Overview
This isn’t a manual: instead, I’ll talk about how to make the most out of the various interweaving game mechanics. This is a work in progress.
Intro
Northgard is a game that looks incredibly simple at first glance: you don’t have to worry about supply chains and there aren’t loads of different resource types knocking about. Indeed, there’s no resource processing – wood, stone, iron and food are gathered and used as they are. In this one sense, the game is like a traditional RTS game – but that’s pretty much where the comparisons end.
The complexity of the game comes from the fact that at any given time, there are 50 different things you could do, but you only have the resources to do one of those things. At it’s core this is a game about pure decision making. So let’s get informed on how best to make those decisions.
This guide was made with Hard mode in mind, which means things such as more dangerous wildlife and higher amounts of food consumed by citizens [still working out the full list of differences].
Resource Management
Unlike a traditional RTS, this isn’t a game in which you expand aggressively with the sole objective of beating your opponent. Instead, the first priority, always, is survival. If you overlook this, then you’ll end up dying off before you even encounter other players. To survive, you need to understand how to manage your resources.
First of all it’s important to understand how resource income works. None of it is tied to the position of any of your citizens: the number is simply calculated as a flat income based on how many of each resource-producing citizen is currently active.
Below I’ll talk about each resource in depth, in order of importance.
Food
This is the most valuable resource in the game: not only does it keep your clansmen alive, but it’s required to colonize new territory. As a match progresses, the burden of food becomes greater: your clan consumes more of it (due to the larger population), and subsequent colonizations cost ever increasing amounts of it. There will often come a point where the food cost of expansion is just no longer worth it due to how high it is, and you’re instead better off clutching the win. For this reason, every area you colonize needs to be a deliberate choice, and not just done automatically.
There’s also the option of holding a feast, which consumes a large amount of food in return for a short (1 month) boost to happiness and production. Like with colonization, the cost increases with each use, so it’s wise to save for when it’s going to be most effective. It’s also an important way to dump food in a useful manner when faced with rats and you don’t have enough silos – hold a feast (and otherwise spend as much of it as you can) right before the rats come to make the most out of what would otherwise just be wasted food.
Despite all these food sinks, you don’t necessarily want to overproduce it. Sure, you’ll never starve if you have a clan consisting only of food producing roles, but you’ll also never get anything done. There’s also a cap on how much food you can store of 500 (+500 per silo built). Balancing your production so that you have enough surplus to survive winter, and colonize key areas, whilst also having a large enough workforce to progress towards victory, is at the core of the game. So let’s look at the food sources.
Food is primarily gained from 4 sources:
Villagers: These guys produce 4 food, and are your most reliable source of basic food production. At winter this is halved (which means, on hard, the villager barely gathers enough to feed just themself), and they can only gather in areas that have either a house, your town hall, or another food building (silo/farm/etc). They only generate food when they’re idle – they won’t do so while building, move-ordered or fighting.
You can’t upgrade villager tools, so these guys don’t scale as well. The advantage is that you can have as many as you want.
Hunters: Hunters produce 5 food each. They’re also the best scaling food source, as not only can this amount be increased by upgrades (tools/building) and silos, but the tech “Sharp Weapons” further increases their production. In terms of raw production per citizen, these are the best value. Like all other non-villager food producers, though, you can have only a limited number of them.
Fishermen: They only produce 4 food, the same as gatherers, but the important difference is that they continue to produce the full 4 food throughout winter. This makes them pretty useless during summer (at least without upgrades), but during winter you want to make sure all your fishing huts are fully staffed.
Farm: Seems to be the worst of the food buildings. The same stats as hunters (5 food), but with no tech to improve production beyond upgrading the building and tools. Even costs 20 wood more to build. Still better than nothing, but no reason to choose this over hunters as far as I can tell.
(Heidrun also has the sheep farm building, but won’t talk about that here)
Summer/winter minmaxing
Given that, apart from fishermen, food production is halved throughout winter, the most effective way to minmax food income is to focus on food production during summer, and other activities during winter. For example, while your clan consumes more wood during winter, you can still produce it at full speed (outside of blizzards). So, all other things being equal, you’re better off cutting less wood during summer – instead having woodcutters gather food – and then having those gatherers chop wood during winter, or mine, or study lore, or anything else.
