i need to find the original peasant, stop him, come back to peasant number 2, send him…
Only woodcutters can cut wood. However, I can send a woodcutter into a nearby building, and he transforms into that thing.
I have to select woodcutter, send him back to home base to become a peasant, to then bring him back to fight the fire.
It’s not fun gameplay, just tedious, and it sours the rest of the gameplay, which is fairly fun. I like that I have to think carefully about what needs to be done, pull peons away from being skalds to become firefighters for a month or 2 before winter etc. But alot of it boils down to clickity click click for the sake of it.
Exactly. You can’t just click on a tree, you have to click on the woodcutter building. Similarly, to create a firefighter, you have to click on the firefighter building.
We all get the gameplay is designed as it is, and you have to be fast, or plan ahead or whatever.
But it’s just so annoying to have some guy close to a building on fire, which really needs to be extinguished, and you have and take the guy to a house, change clothes, and then come back to the building he was close by before.
The Three Moves Ahead guys just love it. If you’re on the fence, give it a listen, it will probably push you over the edge. I disagree with them, but I think I would like it more if I could pause. I am just not a RTS fan, and despite all of the talk of it being a slow RTS, it’s still an RTS.
I started the campaign and completed the first 2 chapters on hard, which seems like is this game’s normal. It’s quite fun so far. I was rolling along pretty nicely but stretched my resources a little thin towards the end of chapter 2. I was able to get things balanced out and get my guys to clear out the wolves for my neighbor. It will be interesting to see how it goes as the game starts throwing more complicated stuff at me.
Playing (and judging) RTSes for the campaigns is like buying baseball card packs for the gum.
Northgard might be a generationally ingenious design. If you’re playing that campaign to the exclusion of the rest, you’re the little old lady peering over the steering wheel of a Ferrari who won’t take it out of first gear.
I understand the sentiment however, if you are going to include a campaign, especially if the core game is so good, then how hard is it to make it decent?
I didn’t think it was too bad. I put up some towers where the mercenaries would come in and gradually made my way closer to the enemy base. After the initial shock of the end game event I just mopped up.
It’s funny but with RTSs the vast majority of my play is usually the campaign. With turn based 4X games I rarely play any type of scenario and just play the random sandbox type game.
Chapter 4 was a nice change of pace. I just enjoyed it quite a bit. It was tougher to balance food production while keeping enough gold income to stay on pace for the victory condition.
I have never understood this line of reasoning. I’ve played and enjoyed campaigns in RTS games for as long as I can remember. Age of Mythology is great, for example; Sacrifice works, and so on. In short: it’s good to have at least some context for pushing your little figures around, even if the writing isn’t always up to snuff (but that can be circumvented by doing something like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade/Soulstorm).
Absolutely! That’s the entire point of a campaign, isn’t it? A bit of context where skirmishes exist in a vacuum. But the issue is that the context is – as you note – almost always some poorly written and 100% scripted hoo-ha that doesn’t even let you play the full game until you’ve spent three or four missions getting up to speed on stuff like camera movement, build queues, and how to survive waves of attackers that circumvent the game design by using whatever rules the script decides instead of the rules you’re playing by.
As I’ve always said, RTSs need to be three things in one box: multiplayer, skirmish, and campaigns. And the campaigns tend to get the least actual design work.
Doesn’t Northgard’s skirmish mode create its own narrative very nicely in its own regard? You’re on on a tenuous piece of land, trying to survive. You need to explore, you need to expand, you need to build and probably you’re going to need defense. And winter is coming ™. And the need to survive creates your first narrative: you’re just trying to get through the first winter or two. That’s Act 1.
And then you make contact with other factions, and also monster factions, and expanding into those controlled areas is Act 2. Can your knife-edged economy survive this stage? The answer is usually “no.” The game forces you to take most of your economy from subsistence to a more permanent infrastructure. Here’s where the flaws in your decisions in Act 1 are revealed, and why surviving Act 2 is tough to do your first few plays.
But should you survive Acts 1 and 2, Act 3 is where things take on new twists. You have to advance your economy out of subsistence completely now, and if surviving the first two acts of the game was only done through mortgaging future prosperity, here’s where you find out. Here’s where, if you didn’t hit a death spiral in Acts 1 or 2, you may find yourself in one as you try to outdo the last couple of clans for whatever type of victory condition(s) you’ve set. Northgard does an amazing job of letting you get tantalizingly close to the win, but then you realize “Oh, I need to just adjust this one thing”. And then that sets off a bunch of other consequences to deal with. And now a full year has gone by, and if you were ahead, now it’s an even dash to see who’ll win.
Northgard – like Rise of Nations – does a great job of having such excellent and particular mechanics that its skirmish games create their own emergent narratives. And no, if anyone’s going to try to sell me on the Rise of Nations campaign mode as being anything but bad…
Sure, but how is it different from any other RTS, aside from the fact that it plays out a lot more slowly? It’s got 4X elements, to be sure, and that gives it a slightly larger narrative than the usual RTS. But it’s still just a standalone skirmish. It reminds me a bit of Sins of a Solar Empire in that regard: the scale of gameplay creates a better illusion of context. :)
By the way, I seem to recall complaints about Sins not having a campaign, right? People want their linear sequences of scripted missions. Some of us might look down our noses at the usual half-baked campaigns, but it’s one of the three things RTS players expect in the box, even if it’s not done well.
I’m pretty happy with Northgard as is, but I wouldn’t mind a campaign that lets me pick a clan and do some sort of persistent progression through a series of dynamic “skirmishes”. Maybe that happens later in the campaign?
While I’m not 100% completed yet, I don’t think this happens in Northgard Campaign. What they do, is make a varied series of mission objectives, perhaps better than anyone else has in my memory, so that the game play remains fresh. To me, this is the main point of having a campaign in RTS games, because otherwise it’s just a rinse/repeat cycle of skirmishes that has nothing really unique from one to the other.
Northgard has crafted what I believe is a masterful campaign, that even though the story is hit or miss, the actual mission are each very different from one another.
I like starting with a limited palette of tools at my disposal when first starting out. The campaign is doing a good job at highlighting different aspects of play so far without me getting lost in all the possibilities. So far the difficulty has been just about right. I’ve had some close calls but have gotten through each chapter so far on my first attempt.
I don’t care about the story in this, but I do like the crafted challenges.
I think there are a couple of things that separate it. For one thing, the random maps dispatch the concept of an ideal build order (past the first 3 or 4 anyway) in Northgard.
And the tenuous economy, where one push too many from one direction or the other can send you into crisis management, makes the game feel different from other RTSes. This feels like knife’s-edge survival, which makes it link seamlessly to the theme, I think. When I play a lot of other games in the RTS genre, I’m always thinking in terms of builds, and whether to rush or turtle. I’m never feeling all that galactic when I play Starcraft 2.
And the last major difference – and one of the most beautiful things about Northgard – is that in a game with the right victory conditions, in many situations it avoids the snowball effect. The third act of the game isn’t just cleaning the map up while you wait for enough accumulation of whatever metric provides you the win. Because, again, Northgard is always pushing on your Viking clan, it is ever-possible to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…and of course, vice-versa.
The more I play the game, the more I think that – whether it’s your cup of tea or not – anyone interested in game design or game design theory, whether for videogames or board games, should spend about 10-20 hours with Northgard.
