Northgard: Hræsvelg, Clan of the Eagle Review (Marn)
Yet another fun and unique clan but this one breaks all the normal rules and is heavy on offense / early aggression / harassment.
This review is for mode only, the only mode I play.
(Keep in mind that instead of the normal first-week nerf most new clans seem to get, this one got major buffs instead)
Conquest Bonus #1 - Your civilians can enter neutral zones
Conquest Bonus #2 - You no longer need to share a border with a zone to capture it
Conquest Bonus #3 - Cast freeze effect on all enemies in one zone for 30 sec
These bonuses are baller and let you break all the normal rules of the game. You no longer need to colonize 'trash' empty zones like swamps and can just skip them. This then synergizes well with Training Fields lore for extra happiness. Your boneyards are all the heals you need so you can skip a healing hut until almost endgame. Your scouts give you a huge front-loaded burst of lore which lets you grab 4-6 lore choices before the first year completes.
One of this clan's unique mechanics is that you raid every zone you clear, insta-mining resources. You can abuse this by decolonizing enemy zones and letting them recolonize so you can leech even more resources when you decolonize it again. You can leave wolves alive next to your borders so that they invade often and die on your territory proccing free mining / resource gathering!
The other unique mechanic spawns burial caches around the map containing resources. These are what give you the advantage over the other clans so you really want to clear to them asap. You spawn them even faster when you have more aviaries.
All of the lore trees of this clan are amazing and synergize well with each other. I never take the exact same lore pathway each game because most of the lore talents are useful for this clan in some way. Very few clans actually work like this in practice.
The recent buff to Sentinel lore is amazing. Your warchief now automatically generates a hawk in any zone they're in and the hawk can proc the blind talent! This is a huge survivability boost for this warchief because it works inside enemy zones.
The recent buff to Training Fields lore is also amazing. It used to just be "+1 happiness per bordering zone with no enemies" and got changed to +3 happiness for having a warchief and +1 happiness per bordering zone with friendlies or with no enemies. This talent synergizes so well with the conquest bonuses.
The only really bad thing about this clan is that the relic sucks. They changed it and made it somehow even worse than it already was. It just randomly upgrades your burial caches to be worth more (and spawns a ton of enemies on that tile when opened). Just beware that this relic is likely due for more changes in the future.
The other bad thing is that you don't gain fame from territory acquisition. You will have extreme difficulty getting to 500 fame (this is meant to be your clan weakness). You need to make a plan every game for how you will hit +200 and then +500 fame, and sometimes that means exploring different lore pathways.
A+ clan