Of course, you don’t want to take this to an extreme – summer is a lot longer than winter, so you don’t want to spend all of it only producing food and not much else. But bare in mind the efficiency of doing this will pay off – if well balanced – over the long run. Getting a feel for how much food you need stockpiled to survive the winter is important so that you can confidently go about maximizing winter production without starvation hitting.
What you absolutely want to avoid is forgoing food production during summer and then running out of food in early winter. Even if you don’t lose anyone to starvation, the amount of workers you have to pull off of other important stuff (merchants, miners, lore, etc) just to break even on food means you’re losing out massively in other areas compared to just munching away on a well-planned stockpile.
Silos
For relatively little raw cost, silos let you squeeze out that much-needed extra food production to keep your expansion healthy. The main cost, really, is that it consumes a building slot, but there are many cases where it’s worth it.
First of all, silos are the only way to boost the food generation of villagers. For that reason, and considering all villagers spawn at your town hall, putting a silo in the same area as your town hall makes your villagers more effective. Try not to have villagers gathering in regions without one if one is up elsewhere – there doesn’t seem to be a cap on how many villagers can be gathering in a single area, so max out the bonus.
They’re also worth building next to actual food sources, and with the low cost it’s not so bad if you need to tear it down later on for a more important building (eg a tavern when you have nowhere else to build). An unupgraded farm with 2 workers will gain an extra 1 food from a silo, whilst a fully upgraded farm (building+tools) will gain an extra 2.1 food with 3 workers. Can’t really complain for 100 wood.
Enforced starvation
Your clan can actually survive surprisingly long without food, and you can use this to your advantage. The issue with starvation is that it leads to a vicious cycle and things can rapidly spiral out of control leading to mass deaths. Here’s what you need to know: If you’re at 0 food with a negative income, some amount of your population will start to starve. The amount that starve is based on how negative you are in food supply. On hard, each citizen (by default) requires 1.66 food. So if you are at 0 food and have -5 income, that means just 3 of your citizens are going to start to starve. Not so bad if you have a large clan. As that negative number approaches roughly the size of your clan * 1.66, though, you’re looking at wide-spread starvation, which can easily become a problem.
After a citizen has been starving for a little while (about a month I think), they become ill. At this point their health starts to decay and they need a healer to cure them. Ill citizens also work slower (20% slower), so widespread illness can see your carefully planned township grind to a halt, and make things very tricky. On top of that, you’ll suffer massive unhappiness, which means your town hall shuts down until the problem is resololved.
However, if you’re careful then you can let a bit of starvation happen to essentially cut corners with food production. For example, if your clan begins to starve in the final days of winter, assuming your summer food production is solid then you aren’t going to have many problems. So if you aren’t stockpiling food for a particular reason (eg expansion) this can be a good move to churn out that extra bit of wood/lore/coins essentially for free. Just make sure your healers are ready to heal up any illness, and that you don’t go too far into the red.
Market
This is useful for bail-outs when ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan, or if you desperately need to colonize somewhere fast. Not essential though, if you aren’t focusing much on coin production.
Wood
Wood is a lot less volatille compared to food – it’s a lot easier to manage, and really the only thing that can prevent you having enough is being forced to convert woodcutters into food producers due to food issues. Again, your food production pretty much determines your ability to do everything else!
There’s only one way to directly harvest wood, and that’s by building woodcutter lodges. Unlike food buildings, you can build woodcutter lodges anywhere you want (although max of 1 per area) However, there’s a decent bonus of 20% to wood production by building the wood cutter in an area with a forest, so this should be a priority. Each woodcutter has a base production of 4 wood, which can be improved through tools, upgrades, and also tech (sharp axes).
There’s two important things to bare in mind when it comes to this resource:
- There’s no reason to hoard it. If you have more than a few hundred in your stockpile, you should consider moving woodcutters away into other roles. Unlike food, winter isn’t super dangerous to your wood supply, especially later in the game, and as mentioned earlier there’s no production penalty for producing wood in winter. Even earthquakes, the only real danger to screwing you over with this resource, arrive with more than enough warning to stockpile. A large town across many areas still rarely needs to spend more than 200-300 wood to repair the damage anyway.
- There might not be a reason to hoard it, but that doesn’t mean there’s no benefit to producing more than you need. It’s easily the best resource to sell at the market, selling for more per unit than food despite being far less valuable in real terms. Here’s the thing: trading wood to a neutral player gives you 4 krowns per 6 wood, or 0.66 krowns per wood. A merchant makes a base of 2 krowns working passively at a trading post, but a single wood cutter – when supported by a trade route – is producing 2.66 krowns worth of wood. In other words, especially in the early game, producing excess wood should be seen as a source of money to supplement tradepost income. If you don’t need money or wood, get your citizens doing something else completely.
