izigame.me

Whelp, this is... sad. Yeah, when people said the rat got nerfed into the ground, they weren't kidding. I figured I'd pick it up on sale anyway to see how bad it was since the concept sounded fun at least. ...The idea should be fun, but they basically are built in such a way that their two main advantages of high population and good healing, are significantly worse than anyone else.
Before I even describe the problems, let me put it this way: if they only had the baseline, generic abilities with nothing unique to them whatsoever, they would be a substantially better clan than what there is currently present.
So with that, let's look at exactly why they're so bad.
First off, the rat clan starts off with all their units injured right from the start. The concept is they start wounded, you heal them up, then wound them intentionally again by using forced labour to make them take damage but work much faster. Great concept! ....Doesn't work right now.
The problem here is that the shaman they get are by far the worst healers in the game. Apparently they used to be able to heal outside of their territory, but this got removed, and this puts them dead last in healing and messes up their entire playstyle. Their shaman CAN heal all units in an entire zone at once! ...But their healing is spread out among all units in the zone. This causes a ton of management issues, and basically means you need at least 1 shaman (or your hero, since Eir can heal too) in each individual zone unless you want constant, endless micromanagement of healing. Note their shaman can leave their zones to attack, but they're only 8 attack, 5 defence, so they're pretty awful in combat. For these two... kind of really not that useful "benefits" they sacrifice the ability to forage for food that other healers do. Oh, and because they count as "combat" units, you have to pay gold for training them too, so they're not only the most useless of the healers, they're the most expensive on top of that. Fun.
This leads to other problems as well. Having to keep shaman in each zone you control kind of puts a pretty notable soft limit on how far they can expand in territory. This causes further problems because they don't have houses (but do get dinged for happiness for not having houses, yay) and instead have to build other buildings to support their population. This means they have to expand pretty aggressively but they can't actually maintain the new zones they take over.
They're supposed to have faster population growth at the expense of their new villagers all ariving at 2/3rds health, but apparently the increased speed was removed in the balance change so... they don't actually have any increases to villager production. The overflow mechanic they have which lets them hold onto more units in reserve if you go over your population cap is not really that useful due to this, and I basically never go over cap. The concept was to get lots of weak units, sacrifice them because they're expendable, but you can produce more quickly and have some in reserve so as soon as some die it's fine you can just drop their replacements out immediately! ...But they don't have any increased production unless one of them dies. Unless you're intentionally playing poorly, it won't trigger, and it doesn't make up for the loss of the unit in the first place, it's still more efficient to just not let your people die.
Other frustrating aspects are things like your hero, Eir, doesn't need iron... but requires 10+ of your people to be injured. Note you can't send villagers out to get hit once or twice by wolves, and your shaman heal EVERYONE in a zone at the same time, so it's actually a real nuisance to try to get 10 people injured at the same time intentionally but not in risk of being killed early game by a single wolf, since you won't really have the ability to mitigate the issues from overwork early on. This makes it a nuisance to get your hero out, and... she's got really bad stats. Not only has she got really bad stats, but all the stuff in the game that would make her suck less has been removed for custom "upgrades" which also suck. The only advantage she has is she can also heal units like the shaman do, healing everyone in the zone. Except, also like the shaman, she can't heal outside of controlled zones, so can't even help heal units after a fight without returning back to your territory like any other clan. This feels like the shaman and Eir were supposed to be able to heal outside of controlled zones but they can't so they're not really of use for the thing you'd think they'd be good for. Either way, a 12 attack, 9 defence hero that can't increase those stats in exchange for being a mediocre healer is not really that great.
Oh yeah, the upgrades... they're all pretty awful. Like you sacrifice more useful and cheaper silos to get... the ability to steal a small amount of resources from neutral factions when fighting them? Not even things like wolves, only things like kobolds. And it's not a large amount of the resources, either. Not to mention rat clan kinda sucks at combat since they have almost all of their combat increases replaced with pretty bad effects instead, and their healing is really bad, and most of the healing won't affect their wounded combat units at all without a lot of micromanagement to shuffle around all the shaman. They are by far the worst at healing their army out of any clan, making the "advantage" they're supposed to have in combat (numbers and healing) negated or in the negative.
So uhm... what DO they have going for them?
Well... their relic is sort of neat, even if it's been nerfed. Summons a big combat unit, so yay. Only get one though, and it's hard to heal since their healing is based around AoE not a single target with lots of HP, so it's... not great.
They can get one upgrade that lets them build two of the same type of building in the same zone! This is actually pretty nice to have and honestly it's about the only true positive they have as it lets you do things like make more longships for plundering, or to have two fisheries or farms and such to exploit these food resources much more effectively.
They also do get the overwork ability, which basically takes off about 1/2 of the max HP of all of your units over the course of about a month, but they work 40% faster during that time. Note that things which don't work, such as combat units, also suffer this health penalty. 40% more means a lot, though. If you have like +50 food generation, and are using -40 of that, you're only producing a net of +10, but this bumps that up from +50 to +70 so you have a net gain of +30. This makes the overwork ability really handy, and it doesn't cost anything other than health, so all you need is a ton more shaman than you would have of normal healers... meaning... less people working... oh. It kind of cancels itself out in value, and because your units will be damaged, they'll be working slower, so it's not nearly as good as it first appears.
And... yeah, that's about it. So of the three things they do get that are still benefits, 2 of them are only partially functional, and only 1 is actually good. For the sacrifices they have to take, they really just suck at doing the things they're supposed to do. They aren't really fun to play either, because the fun parts don't work either by being removed, or countering themselves so hard that they don't do what they're supposed to.
This isn't just a matter of bad balance, it's a matter of excessively bad design. The rat clan does not do what it's supposed to. Yes, it's weaker than if they literally had zero unique things at all and were the most generic clan to ever exist, but it's worse than that because it's not just being weak that's the problem. You can have a weak but interesting clan that does some neat and fun stuff. Rat clan does not even have that. It sucks at combat, healing, population growth, resources, everything.
Failure.