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Ginnungaheim

Thanks for the detailed and constructive feedback. I do think you're right about the MR levels. I's certainly something I'm taking into account for the next update.

As for a gold dump, I'm thematically more inclined to explore a version of the Mani architect assistant to keep the giants locked behind the big summoned forts and the capsite. Not sure the summonable version would be a good fit or if it requires a whole new guy.

As for the second suggestion, I'd like to propose making the Vala recruitable before the cap delay. This way you can recruit one to place down labs and temples to recruit indie mages and heal up severely damaged expansion parties.

I still would never recruit the Vala to research or fight anything due to having a cost efficiency worse than an Abysian Salamander, but at least this way you can spend your gold.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my earlier feedback, and I hope it's useful to you!

Giant units in the 120 gold range (like Solveigs) have 14-15 MR (Morvarc'h, Anakite, Rephaite, Muspel/Niefel Giant in ascending gold cost order), and giants in the 60 gold range tend to have 13-14 MR (Burning Ones, Gibbor, Garmhirdings, Gigante Warriors). Mages in the 300-400 gold range have 15-18 MR (Basandere, Thrymsgode, Gygja, Jotun Skratti, Cyclope Smith).

With those comparisons in mind I would argue that the previous version's MR values were quite fair in comparison to other units in the game.

Moving on to further feedback:

A nation of Never Heals units is both interesting and flavourful, even if it is annoying to manage at times (primarily because you have to manually check dozens of units to see if they're too damaged and need to get shuttled to a lab by Astral Command indie priests), so I don't think I'd immediately argue it should be removed for anything except quality of life reasons. Makes me wish the Nidhere army screen life counter could be used to view HP, though.

However, I'd like to suggest two things: An increase in MR is very much necessary to make the nation function beyond the mid game. And a way to reasonably spend gold in the first 6 turns.

Thus, I would indeed agree that delaying Ginnungaheim Ubar-style is indeed a reasonable measure to avoid having people get overrun by Solveig squads before magic is at least potentially available as a counter (much like Ifrit Warriors, who are similar in more than a few ways).

Without having played an actual MP game with Ginnungaheim yet (though I do know of a particular host who regularly creates new mod wars games, so I'm waiting) I couldn't say if the delay is long enough or should be increased even further, but I do think this is a great direction to nerf Ginnungaheim's primary issue of having too much tempo while letting the actual giants remain strong and fun to use.

Well, I do think I have to swallow my pride and admit I'm wrong about the expansion.

I did a few full scales expansion tests (big blesses are a bait for Ginnungaheim in my opinion) and I could indeed use parties of 12 Mani Guard (6 for weak provinces) and thus obtain 15 provinces by turn 8, which is inarguably good expansion by even the strictest of MP metrics, even without using an Awake.

I was afraid the Never Heals trait would cause effective attrition to be too high, and while I still wouldn't run Mani Guard into barbarians, the strong admin of your citadel cap lets you get enough troops to not get overrun and take too much damage to continue into new provinces, assuming your cap circle isn't complete garbage.

Furthermore, since the nation can take an awake god, and can recruit their sacred elite bonker even before the cap comes online fully (even if still wouldn't use them for expansion) they do actually have the tools to deal with a hellbless rush.

I don't think it's actually that bad. I could expand fine with just clusers of Mani guards. They're pretty damn hardy in the Early Age. However none of this is final, I'm open to suggestions. The 6 turn delay to the capital opening up might be to hard. It's an estimate on how many provinces can be captured using Jarls with a bless.

If the consensus is the nation is now underpowered but the delay is effective we can always look into giving the nation their old MR back. At least for the Ljostursar, the Mani leaned on their old shields to justify that and those are gone.

So you have a nation with merely okay to mediocre expansion, poor research due to vastly expensive mages, weak to rushes since you can't make a single mage before turn 8 (you're just done for if Vanheim marches Vanheres on top of your cap, without any recourse) and a crippling weakness to any MR-negates spells, to the degree that you barely have a late game at all combined with the research issue.

Well, anyways. I hope that my feedback was helpful for any further development.

Egh. I dunno, isn't it enough that the entire nation is so vulnerable to MR-negates spells that it's comical? The 13 MR of their primary mage, the Stellar Architect, is a full 4 points lower than the roughly equivalent, if still much cheaper Gygja with 17 MR. Solveigs, the primary reason to play the nation in the first place, are 432% as vulnerable to Soul Slay compared to a Jotun Huskarl (57.5 gold killed per Soul Slay compared to 13.3).

I get that Ginnungaheim has always been a hard nation to balance, but to me this is a nation that will stop being functional after the first 20 turns, because people can and will bring a mage for every 1-2 Solveigs (because 2 Solveigs both cost as much as a good mage and are rec-limited by your gem forts) you have and cast any of the many MR-negates kill spells and immediately disintegrate your army. It's not even Soul Slay that's the worst part, that would be Charm and Enslave Mind.

And in general, the new Mani Guard is just not a unit you will ever make after turn 7. Before, they had the benefit of high defence and MR to make up for being relatively lacking in damage, making them useful when fighting certain types of threats, like big astral or glamour nations. Instead you have a unit which would trade more or less equally with a Jotun Huskarl- except the entire lineup still has Never Heals. So why would you ever make the inferior Mani Guard with it's 10 MR when you could just make the better giants? It's reducing the amount of viable units in the roster.