opponent gets. But you should try to not let him take more than 1 or 2. Otherwise his income reaches a critical value. Use Zone of control so that he cannot attack a single unit from more than 2 hexes (3 at some kinks in the defensive line). Then, replace damaged units with fresh units (which means you also need a reserve). Place high damage units, such as mages, behind the line, so that you can easily conquer back the lost villages as soon as night ends. Your kill ratio should be higher than the opponents, since he has cheaper units and gains additional income during the night. The Northerners easily get economic advantage. So make sure that you level your own units by conserving xp.
Depending on turn order you can also try to hold all the villages for dusk/first watch and pull back the line at first watch/second watch.

EDIT: if holding the defensive line at night, attack only if you don't get retaliation (for example archers on grunts). mages shouldn't be a part of the line, since they die too easily.

[Yogibear]

For Lawful factions - say you hold the line for first watch but you take heavy damage, would it be pointless to retreat? If you can actually retreat, you lose the advantage as you cannot counter-push at day as most of your units would be too weak.

Also, if holding a defensive line, would it be suicidal to attack at night (for Lawful)?

If you do things right, the opponent has only one turn to attack. It's very hard to crack a good defensive line in one turn, but you might have two or three units suffer severe damage. However, i regard that still as being better than giving up villages, especially against northerners, who quickly become invincible if they get an economic edge.

If your opponent decides to attack longer (that is during second night as well), unless he gets very lucky he will have to pay for it. You can even try to position a fast unit of yours to cut the retreat path for one or more enemy units. Do that at first night and trap enemies at second night if they decide to stay. Apart from very rare situations, any enemy unit that stays to fight into the day will die. So it's perfectly ok to sacrifice for example a scout if two or three enemy units are forced to keep on fighting when they shouldn't.

Addressing your questions about fighting at night: Well, you shouldn't be sitting around doing nothing, but your options are of course limited. The golden fighting rule is most important here: "Don't fight, just because you can."

What you should do (in the order of preference):
- Keep the line
Unless you get attacked with insufficient resources, holding the line is essential. It prevents your opponent from using the full attack potential of his units.
- Prevent losses
Try to prevent losses, so rather heal the wounded than keep on fighting with them (unless they are desparately needed to hold the line and you decide to sacrifice them). It is often seen that wounded units are put on frontline villages, which can be attacked by two or even three enemies. Don't do that. 1 or two strikes of a heavy hitter and not only your unit is gone but the village as well. 60% defense won't help you normally in that situation. So heal your units in the backyard, where they can't be heavily attacked.
- Go for an attack if there is no or just weak retaliation. Ranged units can do that against orcs. However, don't attack a troll with a 5-1 spearman attack if he will regenerate that away anyway. Nevertheless, any amount of cheap damage counts.

Now what if there is this already wounded assasin and your horseman needs just 1/2 for a kill? That's a tempting thing to get rid of that nasty poison, isn't it?. On the other hand, if the horseman receives the assasin's retaliation (which he likely will unless he kills with the first strike), that might put him into bigger trouble. Maybe if you kill the assasin you can cover the horseman and he will be relatively safe. So depending on the terrain, there is 50-65% chance that you will succeed and your horseman will live.

Can't give you any advice on that, actually. It depends what kind of player you are, if you like to challenge the odds or not.

Edit:
I see that CragHack beat me on most of it

[Doc Paterson]

Noskillz: If you'd like to post a replay, you'll probably get more specific responses as to what people think you should or should not have done.

[Yoyobuae]

[...]
Drakes:
The way for drakes to respond to a grunt rush is too hotly contested for me to risk discussing it
[...]

Anyone wants to discuss it? I would appreciate it.

Holding the line would be a pain. Unlike with other factions, a village isn't such a strong defensive position.

Perhaps an early, 1 turn, attack to try to slow them down, probably make them missing one turn of night time for their attack.

I'm just guessing though. No idea what to do.

[silent]

[...]
Drakes:
The way for drakes to respond to a grunt rush is too hotly contested for me to risk discussing it
[...]

Anyone wants to discuss it? I would appreciate it.

Holding the line would be a pain. Unlike with other factions, a village isn't such a strong defensive position.

Perhaps an early, 1 turn, attack to try to slow them down, probably make them missing one turn of night time for their attack.

I'm just guessing though. No idea what to do.

hmm, maybe it's just me, but I would've thought the answer would be a line of drake clashers. Make it so they can only be attacked from 2 hexes, and there is nothing northerners can do that would kill them, other than goblin kamikaze, which requires all 4 clasher attacks to hit the goblin to do so. (clasher 20% resist to blade stops even strong grunts then)

however, if that can't be done, I guess then to do the following
-any wolf that takes a village should be targeted and killed, as you'd have the best chance of killing that over anything else on a village due to only 50% def, and ranged vulnerable.
-scout, if possible, to check the size of the force. Sometimes it may be possible to fight back at the wrong time of day, if you have enough ranged against melee (burners/augurs) and favourable traits.
-I am normally against skirmishers in this matchup, since lucky grunts will kill most skirmishers off too easily. The same applies to augurs, except they're needed to stop poison being too effective, and due to northerners lack of ranged.

[Caphriel]

The problem is you usually don't have that many clashers by the first night, and if you go all-in clashers, you'll be outnumbered 3-2, give or take; probably more like 10-7, and you'll have recruited the 7th on first watch. That's not enough clashers to hold a line on most maps without leaving some villages exposed and/or having exposed clashers that can be ganged up on. The northerners can afford to throw grunts at clashers at night. There was a big debate about it a while back, which is why I don't want to give even general advice.

[Astoria]

On large maps or those that force you to split your army, how do stop the Northerners from pushing first night and taking your villages?

This is very difficult for me when i random Loyalists due to their low mobility and high cost for mounted units. By the time night starts, I usually suffer heavy losses if I remain in range of the orcs.

So far, I've tried both retreating to good terrain but the orcs decimate my units in one turn, I've tried fleeing beyond range and waiting for day, but then I lose all my villages. When I push at day, I never manage to kill as many if they stay on hills. Are there any other general strategies that could work?

As well, I find that as orc units are cheaper, the opponent can bear on you with greater force after the first night if he gains an advantage. Providing he doesn't screw up, a come-back is almost impossible as he has more units and/or greater income. How often is the point-of-no-return in the game from the first night?

Any help is appreciated.

Setting up spearmen at day really works. And, you could force them to split their army.

[SillySod]

Maybe a link to the debate?

[Noskillz]

For me, Loyalist against Northerners are the toughest, they have low movespeed compared to Drakes, poor defence compared to Elves and Dwarfs on good terrain and negligible blade/ resistance for most units unlike UD.

Thanks for the responses, I'll use your advice so (hopefully) I won't get smashed as much.

[Araja]

Problem with the Northerners is that in the hands of a bad player, they're an average opponent, and in the hands of the average player, they're a hard opponent.
I have yet to see them played by an expert, I expect a "resistance is futile" outcome.

There's my moral support done so, good luck!