Northgard: Vordr, Clan of the Owl Review (Varinathras)
I heard this DLC had a rough launch. I played a first conquest mission (only mode I care about in Northgard) with this clan.
Didn't read anything about the clan before starting a match,
Won anyway (normal difficulty) without much effort.
10/10
There's some hitches even in solo when you get achievements, it needs some polish. Also my alltime profile matches all got deleted during the update that brought this DLC out, I now have ~550 matches but 0 wins. Instructions to have this fixed are in their discord, hopefully they do it soon for me.
I wouldn't let the existing issues stop you from trying out this clan tho, it won't save your profile from getting reset to wait either so you might as well have fun.
About the clan itself:
There's a different lore tree for it. Some 'lores' are repeatable.
You don't gather or build with wood, only lore. So that took me a moment to process, as your opening move no longer exists...
You grow your buildings from lore.
Each lore you unlock is actually a Ygdrasssil branch/building that you have to place. Some branches cannot be placed in the same tile as another branch, requiring you to place them wherever you can/have explored. It's not really clear (in Conquest) which ones can be moved; at least you can demolish them but that hurts a lot. Definitely some learning curve for the build order there.
In conquest many of the lore branches/buildings can be moved to a different tile (running little trees lol)
Some of them can be built/bought more than once. The UI doesn't make it very clear which ones can or cannot, and their location on the lore tree doesn't help with that either (didn't really see a pattern to it)
Generally the ones that can be moved are (example):
-Passive regen for units/vills in tile
-Passive gathering of ores
-Passive debuffs to gathering if placed in enemy tiles (many of these branches can be placed in neutral tiles to leech resources where an enemy would expand, or to heal your army passively so your healers don't get activated and get you food instead because they benefit from a branch that buffs 'specialized workers'
-They can be placed in an ally's lands in coop conquest to buff them too (or so I heard)
All in all, this clan plays very differently, as it arguably removes building and woodcutting and frost mechanics entirely (I guess cold isn't a problem at all for them?), is a semi nomadic support clan (in Conquest) that at the end of its lore tree can get a powerful special military summon as well for... you guessed it... lore. Somewhere between Boar and Lynx but complexer at first sight.