Guide

Norse God Power Guide

Archaic:

Great Hunt: Odin’s first GP is a great way to expand your early food eco. It can only double the amount of animals up to 750 food, so never use Great Hunt on 2-3 deer and never use it on eles cuz you’re not guaranteed to get another elephant (GH is a very variable GP). The best ways I’ve found to use Great Hunt is to take all the sheep you have and bring it to a pack of 5 or more deer and then great hunt. If only 600 food of deer is converted, the pigs will make up for it and also multiply. Pigs also generate food, so in fact you’re getting a lot more than 750 food if you GH pigs as well as hunting.

Doing an immediate great hunt w/ pigs on Marsh or Tundra is also a good use of GH. Sometimes it’s best to GH a second pack of deer so when you switch to that pack for your classical food eco, you have lots of food prepared for your strategy.

Dwarven Mine: I think this is one most wasted GP’s in AoT. Dwarven Mine is free gold, so using it immediately in archaic isn’t always the best idea. Only use dwarven mine immediately in archaic if it’s a) a water map where you plan on fishing, going for a 4:00 up, or c) you have lots of hunting and you plan on getting pigsticker by 1:30. Don’t use dwarven mine if all you have is a rhino, cuz you’re going to lose a lot of hunting time just killing the damn thing with 1-2 vills.

Dwarven Mine’s use outside of immediately in archaic would be dropping it by your original gold mine to maintain gold flow while your opponent switches mines or using it in the late game when you have no mines left but have no trade either. For an archaic GP, dwarven mine’s worth goes up as you age up (500 in archaic, 1k in classical, 3k in heroic, 6k in mythic), so saving it for a more useful situation is always worth it.

Spy: The two best uses of spy are on enemy vills/ox-carts (try to get a gold villie, food villies are your second option, wood villies suck because they don’t have to move much) or on enemy military units to monitor where he’s going to attack, if he’s building up his army, and what counter-units he’s building. If you know an attack is coming, you can prepare your troops in proper defensive positions to give yourself an advantage.

Using it on a gold villie is the *best* use of spy ever because whether you rush or whether you raid, you always know where his gold is. An opponent can’t know which villie is spied, so he can’t really know if switching vills will help. In a rush, you can keep beating him off his gold and if he moves it, you’ll know where it’s going, so you can move there and push him off that mine too.

Classical:

Forest Fire: Forest fire is primarily used for knocking someone off wood for a short time or killing their woodies, secondarily used while in a battle to damage military units by a forest, and thirdly used to damage buildings while attacking. If you use FF to attack someone’s wood eco, the best times are either at around 6:00 when your valk hits his wood and FF’ing to push him off wood for a while, or later on when you have several cav and you can trap his vills next to the forest and kill several woodies very fast and very efficiently.

If you want to use FF vs units, that option is open pretty much anytime in the game. Make sure it’s not a forest he can avoid easily or is not touching, because then you waste a possibly deadly GP in a crucial battle. If you use FF vs buildings, a great time to use it is vs eggy towers + houses combo. FF can kill the tower, the houses, and a monument very fast and open up an eggy to attack in seconds. Using it later on to damage a migdol or a TC is also a great use.

Healing Spring: Healing Spring is a very defensive and passive GP, so use it as such. I find the best use of Healing Spring to be casting it near your barracks in a raiding strategy and letting RC sit in it constantly. Raid, retreat, switch cav groups, let the fighting one heal, let the sitting one attack. If you keep rotating cav groups and letting them heal, you can reduce casualties drastically and pop out faster. As long as you’re careful in your raiding, you can lose very few raiders even if they are constantly battered by towers and enemy units.

The spring is a very game-based GP and doesn’t have specific uses in every game, but generally try to use it in a defensive position where you can heal troops before battles to gain an edge while also healing up key, strong units that have been weakened (fenris wolf raiding and then letting them heal in the spring rox my sox).

Undermine: Undermine’s best use is, of course, in a rush situation where you can knock out a tower above someone’s gold instantaneously or take away 800 HP from a TC with a free GP hit. Used carefully, you can kill two or even three towers with one hit. Just aim the two dots behind one tower at another tower in a straight line, and voila, two towers down. If 10 towers are lined up very closely, you can even pwn all of them. Very useful in loki tower whoring wars.

