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Well... this is awkward. Clan snake does what clan dragon CLAIMS to do, but then also does what clan snake is supposed to do as well. I don't get it.
Either way, Sváfnir does do the sneaky, treacherous thing pretty well, so let's see what we have to work with!
First off, they have 0 honour. Don't bother collecting fame, they don't have any. You can't win a fame victory with them, they don't have fame-based buildings, you can't send their longships out for fame either. Instead, they get their benefits after a set period of time (every year they get the bonus as if they had 200, 500, etc fame).
Early on you'll discover they have some nasty, sneaky and dirty handed tricks. For example, fairly early into the game your military units become able to hide in any territory which has animals, such as neutral territories. This includes your warchief. With an early tech, you can sneak into the lairs of kobolds, dwarves, jotun and so on, and start bringing down everyone else's reputation with them at a rate of -0.2, which adds up pretty quickly, making it hard for others to get reputation with them, or just making the neutral factions spam attacks at your foes non-stop.
You can also sit one of your military units that are hidden in a tile/zone filled with wolves or bears, and rile them up into attacking nearby tiles. If the animals attack a nearby zone, they'll explore it for you for free too, nice!
Your military units can also steal resources from enemies, so attack their farms and steal some of their food as you do it for example, and often in pretty respectable amounts. I've seen 200 food get stolen in a single go, which can be a pretty major deal at times.
Your warchief eventually also learns an ability on a 6 month cooldown which basically does a scorched earth dealie for 3 months. This lowers the production of the zone by -50%, makes your units stronger within its boarders, and just generally sucks for whoever you throw it on.
Best yet, one of their top-tier researches is you can steal a tech from someone else you've encountered so far in the game, and this includes all clans you've encountered during an entire conquest, which can present an awful lot of options to choose from.
So... yeah, snake clan are kinda jerks. But they do a good job of giving you ways to harass and annoy enemies non-stop, picking small fights on the edge of their boarders that you don't intend to actually conquer the zone but just get some hits in and annoy others constantly, sending attacks with animals and neutral factions against everyone to just make it so they're always stuck running around dealing with the messes you're causing everywhere.
The... weird part about this, is that snake clan does ALL THIS... and then ALSO does a vastly better job of what dragon clan was supposed to do... basically using a single, big strong unit instead of a full army. ...Wat?
So you start off with your warchief already available at the very start. I don't mean you can build her immediately, I mean she's actually in your starting units with your villagers at the start of the game. She's in a weakened state to begin with, only about as strong as a warrior to start with, but it's more than enough to clear out 2-3 tiles worth of wolves, but not quite a bear.
As the years pass, she gets ridiculously large combat stat boosts to her BASE stats, which makes any other % increases that much stronger. Not only does she get the normal +20% damage and +25 attack/defense for legendary heroes, but she also gets up to another +20% attack from killing enemies in their own territory, and on top of that, one of the techs you can steal is... the +100% attack for being the only military unit in a zone that dragon clan gets.
Toss in that snake clan also gets proper healing, unlike dragon, and they're just flat out a bazillion times better at doing the "single, powerful unit" that dragon clan fails so hard at. PLUS they get all the normal sneaky stuff snake gets normally anyway.
...This really isn't fair. Why does snake get all the things snake does, AND all the things dragon was supposed to have? How come dragon doesn't get anything at all to make up for it? I don't know, but this means there are two distinctively different paths you can go with snake clan pretty easily... and they don't have the problem that dragon clan has of below average units in numbers. In fact, their skirmishers are pretty high damage, and they still get throwing axemen, which is great since your warchief is so durable she can easily tank any other super unit like a summoned boar or even a champion jotun while suffering minimal harm while her army (or just herself since her damage is so absurd, I've hit 15+42 attack on her before...) rips the enemy apart from the safety of being behind her.
She really is built to just walk behind enemy lines, kill a few warriors or villagers, then run off to heal and do so again from another direction. I'm not entirely certain, but it definitely feels like she has substantially increased movement speed as well, so she's great at hit and runs and constantly being wherever you don't want her to be. There's a lot of micromanagement required, but you definitely get rewarded for just constantly harassing and annoying enemies.
The downside is that snake's defenses aren't spectacular. You might want to take the defensive combat tree so that you can defend your own boarders better, especially if you're outnumbered or in a free for all game, because they're great at pissing everyone else off but then not really having a lot of capacity to weather the inevitable backlash that will come from such. Their warchief is fast and obscenely strong, so can pretty much single handedly deal with most mid-game assaults by herself, but she can't be everywhere at once and you'll probably have made a lot of people very angry at you during that time.
1v1, I don't think there's really any other clan that stands a reasonable chance against snake on equal skill. Snake's just... better than everyone else. By a very, very large margin. In multiplayer though, their real weakness is to just keep hitting them hard and often and don't let up because they don't have the ability to defend themselves from multiple angles well. Get extra scouts and keep an eye on the map - any time they're getting hit from one side, make sure you're hitting from the opposite side. If they're getting hit with drowned sailors, or animals or any kind of other spawn, hit them at the same time because their attention divided is a necessity to abuse against them and keeps them off your back.
But yeah, snake does everything dragon was supposed to do, and then also the snake stuff on top of it. This annoys me, and these two clearly need to be balanced better because it's absurd how lopsided they are. At least snake is FUN, and it does exactly what you'd want out of it: lots of subterfuge, lots of harassment, lots of dirty tricks. They do what they're supposed to do. Very well. Too well, in fact.