Fighting the wolves and the Draugr isn’t particularly challenging, and battles with other clans are often determined purely by who can throw more bodies into the fight. While I enjoyed the management side of the game quite a lot, the combat fell short of my expectations. More often than not the winter will come rolling back around before you manage to restock fully, and the cruel cycle starts all over again. While it is possible to recuperate, I found that it requires a lot of time and effort. It’s easy to see how one bad winter can completely ruin an entire campaign. To add to the challenge, villagers can get wounded in combat, or fall sick during the winter, which are all severe blows to your output.
Since the labor force is suddenly limited, you have to adapt and start assigning more and more people to food production. You village also stops spawning new villagers when everyone’s unhappy. Happiness is tied directly to production, so if it falls below zero, production grinds to a halt. If you run out of resources during the winter, your village’s happiness levels start to drop. I often found myself forced to restart a game early on after a bad run. With that said, one bad winter can send you into a downward spiral you might not recover from, especially if it happens in early in the game. However, as I grew used to the game, I learned to enjoy the management decisions I had to make and the tight situations I was forced into thanks to all my weakened military units. During the early stages of the game, it’s nearly impossible to continue gaining resources during the winter, so you are forced to maintain large stocks of food and wood beforehand to survive the cold.Īt first, I found the winter system unnecessarily punishing and frustrating. During wintertime, your food production is significantly reduced, your firewood consumption is increased, and your military units power is decreased. Winter comes every year on a repeating cycle. To survive in Northgard, you must manage your stocks of food and wood with consideration of the coming winter. Having a “fluid” workforce is a clever system, but also a necessary one in a game like Northgard. These re-assignments don’t cost resources, for the most part, so you can adjust your focus at any given moment as necessary. The main method of controlling the villagers in your village is by assigning them to different buildings which causes them to change their assigned jobs.
You always get a notification about those events in advance so you can prepare. There are also random events throughout the game such as tremors which damage your buildings, or Draugr portals that spawn enemy units inside your territory. For example, Magma regions allow you to win the game by reforging the Sword of Odin. There are also slightly more unique conditions that play into the game’s settings and tone. Like in many strategy games, those range from defeating the other clans to completing a set amount of research or trade. When playing through the single-player mode, you have various victory conditions. Those can range from wolves, the zombie-like Draugr, Valkyries, and rival clans. Once a region is clear of hostiles, you can colonize it by spending some resources on it. To take over a territory, you must first clear out the enemies inside of it. Once The map is split into regions, with each containing either resources or unique improvements. There are a lot of them spread around the map, and I’ve quite enjoyed exploring and seeing what everything does. The Stag clan, for example, starts the game with more resources and the ability to construct the Skalds Hut which is an improved version of the other clan’s brewery. There are several different clans to choose from, each with different abilities that enable interesting new ways to play the game. Your role is to lead a band of Vikings that have recently landed on the shores of Northgard. Now that game is officially released, its time to take a closer look at this Viking management game. Indie city-building RTS game Northgard drew quite a few followers during its time in Early Access due to its particular graphics style and intriguing mechanics.
Northgard is an intense and engaging strategy game that offers fun gameplay while forcing you to make tough decisions.
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