Undermine on a migdol, towers, or a TC late game is also great because it’s a free siege hit. Make sure you back up your attack with a powerful army and you can cost a player the game, especially if he’s relying on that fortification for his survival.

http://www.rts-sanctuary.com/index.php?showtopic=10775 - Josey explains how to use undermine in a scenario he designed himself.

Heroic:

Flaming Weapons: FW is a fantastic GP that allows norse to knock down buildings and push if they’re stuck in front of a heavily fortified position. Two things I always see people do is FW while the opponent has a GP that can stop them (cease, pest, etc) or use FW when they could easily win or would easily be slaughtered in the battle without FW. Really, what’s the point in using FW when you’re going to win the battle anyway? Only use it in close battles or by tc/forts/towers to gain an advantage and destroy buildings.

Combining FW with a decently fast heroic time (12:00) and then attack with 115/130 pop with perhaps one up and FW can devastate someone. FW is also good to have in store if your opponent has a gp combo like anc/eclipse or if they have pest + curse, pest + bronze, etc. Remember, FW is a really nice GP, so it’s best to use it in the right situation, not on a pre-decided time like 14:00 or something.

Rag/FW and FW/fimbulwinter are the best GP combos for FW. If you’re opponent can’t cease rag/fw, then you’ve got a good chance at winning. If you get secrets, max vills + dwarves + caravans, and get all your armory ups in preparation for rag (best way to use rag), then you’ve got a great chance of winning the game. Rag can both hold an opponent and kill an opponent, so if you’ve got a titan on the way then you can end it right there. FW only powers it up to make it even uberer.

FW + fimbul simply pushes your opponent off of their eco while you’re attacking with a strong GP, which puts them in a very difficult situation. They can’t cast any gp’s because fimbul is blocking them, they can’t reinforce because their eco is garrisoned or getting owned, and they will have lots of trouble pushing you back with no GP of their own to cast and fight back. No reinforcements + no GP’s + usually a dead army = gg in most cases unless he was really well-prepared. Since FW allows Norse to kill buildings too, you can attack his town at the same time and totally wreck him because fimbul wolves will make short work of his army.

Frost: Frost is a counter-GP. Typically you use Frost to stop Bronze, FW, or other timed GP’s. The best thing you can do during Frost is to drop a hill fort or two while his units are immobile (unlike Cease, you can do whatever you want during frost) and then smack up his most dangerous units such as siege or powerful myth so when he gets unfrozen, he has to retreat or fight with a weakened army. There’s not much you can say about frost because it’s very situation-based, but using it to push an opponent off a TC, stop his army from pushing on you, or countering a GP are the best uses. Dropping a hill fort only seals that land for you, so it’s just an added bonus of Frost.

Walking Woods: WW is both underrated and overrated online. It can end games, but it can also do virtually nothing to a well-prepared army. I always see players use it on trees by an enemy’s TC to hit their eco. While this is a crafty use of WW, it’s not always the best use because an enemy can have heroes around and all your trees will be owned in no time flat.

WW is best used in FH rushes, charges on fortified positions (if the enemy has no heroes, it’s pwnage, if he has tons, then your army will be more effective cuz he has less regular units then), or, while you’re attacking and holding an offensive position, you WW his faraway gold and he doesn’t have an eco to fight back. WW + fimbul + attack TC is almost impossible to beat on the first try because of the sheer mass of myth that still don’t cost you any pop slots.

Mythic:

Ragnarok: This is easily the most used Norse mythic GP so I’ll explain in more detail than the other GP’s. Rag converts all of your villagers and dwarves to powerful military units known as Ragnarok Heroes. Of course, the idea here is that the more vills and dwarves you have, the more powerful ragnarok is. I always see people getting mythic fairly fast and then ragging with 60 vills and their army and attacking. This army will be pushed back almost certainly by an opponent who is improving their eco more and waiting for a more powerful rag, because 60 vills usually will be faster and thus with less ups, while 100 vills will have all the ups and will have 40 more units. Never ragnarok prematurely unless you have no other possible chance of winning the game.

Combine Ragnarok with a large trade route and possibly fishing so you won’t have a dead eco as you pound your enemy with rag heroes. Trade routes and fishing also make coming back from ragnarok a lot easier because you already have a working eco in place, you just need to improve it really fast.

