[R&F] Civ of the Week: Norway

[acluewithout]

• Leader: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock (Harold) the Third.

• Leader Ability: Thunderbolt of the North. +50% Production towards Naval Melee Units. All Naval Units gain the ability to Raid Coastal Tiles. Gain the Viking Longship. Harold also has pretty fab beard.
  
  
• Civ Ability: Knarr. Units can enter Ocean Tiles at Shipbuilding instead of Cartography. Zero movement cost from embarking / disembarking. Naval Melee Units can heal in Neutral Territory.
  
  
• Unique Unit (Civ): Berserker. Medieval Melee Unit. Unlocks at Military Tactics (along with Pikemen, Huey Teocalli and pages and pages of posts about dead end techs and too expensive Pikeman). Doesn't upgrade from any earlier unit, and upgrades to Musket Man. Strength 40, Movement 2, Production Cost 160, Maintenance 3. Movement increased to 4 in Enemy Territory. +10 Combat Strength when attacking, and -5 when Defending. Also has pretty fab beard.
  
  
• Unique Unit (Harold): Viking Longship. Ancient Era Naval Melee Unit, that replaces the Galley. Unlocks at Sailing. Melee Strength 30, Movement 3 (and up to 4 in Coastal Waters), Production Cost 65 (halved with Knarr), Maintenance 1. May or may not have beard.
  
  
• Unique Infrastructure: Stave Church. Unique Building, which replaces the Temple. Unlocks at Theology, Cost 105, Maintenance 2. Grants your Holy Site an additional Standard Adjacency (+1) from Woods and provides +1 Production to all Coastal Resources for this City. Otherwise, provides +4 Faith, +1 Great Prophet Point, +1 Relic Slot, and +0 beards.

• Leader Agenda: Last Viking King. Hates you because you do not have a navy or a beard. Likes you if you build one boat. Mixed feelings about Gilgabro - lots of beard, very little navy, not sure about the donkeys. [...more accurately, likes to build a strong navy and respects Civs that do as well; does not respect Civs that don't build a navy.]

• Interesting links (or should I say "suggested reading list"?): What is the best Naval Civ (hint: rhymes with "Shmorway"); Archon_Wing thinks Norway is better than Spain and Egypt; Lily_Lancer also thinks Norway is better than Egypt, but doesn't give points for Harold's Beard; The State of the Combat Units (Post Spring 2018 Patch); How do you make Naval work? (one of mine, sorry); Faith, Holy Sites, and No Religion (me, again, sorry); Battering Rams at Sea; Samurai (and Berserkers) are Still Rubbish; How to Enjoy Norway (hint: it's the Beard); What is the Value of Naval Melee Units? ; Norway isn't Awful (and is still better than Egypt - note, Egypt has no Beard).
  
  
• Also, VIKINGS IN SPACE!!!!!!

Notes:

• I like Harold. A lot. It may be slightly irrational. That may come through in my comments. I can't work out whether I like playing as Harold as much as I like playing against him. He is hilarious either way.
  
  
• Horrible Hold-the-fort Horatio Harold's coastal raiding super power works for the Longboat, as does the %production boost for Naval Melee Units.
  
  
• You can use Coastal Raiding to pillage tiles, but also steal civilian units and pop goody huts. So, Hilarious Hannibal Harold the Third can sail around with his boats stealing builders and settlers and also grabbing goody huts from hard to reach places.
  
  
• Harold Bonus for producing Naval Melee Units, combined with Maritime Industries Policy Card, combined with Magnus, combined with Longboats, allows for some very powerful (and kind of shady) production overflow type shenanigans. Vikings in Space indeed.
  
  
• There aren't that many Civs with two unique units, which is a bit special. Everyone should also pick Gilgabro for next week. Then we can have two weeks of beards.

 

[Arent11]

• You can use Coastal Raiding to [...] pop goody huts.

Oh, I didn't know that, thanks for pointing that out!

 

[Leathaface]

Norway are very nice when playing on Archipelago/Island Plates maps, being able to settle distant islands before everyone else is sweet.

EDIT: Just noticed my post count is 666.

 

[acluewithout]

I like Harold a lot, and have been playing him fairly solidly since England got smacked with the nerf bat hard (well, playing them when I do play civ, which hasn’t been that much since R&F).

