Haven’t been able to play Northgard much (just shy of two hours) but I get the general gist. Not worth $8 or whatever I paid, but would be worth around $3, I think. (It has a low production value feel, akin to Vampire Survivors or Defense Zone 3.) I’ll keep it, though, because it is kind of fun and interesting.
In a traditional RTS you spend resources to train villagers and then assign them tasks like collecting wood. In Northgard, villagers show up on their own, for free, at a rate determined by your happiness meter. The happier your people, the faster new people show up. So far as I can tell, you manipulate happiness by building a specific happiness building, which uses up villagers who could otherwise be doing something productive like being a combat unit.
Standard RTS elements include needing to collect food, wood and a third thing I forget (steel?), as well as having to build houses to cover all your people. Villagers won’t spawn unless there is available housing.
Instead of training people at each building – like warriors at the barracks – you send villagers to each building to take on that role. Two villagers max per building. So each barracks can convert two villagers into warriors, each farm can turn two villagers into farmers, sawmill converts two lumberjacks, etc…
The first instinct in such a scenario, at least for me, was “okay, two basic melee units per barracks, where can I fit 10 barracks?” But that’s the rub: The map is divided into smallish sections, and you can only build three buildings in any one section. You also have to pay an increasingly expensive fee to unlock each section before you can build on it. (20 food, then 40, 60, 80, 100, etc…) And use your warriors to kill any defenders, including hostile fauna like wolves.
The maximum buildings allowed seem to be four in your starting area, three more for each additional area, and any one area can house one additional building if you pay 100 food. (That probably increases each time as well.) In other words, you have to be very deliberate with your building choices. Especially since there are buff buildings, like a silo to increase farm production, that only buff buildings in that area. So you could theoretically have three farms and one silo in one area for maximum food production efficiency.
The tension is that there are a bunch of buildings you’ll want to build but not enough areas to put them all. Plus the fact that every increase in population requires more houses and farms and before even thinking about more warriors, healers, happiness dudes, etc…
TLDR: It’s kind of an interesting take on the RTS genre, but with a cheap feel. Not worth $7, more like $3. Or ideally free.
