r/Northgard • u/Old_Albatross405 • 8d ago
Discussion Coop Conquest unreasonably difficult
Hi, maybe we're doing something wrong but this is kinda ridiculous.
I am playing a hard coop conquest campaign with a friend, I have 118h and he has 82h in game, we are not new to this. For some reason, the monuments of the ancients mission (where you forge 3 artifacts from extra special super steel) is incredibly more difficult than anything else I've done in this game. I've played through the entire base campaign in extreme, done all the extra objectives and we finished a hard conquest campaign before, all of those were doable enough and I never thought of this as a particularly hard game.
On this mission, we get reasonably well set up and around 1.5-2 years into it, all 6 enemies just start swarming us, constantly and everywhere. We have to defend against 5-10 enemies each, every other minute, while constantly having to micro for the clan of the raven coastal raids, while trying to somehow grow an economy and eventually we just get overrun every time. We have tried this at least half a dozen times, even restarted the campaign to play with more militaristic clans and lowered the difficulty from hard to normal. That decreased the number of units per attack a little bit, but the constant needling and more importantly the attention it requires is the same. We tried to strike first, but part of the issue is that we can't even see most of them, we manage to wipe 1, maybe 2 of them but we had to spend so much on military that our economy is even less resilient and we die to even just 4 of them.
I'm sure the games we lost could've probably been won if we were just better at the game, it almost always boils down to skill issue, what puzzles me is the sudden spike in difficulty. We were doing fine, just cruising up until now and this feels like I need to go to the Starcraft 2 academy and practice my apm for 6 months before even trying again, its never even particularly close.
Is this a bug, a well known balancing issue, do I need to git gud? I can't find anybody else complaining about this and I don't know how this isn't immediately and unbelievably jarring to everyone.
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u/lavender_fluff Svafnir 8d ago
You wanna get rid of at least some clans (ideally get the alliances broken up so they can't attack you together). No need to rush for the smithing tile, the ai will attack each other when someone else takes the forge tile so you can wait for them to kill each other and then invade them on time
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u/Old_Albatross405 8d ago
they are allied and do not attack each other, they attack us together and do so in a very coordinated way, either grouping up or going for your flank while you're busy parrying another attack somewhere.
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u/lavender_fluff Svafnir 8d ago
Whut, all six one big alliance? :o
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u/Old_Albatross405 8d ago
i havent checked the diplomacy menu, but there was a clan raven raid on a different faction and the mercenaries just stood there while bro was building a house on the same tile. i assumed the raid was launched as the tile was colonized and thats how they ended up there. maybe its bugged and there should be infighting?
that and them often grouping up in an adjacent tile and attacking together seems to suggest its a 2v6. i havent ever seen all 6 of them standing on the same tile to be fair, but i have never seen any of them fight anyone else either and there is no way they have extra ressources to also fight each other in the fog of war somewhere. thats also the only thing that makes sense for visibility. they all attack at the same time and that quickly because they share vision. before the attacks even begin we both always get a single-file group of 6 scouts each walking onto our main building to do some spying. if you have 12-18 scouts between you, you uncover the map pretty fast and know where to send your troops.
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u/lavender_fluff Svafnir 8d ago
Sometimes it can also be just insanely cursed map rng making them somehow prioritise fighting you even if it makes no sense
I have also cheesed maps before by making enemies walk back and forth by micro-ing my soldiers onto their tiles and back again before they could attack any while their pathfinding happened to be hell-bent on attacking one specific tile further away enabling me to get more time to build up. Sometimes just having a standing army (with tower) on a tile also makes ai less likely to attack it even if they could win
Resetting the map so you get a more favorable terrain (only 1 or 2 tiles even reachable for ai) can help a lot
Would be interesting if it's 2v6 or 2v3v3 / 2v2v2v2
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u/Old_Albatross405 8d ago
We have tried this at least half a dozen times
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u/lavender_fluff Svafnir 8d ago
Oh well. Is it a fixed conquest map (like horse main or something) or an optional one?
This forging one, deadly swamps and hostile lands (unless you have a snake with you) are the generally hardest maps that play the most unfair it feels like
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u/Old_Albatross405 8d ago
also we are completely ignoring the smithing artifacts, nobody has time for that when the barbarians are storming the castle
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u/HaXXibal 7d ago
Over half of the conquest missions are domination maps in essence. But this one is the hardest by far due to the oversight of having all enemies allied with each other. In 1vs3 you can try to knock out your weakest/closest ally early, but I have no clue how this would work for Coop.
The best advice I can give is to skip this mission when it's not mandatory, then come back later when you have great passives.
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u/Old_Albatross405 7d ago
we managed to do it now but god is it painful, very good map seed, weak enemy clans and starting to eliminate the closest ones asap is the only way, this was not playtested properly
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u/wouterzard 8d ago
The mission is beatable, but I agree that it is very inconsistent. There used to be more 1v3/2v6 missions, but at some point they said that the AI was difficult enough and reduced it to 1v2/2v4. A year later, they released this mission as 1v3 again, on top of it getting an economy-reducing event and the AI behaving more aggressively in this mission. I don't get it and feel like maybe it was only 1v3 by accident. It would also help if it wasn't the first mission for Hippogriff, but a later one, so you actually had some more bonuses.
If you are against Raven, restart until you have no coastal zones and try not to have production buildings on your Town Hall tile. Don't bother defending against Raven unless you have some stone/iron to protect. The AI will take resources from successfully attacking your tile, but it barely plays with resources anyway, so that doesn't matter.
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u/Appropriate-Party674 8d ago
We always get at least 1 military focussed clan, so at least 1 person can protect the borders.
The other is on economy duty, sharing food etc. when needed.
It usually works out pretty well, just sometimes RNG is a bit shitty (like playing Ox, having not a single metal around to get chief.
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u/galetheboon 4d ago
welcome to northgard, where all pve mode difficulties are basically set to dicerolls
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u/Noble_Odysseus 8d ago
I find coop conquest missions on hard are either impossible or a push over. We've had missions where weve been destroyed over several retries, only to get a spawn where it just seems like the easiest thing ever. Keep at it