But Harold’s bad. Not unplayable, but just sort of, well, bad.

I really like the long boat, and the production bonus, but to get the most out of Harold’s longboat you’re settling coastal cities as your second or third cities and focusing those cities on all the naval eurekas instead of pushing your economy, which sort of pulls you off course.

The faith building is also a bit odd. It pushes you to keep forests, instead of chopping for mines, which I associate with a cultural game. But Harold is not really suited for culture. Or, you might have lumber mills if you have woods and low production land - but Harold seems to get plains hills when I play him.

And he’s hard to get a religion with. He doesn’t get any advantage getting a religion - which is totally fine. But then he has so much else to do (eg navy) it’s hard getting to a religion in time again without pulling yourself off course (again). And Harold doesn’t get anything unique he can use faith for.

And, it’s odd building a holy site to boost production.

The Beserker is great. I won’t replay the whole pikemen, medieval melee, can’t upgrade, military tactics debate. Others can have that chat. But the short version is that (IMO) Military Tactics and Pikes could be tweaked, but things here are “okay ... ish”.

The real problem with the Beserker is that he’s focused on raiding, and I’m not always still in the mood for raiding at that point.

... And yet, all that is sort of why I like Harold. He’s certainly not OP. He doesn’t have a straightforward strategy. But he has lots of different elements you can play with and try to make work. And frankly I just like the idea of playing vikings. It appeals to both my inner eight year old, and also my actual eight year old.

 

[Arent11]

By the way, how is coastal city capture post R&F? In vanilla civ, Norway could expand quite quickly by capturing coastal cities. But now that you have loyalty, capturing such cities maybe doesn't make sense anymore?

 

[Disgustipated]

By the way, how is coastal city capture post R&F? In vanilla civ, Norway could expand quite quickly by capturing coastal cities. But now that you have loyalty, capturing such cities maybe doesn't make sense anymore?

That's my concern as well. I haven't played them post R&F, but I will in a few minutes. I had a lot of fun with them on Earth maps and the like. But now I'm not so sure.

I'll probably just load up a continents game, it seems a bit cheesy to skew the game to give him the advantage. And all my Civ of the week games have been continents.

Earlier access to some areas could allow for peaceful settling, so that will be nice.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Norway was once known as the Aquaman of Civ 6, being only marginally more useful on water. I mean naval + religion? Come on. Now since that title's been passed to England, Norway does have a few gimmicks up its sleeve mainly due to Magnus galley chop abuse and they get a forest bias. Being able to enter the water more quickly with land units is also nice since they can attack from more angles, and also find people and things quicker, as well as settling those spots nobody can get to first.

The Stave Church is pretty irrelevant if you can't get a religion but you might be able to capture a Holy Site.

And.... that's about it. If you find an early relic or a religion, consider using your superior exploring abilities to find everyone, get some open borders and trade, thus getting ahead in the culture game.
.

 

[Disgustipated]

umm, ouch. Here's my start.

Spoiler :

I was looking forward to a really enjoyable naval game. I really should restart. But that hardly seems like a fair test of this civs abilities.

I really want to struggle through this game. LOL. Might as well be a generic civ at this point. I'll include my save if anyone wants to torture themselves with a non sea start.

Spoiler :

and a horse barb camp as well, this just keeps getting better. I'll call this my masochism game

 

[Arent11]

umm, ouch. Here's my start.

It looks as if there is a coast/river in the north. So in principle you could sacrifice 3 turns to move there, if the yields are good enough.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I like to play Norway, but only when I set the map settings in its favor. Archipelago, Island Plates, or the YNAMP Terra map.

I really like the Longships. I enjoy nabbing tribal villages, builders, and settlers and being the first to meet a ton of City-States. And if it runs afoul of some barb ships, it can decamp to the deep ocean and heal up.

I'm fairly peaceful, so I don't get much use from the 'Zerker, but it is good for hunting barbs.

I have mixed feelings about the Stave Church. The bonus production is pretty nice and the Faith is a perk, but you have to invest in religion, both at the city level and in civics, in order to take advantage of it.

 

[Icicle]

• You can use Coastal Raiding to pillage tiles, but also steal civilian units and pop goody huts. So, Hilarious Hannibal Harold the Third can sail around with his boats stealing builders and settlers and also grabbing goody huts from hard to reach places.

