Northgard: Kernev, Clan of the Stoat Review (jbot)
This clan makes no sense. I'm not saying it's not interesting, or fun to play; it is, actually, both of those things. At first. But it's like someone ordered chatGPT to "produce a remix version of Northgard by scrambling the tooltips, buildings, and core mechanics from the original" and this clan was the result it hallucinated.
- a great many of the tooltips are incorrect, and a slew more appear to use outdated language or syntax from old builds
- the UI sends mixed messages. Why are the Fort and Sentry Camp in the same category of building?
- baseline production rates, something thats already hard to intuit, are obfuscated even more in this system. How can we figure out how much the resource delta will change when converting a populous zone to a Duchy?
- combat seems drastically swingy, esp near the midgame. Why did NPC army caps seem to suddenly balloon?
- Why are the Levies described as if they are functional replacements for the Feasts (like the Rat) when they aren't?
- forts are.... replacements for defense towers?
I really tried to like this one; the mechanics just feel like an odd mishmash of ideas, like someone was trying to graft a new head onto Northgard, just to make it dance a bit different. But the dance it's doing is at once both too similar to the original to warrant the rewiring of fundamental mechanics (like Housing->Liveability), and so different as to be like learning a totally new game.