So yeah, I picked up Nords.
The first thing to look at regarding Nords is their unique army rule, Blood of the Einherjar. This is an immensely powerful rule that mainly changes how your opponent has to think about assaulting a Nords army. In short, an damaged Nord model/regiment gets extra attacks, and a Nord model/regiment at half its starting health can fully re-roll all missed attacks in a Clash action. This creates situations where causing damage to a unit can actually increasing their output considerably; a 4 stand wide front line of a regiment with some supporting stands behind it that loses a single model loses no attacks and gains four due to Fury. A regiment could easily outright gain output by losing even a single model if that gets them below half their stands, making attacking them at all a double edged sword.
This ability is a massive increase to output as you lose models, letting damaged units function at much higher efficiency than other factions would allow. Where this really shines, though, is with Nords already extremely impressive monsters.
Jotnars have been a powerhouse in Nords for some time, to a point they’ve received multiple nerfs each and are still extremely effective. While a regiment loses an attack with each model that dies, a monster doesn’t, meaning a damaged jotnar, or valhalla forbid a half health jotnar, is *immensely* more effective in combat than a full health one. Given that they aren’t slouches in the defenses department, you have to really make the call on if you want to attack one at all if you aren’t going to completely kill it. An Ice Jotnar goes from making 13 attacks and hitting half on average, to making 14 attacks and hitting three quarters of them, which is immensely dangerous on a Cleave 3, Terrifying 1 platform.
Overall I find Blood of the Einherjar to be an interesting army rule that is fun to use, although it loses some of the unique decision making I get in Hundred Kingdoms, where the army ability can be picked based on the style of army you’ve constructed. That said, this ability individually is very powerful and literally any Nords army will get use out of it, and you get the fun of having your units become highly efficient and effective as they’re taking damage. While not to the extent of Old Dominion, mechanics like this that take the bite off the typically ‘negative’ experience of taking damage and losing your models, and actually make you excited about gaining new power as things die, which I can definitely appreciate.
Overall I’ve found Nords to be a lot of fun to dive into after my time with Hundred Kingdoms. The units are very different with a lot of exciting, specialized roles, having access to monsters at all (especially such strong ones as jotnars) is a blast, and the heroes, which our next article will dive into, are an absolute blast to wield.
If you’d like to pitch up a batch of Nords for yourself, or pick up any other Conquest goodies, make sure to hit up their webstore using the linked image below and use the code LOS10 at checkout to get 10% off your order! Thanks for reading, see you next time!