This is my favorite thing about this civ. It annoys me when you find that one goodie hut left in the game and it will take a land unit like twenty three turns to get there and you know either someone will get it first or you'll need that guy elsewhere, but you know if you don't send someone it will still be there and you won't have needed that guy in twenty turns. Norway just pops 'em!

Everything being amphibious is underrated, as is naval units healing in neutral territory. Really makes fighting all those dumb barbarians that are inevitably at every icecap less tedious.

Stave churches giving production to the coast is actually pretty nice too, but you have to have enough going on in religion to make building it worthwhile which is a bit tenuous. Berserkers should really be something you can upgrade to.

Not a great civ, but a pretty fun one, especially when waging war across island!

 

[BarbarianHunter]

umm, ouch. Here's my start.

I really want to struggle through this game. LOL. Might as well be a generic civ at this point. I'll include my save if anyone wants to torture themselves with a non sea start.

I started a game using your save with hopes of founding a religion so as to take advantage of the Stave Church’s +1 production per coastal resource. Unfortunately, it was the early game, and any site I could see that had a reasonable number of coastal resources was essentially a non-productive wasteland. Scratch that idea. So I went with the old standby…Science and the Colosseum. On the bright side, I built the Colosseum. Unfortunately, on the other hand, before realizing the AI would beat me soundly to the Great Prophet using +4 Golden Age bonuses, I built a useless Holy Site.

Spoiler :

I have popped exactly one goody hut with my fleet of 2 fabled Viking Longships. I have also managed to use one of my Longships to dispatch 3 barbarian Quadremes for the Americans as well (getting the +1 movement promotion)!

From what I’ve seen of the map, when factoring in loyalty constraints and garrison strength, any cities that are conquerable by my naval melee units are also rubbish. Maybe I’ll try Kaspi for the amenities.

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

Norway always seems to leave me uninspired.

 

[Disgustipated]

I started a game using your save with hopes of founding a religion so as to take advantage of the Stave Church’s +1 production per coastal resource. Unfortunately, it was the early game, and any site I could see that had a reasonable number of coastal resources was essentially a non-productive wasteland. Scratch that idea. So I went with the old standby…Science and the Colosseum. On the bright side, I built the Colosseum. Unfortunately, on the other hand, before realizing the AI would beat me soundly to the Great Prophet using +4 Golden Age bonuses, I built a useless Holy Site.

Spoiler :

View attachment 497341

I have popped exactly one goody hut with my fleet of 2 fabled Viking Longships. I have also managed to use one of my Longships to dispatch 3 barbarian Quadremes for the Americans as well (getting the +1 movement promotion)!

From what I’ve seen of the map, when factoring in loyalty constraints and garrison strength, any cities that are conquerable by my naval melee units are also rubbish. Maybe I’ll try Kaspi for the amenities.

Spoiler :

View attachment 497342

Spoiler :

View attachment 497343

Norway always seems to leave me uninspired.

I managed to salvage something of my game. I even got a religion. Had to build a holy site after my 1st settler (which I had to delay settling due to barbs). Finally got the barbs under control. I did not expect to be on a continent by myself. Quite the challenge.

I'm actually building Coloseum right now, I think I can get it. But I lost out on Taj Majal to France and Alhambra as well (I was building this in a poor city). Managed to get Potala and Forbidden, I generally beeline these somewhat after getting the basics first. Big Ben will be tight since Rome started it 2 turns before me in a better city I think. But I have the Great Engineer that can boost this that I'm saving if need be.

I actually built a lot of longships. I only conquered one city state of Carthage which wasn't far (once I got the tech to cross oceans) and no nearby cities to have to deal with loyalty issues. I thought about going after Rome, but as you noted they are poor cities, and already had 40 defense at this point. Longships weren't going to cut it. Conquering Carthage set an emergency against me with Robert the Bruce and Shaka participating. Only Shaka sent any troops which I dispatched with city walls, archer, swordsman, and longship took out an archer in the water.

So I could not take advantage of the Longships very much (though popped quite a few goody huts with them), and did not take advantage of Stave Church that much. I have built one because I only have one holy district. Which is the most I ever build in my games. I can't be bothered to build more. But perhaps I will later since Stave Church seems like it would be alright if you have a decent number of sea resources (my capital has none and that's the place that has it).