Rag is also made stronger if you combine it with a titan. Basically, drop your titan gate in a secure position and put as many rag heroes as you can on it. Send the rest of your army to fight and push back the enemy or hold your position while you build your titan. If your opponent hasn’t even gone secrets yet, then you have a very good chance of winning because rag + titan can push through buildings very fast and kill a titan gate with ease.

Rag + fw, as discussed before, is a very powerful combo and you should always try to achieve this if you have no direct need of FW in Heroic (although don’t be shy about using FW in heroic). Rag + fw can kill a titan but you will lose your entire army, and if he has his army there then you can’t kill a titan without your own, so don’t think it’s gg just cuz you have rag + fw stored up but no titan to counter his. Use rag + fw the same as regular rag, fw only makes the process much, much easier.

The main mistake I see beyond the preparation for rag is the actual use of rag. You can push with rag very easily into your opponent’s base, but if he has 30 towers + 10 migdols + 20 ca’s + mercs, then it’s not very smart to just charge in, is it? If you see that he has such defenses setup at one point, make sure you go secrets before ragging. You can also attack his other 2 tc’s instead of that heavily fortified one and make it 5 tc to 1. Wipe out his eco elsewhere, build up around that one point, and then attack with full force so there’s less of a chance of simply being slaughtered and losing the game.

Rag should never be used with hesitation. If you ever *retreat* with rag because you’re being slaughtered, then you didn’t use rag well (unless you’re winning uberly in several different spots) or your rag is lost. Combine your rag attack if you’re not sure you can win in one particularly tough spot, because splitting rag can always be a game-ending mistake. Splitting rag while attacking a TC on the side and hitting the main front of his base which could be weak is great, but if you’re not sure about splitting rag, don’t do it.

Fimbulwinter: Fimbulwinter is a great GP but is also a very wasted GP on ESO. It’s only useful if used in combination with an attack, because anyone can just hit townbell and fimbulwinter will do absolutely nothing. It’s main two uses are to disrupt his eco and to create military units in his base to attack his army, so in both cases, if you’re not attacking, you’re really wasting your GP.

The best time to use fimbulwinter is right as you hit his TC, hopefully with fw or WW. Fimbul stops his eco, so he can’t reinforce units, giving you a significant edge in any battle you fight during and a little time after fimbulwinter.

The trickiest and most chancy use of Fimbulwinter is to kill a titan gate. Unlike other civs, Norse have no direct way of killing a titan gate by means of a GP, and fimbulwinter is the closest you can get. Basically, wait until your opponent first drops the titan gate and then wait for the gong sound of him first starting it. As soon as he’s started it, it’s fair game to be attacked, so cast fimbulwinter immediately as he starts it. If you’re in luck, his vills won’t have done much to it and you will rape all of his builders. If he townbells, you could get *very* lucky and the wolves could decide to hit the very weak gate and destroy it. Since you’re attacking at the same time, his eco isn’t even working while it builds/garrisons, so you’ll get a small advantage there anyway.

Nidhogg: Nidhogg is only available to Loki but can be pretty strong if used in the right hands. Nidhogg is best used against enemy armies which don’t have many ranged units or ranged heroes in them. No ranged units = no attacking nidhogg, and 40 hack per hit can get quite devastating after a while. Keep nidhogg away from ranged buildings unless you plan on destroying those buildings very soon.

Nidhogg is pretty much a horrid GP if your opponent has units ready to counter him, because he is easily countered, moves slow, and has a weak attack if you can’t use him for a long time. Micro nidhogg heavily whenever you use him so when your opponent microes on him, you retreat, his units run, and your army is pwning throughout. VS an excellent microer, this trick won’t work as effectively and Nidhogg is best used to raid enemy gold, trade, or simply sneak up on enemy units, hit them, and run.

Nidhogg’s trickiest use, similar to that of fimbulwinter, is killing titan gates. Nidhogg does crush damage similar to a phoenix, but unlike the phoenix, he can be summoned anywhere you have LOS. If you prepare for the enemy as he drops the titan gate and starts it, you can summon nidhogg right on top of the titan gate. If you’re lucky, you can kill the gate in less than 5 seconds and get nidhogg away with less than 500 HP lost. Having nidhogg wait around behind the enemy base also works if your enemy is constantly reinforcing his army with ranged heroes and towers.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my guide and learned a thing or two from it. Special thanks goes to Josey for lending me his GP guide format