What happens when you run out of wood? Well it’s basically the same thing that happens when you starve: depending on how in the red you are, a number of your citizens will start to freeze. After a month or so of freezing, they progress to being ill, causing their health to tick down until they die. So, like with starvation, hitting 0 wood isn’t game over, but can spiral out of control if you don’t sort it out reasonably quickly. Having a couple of woodcutter lodges available to fill up with workers is normally enough to blast you out of wood debt at all stages of the game, though; provided that there’s enough food to support them (see how important food is yet?)
There’s two ways to reduce the amount of wood that is consumed for heat: sheep and tech. The tech comes relatively late in the form of Hearthstone (50% less consumed). This often isn’t particularly high priority as a single upgraded woodcutter lodge in a forest area normally provides enough wood for building, repairs and heat anyway (especially as by the late game you’re not using as much wood to build things as expansion slows down). It’ll free up a villager or two, though, so worth taking in some situations (such as when you have limited food supply besides villagers), but I haven’t really found much reason to beeline for it.
Sheep are much simpler, reducing the consumption of wood by all houses in the area. For this reason you’ll generally want to try and build your houses across as few areas as possible, so that if you do find sheep (or start with them) you can maximize their use (putting a single sheep in each housed area – they do not stack). You can also choose to slaughter the sheep for 80 food, but this should only be done as a last resort and/or if you have more than you need: they don’t respawn, and outside of the earlygame 80 food really isn’t much (not much more than a single tick of consumption by a large town). If you find your clan suffering from widespread starvation, especially in the early game, that 80 food can save a lot of lives. But remember not to use it until a good few people are already starving, but before they become ill, to maximize its value (see “enforced starvation” in last section)
Given that there’s no value in having an excess of wood, part of optimizing your build order comes from not overproducing it. Right at the start of the game, a lot of people might be tempted to build a woodcutter lodge immediately to get wood income ticking in, but remember: only produce as much as you think you’ll need in the near future. This isn’t a game where more building materials = more buildings: the limitation on how many buildings you can have per area means expansion is gated by many other things (food, army, map layout and other priorities). If you’re playing Starcraft you want your workers mining from the first second, and the only thing that really limits how quickly you can convert resources into units is supply. In Northgard, you convert wood into buildings in a much more sporadic way, which means your production of it should be more sporadic to match.
You start with enough wood to make a house, scout tent and woodcutter with a bit spare to let consumption tick down. Building two woodcutters in the earlygame is almost always going to be overkill, so to get the most value out of your investment – which is “only” wood, but more importantly it’s citizen work which could’ve been spent somewhere else – you first want to wait for your scout to reveal the adjacent areas. If you find a forest, then that’s where you want to put your first woodcutter (unless it’s guarded), and should be your first colonize. If not, colonize another area and put it there (leaving your town hall area as open as possible, because ideally you just want it to consist of houses and a silo by midgame). Yes, you get a partial refund if you demolish it to move it later on, but especially on hard that lost wood can still cause problems for your earlygame, particularly if you’re unlucky finding food sources.
From here it’s just a case of managing how many wood cutters you have carefully, so that you’re only producing as much as you need. During summer, you should be particular tight on wood production, as often a mere villager producing food provides more value than a woodcutter. By producing enough food during summer, you can then move villagers back to the woodcutter lodges during winter so that they keep producing at full capacity and counteract the additional wood consumption, whilst potentially producing a surplus to prepare for expansion.
That’s all there is to it really: produce as little as possible without making people ill and without slowing down your building expansion. If you get an earthquake warning, produce a bit more or just buy some from the market if food is an issue. Repairs are generally cheap.
Woodcutters are one of the production roles that have a bonus to combat damage, making them reasonably competent at fending off wolves (which attack stupidly often). For this reason, there’s another aspect to choosing where to put your woodcutter lodge: defense. If there’s no nearby forest then this might be the deciding factor on where to place it. If there’s a forest, this probably isn’t a big enough advantage to not build it in the forest, but it’s still worth considering. After scouting the adjacent areas to your starting position, it’s often possible to tell which unexplored areas have hostile wildlife, as wolves and such will poke their head out of the fog at the edge of the area. Woodcutters aren’t soliders, but it’s all about the small advantages.