As you can see, very map dependent Civ. At this point they are pretty much at the bottom with Georgia with an F grade from me, but I know on some maps they can shine and I'd give them a C with a favorable map. We'll see how this game turns out.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Tried a King (for something easier)/Shuffle game and ended with this. That's not a bad capital... except only 2 hills and the entire landmass has like 3. But at least it was a water map.

I'm not going to even provide saves as it was kind of a bore. At the end my capital didn't even have 40 production and finished the Forbidden Palace at turn 200. But Norway's ability to meet everyone quickly was useful. Mostly came down to Magnus chopping some longboats before the land became crap and then I used them all to explore. But annoying enough I was like at 75% for a culture win for 100 turns though I guess I should have went to war but was too lazy for that. Later on I actually resorted to IZs for GEs but that still was no good. The only real good thing that happen was Petra.

Spoiler :

Exploring the map quickly!

CS Emergency helped and good it was coastal too.

Spoiler :

I'll probably try to roll a better map for them.

 

[BarbarianHunter]

I did not expect to be on a continent by myself. Quite the challenge..

I went with it. Didn't expand, and didn't war. Just didn't feel like it. Something about HH, just drains me of enthusiasm. I just sat there researching, and researching until the game ended. Here's the extent of my empire @ the end.

Spoiler :

As you can see, very map dependent Civ. At this point they are pretty much at the bottom with Georgia with an F grade from me, but I know on some maps they can shine and I'd give them a C with a favorable map. We'll see how this game turns out.

F. My victory screen sums Harold right about up for me.

Spoiler :

 

[KayAU]

This is how I see Norway's abilities in Civ 6. I'm assuming a map type where water and coastlines play a part.

Leader Ability - Thunderbolt of the North: This ability was faintly decent when it was just coastal raiding with melee ships. In peace time, it allows you to pop goody huts and clear barbarian encampments, although the latter requires a ranged vessel to kill the units first. In war time, you can do a fair bit of economic damage to an opponent who has his districts by the coast. Also, coastal raiding is fun, and being able to do it early in the game without the need for naval raiders is pretty nice. When this ability got buffed to include a good production boost to naval melee units, it went from faintly decent to pretty darn good. It also made the ability synergize very well with the Viking Longship.

Civilization Ability - Knarr: I really like this one. Being able to enter ocean early is thematic and potentially quite useful on the right map. Naval melee units being able to heal in neutral waters works well with sending your fleet of longships on far away raiding missions, which is again thematic and fun. No penalty for disembarking and embarking is surprisingly useful on maps with a lot of water, and works well with the recently buffed Berserker, making him more of the mobile coastal terror he was meant to be.

Civilization Unique Unit - Berserker: This one used to be somewhat bad, but got buffed in the last patch, and is now actually fairly good, and a lot more interesting than many might give it credit for. I generally like comparing it to the Knight. Unpromoted, the Berserker has 4 movement in enemy territory, which is what the Knight has (everywhere). If you get the Commando promotion, which is not too difficult, this increases to 5. Combine this with Norway's ability to embark and disembark without penalty, the Berserker becomes extremely mobile on enemy coastlines. In terms of strength, the Berserker has 50 when attacking (2 more than the Knight), and 35 on defence, which means a Knight can kill it pretty fast. This improves drastically with the first promotion, though, when Battlecry changes the numbers to 57 and 42, respectively. A Berserker with Battlecry and Commando is a terrifying thing. It is also worth noting that it uses one less movement to pillage tiles, which is both thematic and useful. Production cost recently got reduced from 180 (same as the Knight) to 160, upkeep is 3, just like the Knight.
The one big drawback of the Berserker, is that it must be hard built. I would love to see it changed so that it replaced the Swordsman, as that would make it one of the best UUs in the game. As it stands, though, with the reduced production cost, increased strength, and improved mobility for melee units brought by the last patch, this unit is now pretty good.

