Northgard

"Sola vendar hausten sendar

graset gulnar, blada fell

lyse dagar er på hell"

 

Wardruna - Jara

 

 

I stand by my statement that "real-time" strategy games are largely a fad of the '90s and fundamentally pointless, consistently devolving to button-mashing instead of strategic planning. Still, I retain a soft spot for Homeworld, I do plan to try at least one of the Total War games at some point, and when Northgard came up on sale I bit the bullet, gave it a chance and was pleasantly surprised.

The basic Settlers-reminiscent gameplay presents a weird compromise toward turnstile mechanics: tiles, but no turns. Units move freely within discrete territories with fixed construction capacity and hard boundaries restricting events to one tile at a time. A few effects can be global, like healers able to reach your other units anywhere within your own boundaries. The basic resources, food, wood and gold, are both produced and consumed continually for upkeep, making you scramble to maintain threshold values, while the stone and iron you'll need for upgrades come in finite deposits and a very slow availability in the marketplace. You'll likely struggle most to maintain high happiness, as you only gain more workers (to be recruited into the military) via a slow trickle of immigrants.

All in all, this is an RTS with a very strong managerial emphasis, to the point it feels like a more fluid version of Lords of the Realm. Conquest is in fact the least likely victory scenario, as you can also win via research, gold production, sheer expand&exploit or capturing "king of the hill" terrain tiles depending on map. Charmingly, much like Dawn of Man, your gameplay is heavily marked by the yearly summer / winter cycle, your greatest enemy looming in the severe upkeep hike incurred by winter weather. Interestingly this also makes winter raids a risky but potentially devastating proposition. The various clans (added as paid DLCs per current marketing dogma) also alter basic gameplay in a surprinsgly fundamental fashion, heavily shifting your economic balance or the utility of your units, especially your army's hero(es).

So I've already played more of Northgard than I would have ever guessed just looking at screenshots... but entirely in single-player. Despite it obviously being developed with multiplayer in mind, the core flaw of RTS, button-mashing, still renders combat too much of a nuisance. While you need to control far fewer units than usual (your army will rarely reach a dozen) and don't need to spam activated abilites, your success still relies on pulling individuals out in a timely fashion as their hit points drop and gaming the zone line system to instantly escape to safety. Incidentally, zone lines also result in counterintuitively building defensive towers as far back behind other buildings as possible. Northgard is an admirable and surprinsingly immersive attempt at reconciling RTS with the word "strategy" but the genre's core flaw remains insurmountable.