Krowns
Happiness
Stone
Stone is pretty straightforward: It’s mined in limited quantities from the map, and is used exclusively to upgrade buildings on an individual basis. Despite that, there are a lot of tactical decisions to be made regarding it.
Getting stone fast is important, because the faster you get your town hall upgraded the sooner you can start putting down silos and taverns, which are essential for growth (the silos provide extra food production, the taverns let you grow your pop higher which means more food production, and the town hall upgrade itself increases pop growth). Note that both these two advanced buildings require no stone to actually build, so it’s viable to grab 10 stone from a quarry and then go back to producing something else for a bit. Doing this is particularly useful as it means you can wait until you’ve got the Mining Efficiency tech before mining the rest of the node (getting +50% from what’s left).
How quickly you tech to Mining Efficiency is going to depend on a lot of factors – there are a lot of key techs that you want to get in the earlygame, so you don’t necessarily want to rush straight for it, especially as it’s in competition with colonization to reach the next tier. But you also don’t want to mine too much stone without it, otherwise you’re missing out on being able to grab a lot of key upgrades earlier. Then again, if you wait too long to start mining stone en masse because you were waiting for the tech, your upgrades are coming later anyway.
Often the decision is made by your scouts: if you find there’s plenty of nodes in attainable areas, mining down a node here and there without the tech will help kick start your economy with upgrades. Then, by the time you colonize the areas littered with nodes, you’ll have the tech and no more problems being short on stone. Alternatively, if your scouts are only finding the odd node here and there, it might prove game-destroying to mine them out without the tech, leaving you with no access to stone outside the marketplace and 33% fewer upgrades than you could’ve had if you waited.
The other factor that goes into deciding whether to mine without tech: how badly do you need to upgrade certain buildings? If you had an unlucky start with only one food area, for example, you probably want to prioritize upgrading it ASAP because food is going to be a big problem going into midgame. Perhaps there’s really aggressive wildlife keeping you contained and shutting down your expansion, and rushing out an upgraded training camp is the solution. Basically, you don’t want to be mining without the tech unless you have a really good reason.
There’s always going to be some buildings you need to priortize over others, but these will change from game to game. Food buildings is normally a safe bet, though, even if you’re lucky and have multiple areas with deer, being able to maximize the amount of food a small group of citizens can produce means you don’t need as many villagers gathering, and have more flexibility to get on with victory conditions.
It’s not always the top priority, though. Sometimes you might get into an early war, or get constantly attacked by neighbouring wildlife, in which case you’ll want an upgraded training camp and healing hut as soon as possible. The upgraded healing hut is perhaps more important for these early game struggles, as it doubles the heal speed of your healers meaning that not only can you sustain yourself for longer, but you have fewer production penalties from lots of injured citizens, less happiness penalties, and more healer downtime in which they can gather food. One of the most crippling things in earlygame on hard is having half of your citizens constantly injured, as the waves of damage can come faster than your unupgraded healers can heal, sending you into a downward spiral of unhappiness and production penalties.
Upgrades tend to offer some area-wide bonus that is usually irrelevant, as the area is only limited to one of that building type. There’s one exception, though: merchants. You can build both a trading post and a marketplace in the same area, and both upgrades offer a +30% bonus to merchant krown production in the area. In other words, if you want to make the big bucks, make sure you pair these up so that they’re in the same area for maximum synergy.
Food unfortunately doesn’t work like this, as the bonuses provided by food buildings state that the extra production onlyapplies to the production of either grain, fish or meat, depending on the building. Villagers gathering in the same area as an upgraded farm don’t get any bonus. However, they do get a bonus from Silos, which can be upgraded for an additional 10% production, so make sure you have an upgraded silo in whatever area you have all your villagers gathering in (ideally your town hall area so that fresh villagers spawn into it).
If you’ve planned well and not been too unlucky, by lategame you should have all your key upgraded buildings. At a certain point stone becomes kind of useless, as you’ve not got anything important left to upgrade, and are no longer expanding enough to need a constant supply. At this point it’s worth selling off excess at the trading post, although if you’re in a fierce war with a neighbour you’ll obviously want to keep a decent amount stored in case you need to rebuild anything. Just remember that stone may be in limited supply on the map, but its usefulness is limited too. Don’t stress over colonizing non-ideal areas just to get stone when you don’t really have any major need to upgrade anything.