Leader Unique Unit - Viking Longship: First, I need to correct the original poster. The 50% production boost doesn't halve the production cost of the Longship, it slashes it by one third, that's just how the math works. Still, that is a good synergy, which makes the Longship an inexpensive and interesting early game unique unit. To sum it up quickly, its advantages are: Cheap, strong (5 more than the Galley), fast (1 extra movement point on the coast), able to raid, able to cross oceans early. Once again, this is a good unique unit, which is one change away from becoming top tier: if the Longship could attack into the coast, it would go from good to excellent. As it stands, it is another pretty good, pretty interesting unit which fits Norway's theme well.

Unique Infrastructure - Stave Church: This is probably my least favorite aspect of Norway. It isn't horrible, and the ability to get extra production from sea resources is good on its own, great if you combine it with God of the Sea, and amazing if you luck out and combine it with Auckland. The additional adjacency for woods is just odd to me, as extra faith doesn't really synergize with anything else Norway does or would be particularly inclined to do. Being a tier 2 Holy Site building is just a bit odd, and doesn't seem to merge that well with Norway's other abilities or theme.


Overall, I really like Norway, it is one of my favorite civs. It could be that I am somewhat biased, being Norwegian, but I find most of its abilities to be fun and interesting, and mostly fitting with the whole Viking theme. The two unique units are now both good, and just one buff each away from being top tier:

• Longships able to attack into coastal tiles
• Berserkers which replace Swordsmen

This would have made Norway quite powerful, and even more fun to play as. As they stand, they are certainly already fun, and fairly potent on a water map.

 

[acluewithout]

I’ve got a religion for Norway a few times, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. Instead, I think the way to play Norway is to use faith without religion eg to buy builders / settlers or military.

That bias for “no religion faith” strategy is why I find the Stave church so odd: it boosts your faith economy, but then also boosts hammers (in a round about way via fish tiles) and then sort of also nerfs hammers too (by encouraging you to keep woods). To me, you want to lean into one type of economy instead of mixing them up and losing focus. The stave church instead gives you very mixed messages about which economy to favour. That said, you can run holy site projects to convert production into faith... so maybe it all does come together in some way.

Berserkers are a great unit, particularly when you consider you can combine them with oligarchy. Whether hard building is an issue depends a bit on how optimally you’re playing. I think the Berserker is more let down by pikemen. When I play England, I get Redcoats at the same time as I can upgrade horsemen to cavalry, which lets me “rush” cav to support my (smaller in number) hard built Redcoats. It’s not really efficient to “rush” Pikes with your Berserkers the same way though, because Pikes are so expensive and aren’t really built for offense.

To me, Norway’s fun comes from encouraging you to explore early and raid all but a small group of allies. That’s different to the war capture war model (hey, there’s a thread about that), which is interesting, but you also have to accept this ongoing raiding strategy is not hugely optimal.

This focus on raiding though is what ultimately makes Norway quite weak. Their most natural victory condition is domination - but raiding doesn’t really get you to a domination victory. And then they don’t have anything else which is really directed at any of the other victory types.

I like Norway in a sense because they are basically “blank” for all victory conditions, but they still have interesting bonuses you can play with and use (even if those abilities don’t really help you achieve victory!!).

 

[Disgustipated]

Didn't they eliminate the nerf to bezerkers in a recent patch? My civilpedia is still showing -7 on defense. Which reminds me, I forgot to research military tactics, I need to do so asap. Getting era points has been difficult my game and I'm getting normal ages, not golden.

I had a lot of flat forest on my map, I prefer to lumbermill those and not chop. This has slowed down my early game considerably.

 

[Arent11]

Well, Norway plays quite differently from other civs:

(1) Instead of supplementing your initial warriors with archers, your main early army is longships
(2) They allow you to quickly take coastal cities/expand, settle uninhabited islands, pop all kinds of eurekas & inspirations, give you easily a first golden age (combine with goddess of harvest, magnus and monumentality)
(3) Later on, you can supplement them with an embarked army that can dance in & out of the shorelines, making it difficult to counterattack your units. The AI can not deal with that.

Altogether, I like the combination of ships & an embarked army. Norway is just special, they are not "bad" or "good", just heavily dependent on map settings.

 

[Disgustipated]

The thing about settling uninhabited islands though is the longships can't take care of the barbarian menace on those islands. And I got like no army lol. I haven't seen that many I'm interested in, but I may need oil later.

It would be cool if the longships could have both ranged and melee ability.