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Not bad, they're fun. Not very powerful... but they're fun. They do neat stuff.
So the Kraken clan's a bit strange because they're extremely luck dependent upon how good their starting area is, as they're a ton more powerful with good starting tiles, but also a ton weaker if they get a bad starting set of zones to work with and it can cripple their early development.
With that in mind, their strengths are defenses, trade, making friends and happiness. Which is odd because they can't do a trade victory, ever.
So let's look at the specifics about why they do the things they do.
First off, they have a bizarre but fairly fun, if rather limited, new mechanic about being able to cast spells with a new resource called Wyrd. In short, you get a tiny bit of wyrd production from your town hall (+2) and can make a building that replaces the brewery that you can send female villagers to become norns, which produce a fair bit more wyrd, as well as happiness.
The spells you can use are pretty limited, but fairly useful. It'd be nice to have more variety and options, but it's not awful for what it is.
Before we get into spells though, the Kraken has one massive, enormous disadvantage that has to be talked about first: they do GREAT on coastal tiles... if you could build a shipyard normally, you can instead build fisheries which don't seem to go down in food production during winter, so they get tons of food. Sounds great, right? Yeah... but no shipyards period. Also, if they try to move inland from the coast, they get -30% attack on non-coastal tiles and it costs a looooot more to colonize those non-coastal tiles.
The reason why this mastters for spells, is their first two spells are both directly built around this. The first, shallow waters, gives a coastal tile +1 building slot permanently for 100 wyrd, which helps mitigate their early game problems a bit and being mostly stuck to coastlines. The second spell, high tides, lets you remove the penalties on a tile adjacent to a coastal tile or another flooded high tide tile for 300 wyrd. You start with 400, so this is a good amount to get you started, but it can still make things really rough at the start of the game. After the second year you effectively have almost infinite wyrd so it doesn't really matter that much, but it really can be limiting at the very start. Get wolves on all your coastal tiles to start and you're going to have to force your way inland and it won't be easy to do.
Their next two spells are just 600 to convert one norn girl into a valkyrie who... kinda sucks? Only 10 attack, but 17.5 defense and 75hp for a "super" unit, and you can only have one of them. They're... not great, and it's a bit slower than getting a warrior out, but you can get one early game at a bit of a delay, and once you do she can clear out your starting zones pretty well. It's just with a bad set of starting zones it can be really hard to find the building space to get things rolling. The other spell just lets them spend 1,000 wyrd to send drowned sailors to attack a coastal region once per month, so they can "kind of" send mercenaries like the ravens, just... nowhere even remotely as good. It's a minor nuisance at best for enemies, but you can spam them so that's something I guess.
That said though, Kraken gets fairly useful and interesting stuff at least that removes most of their downsides. So two early techs they get give them +1 krowns and wyrd for every 3 buildings on coastal tiles, and note the coast is anything adjacent to the ocean, not just those with shorelines, so even cliffs where you can't build a fishery still count. The other knowledge upgrade marks on the map (but doesn't reveal or give contact to) all neutral factions and your trade routes gain +100% krown income, and each merchant assigned to a trade route gives +2 lore, +20% extra krowns for the merchant, and +20% reputation for the trade route. This stacks with the later trading caravan tech they get later on, and it'd probably be better if they had it moved to there, but whatever. The point is, their "no shipyards" thing is basically canceled out since they get lots of money and lore.
But what about fame!? Well, their relic gives them +1,000 wyrd immediately (kinda useless by the time you can build it), but also lets their norns produce fame on top of the happiness and wyrd. Which is... good? It again fixes the lack of sailors, but note that you now have spent 2 of their unique knowledges AND their only relic slot just to make up for not having ships. This is a pretty high cost just to break even, and most of their wyrd stuff is just canceling out their drawbacks for their limited territory issues. So you may notice that almost all of their stuff is just making them average, not actually good.
Their only other techs are also kinda meh. Instead of +20% attack, they get +10% attack, -15% krowns cost to train combat units, and +1 warband size per camp, to mostly make up a bit more for issues with money and limited building space. Basically their military is slightly weaker than normal, and... I find I almost never use their warchief oddly, because the valkyrie generally does the tanking job better, so their other units can kill stuff with the valkyrie up front.
The last two techs are letting you have a second valkyrie and letting their kinda pathetic life regen work twice as fast (double almost nothing is still almost nothing though) and also works on high tide tiles, where it normally only works with the new building. Honestly, it's kind of a wasted tech slot to be honest. The only other one is norns give +20% wyrd and +50% happiness, so that's really nice on the happiness, but again the wyrd is basically infinite already so not really important.
And that's it. They have good defenses thanks to the valkyries, they have good money and neutral faction bonuses from knowing where the neutral factions are and big bonuses for their trade, and they have good happiness, but really it's all just workarounds to make up for them not having any sailors.
In the end... their strengths basically cancel out their weaknesses, but they don't really excel in doing something better than anyone else. They're fun to play, but they're not as powerful as the original clans which all got at least 1-2 things they did really well with 1-2 they were a bit weaker at. They're like the most neutral balanced clan that I've seen so far, which is sort of weird of a choice, because they do have that really rough early game drawback if they get a bad roll on their starting tiles and they never really make up for that elsewhere. With a good set of starting tiles, they'll have much better access to food, but that's about it, and it's severely luck dependent.
As stated though, they ARE fun to play as, and they do cancel out their weaknesses with some effort, but it kinda sucks that their biggest strength is basically their trade caravans and they're incapable of making a trade victory, so even if they're fun, they're a bit weaker than they really should be. Slightly below where a generic hypothetical clan with no replacement knowledges nor bonus relic would be, and a bit significantly below the starting clans for overall power.
But, despite that, as stated, they are fun. They do weird stuff in weird ways and are interesting to use, and they aren't bad at the things they're meant to be good at, so this puts them well above clans rat and dragon.
Also, as a bonus, you can have all sorts of fun with the kraken name. All my conquest save file names are stupid.
- Release the Kraken!
- Kraken down on kobolds (kobold spam)
- Kraken open a cold one (fighting tons of dead sailors)
- Smakin da kraken
- Krakalakin
- What's kraken?
- Krakentoa virus
- Get kraken
- Kraken my knuckles
- REFLEECE THE KRAKEN! (During a blizzard =P )
...Yeah. This is dumb. It also entertains me waaaay more than it has any right to. But whatever, I'm having fun with the kraken. They're a bit weak, but fun.