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.

And mind you, because you can't make mages, you can't even spend your overflowing gold (you can easily have 4000+ gold in your bank by the time the cap allows you to play the game) on labs to enable your troops to actually heal after taking a few provinces. So your units are forced to stop taking provinces because they have no way to heal except spend 2-3 turns moving back to the capital.

Hm. I don't know, I honestly feel like the nerfs have gone too far. Having the cap wake up at turn 8 practically makes the nation like Ubar in terms of expansion (since expansion is more or less over turn 10-ish in multiplayer, so you'd get like one or two turns of using your actual units to expand with before you bump into other players), but worse, because you can't even make any mages whatsoever for those turns. You can't spend your cap turns on anything at all, actually, because the scouts cost too much resources, so they'd be directly reducing the size of your expansion parties of the nerfed Mani Guard (and you don't actually make your sacred, because you can't bless them, and a single Keeper of the Gate could be 3 Mani Guard, who are better in expansion anyways). So you spend your first 7 turns making a commander every other turn and nothing else except the units. This puts you behind quite severely in terms of research compared to every other nation in the game.

That's weird, let me fix the commander and see if that helps.

Ah, I can't post screenshots here, but to be more specific I mean that I tested in V2 and V3 having someone attack my capital with 50 PD, and only the commander and 3 star throwers showed up. The other 10 melee giants on the PD screen didn't show up at all in the fight.

It's not completely gone, but it's expected you put in at least 20 PD points. However the lack of leadership is an oversight I'll fix tomorrow.

Is the PD supposed to be completely gone? Tested both V.2 and V.3 and in both versions only 1 Star Thrower per 10 PD shows up. Not that those troops actually do anything, mind you, because the Wandalaz commander has no leadership of either kind, so the PD automatically runs away.

You should not have PD outside of your capital but the mod command seems broken. I reported it, lets see if it gets fixed.

And since two rebalance passes they now lose against barbarians consistently unless you script for it.

Agree with Elephant Seal. Think there is lots of potential. Needs to be toned down since NONE of my troops died in the first two years. The PD is also way OP. Need to have a "militia" troop that could nerf the PD instead of giving hundreds of gold worth of value for so little.

Nice!

it's really funny to mass "archers" that throw fireballs at people
also commander jarl that comes free with PD does most of the work when enemies attack lel

Sure, it is feasible that in longer games with larger maps and more factions present or against very skilled players that they will fall off in the late game since I could only recruit from my cap, but it doesn't really matter because your own mages are also nothing to sneeze at.
If I was to make a suggestion it would either be to massively tune down the strength of your units, or increase their cost and upkeep dramatically. As fun as it was stomping everything its not something I would want to play against lol.

Awesome Faction concept and great sprite work. As for balance... Yeah I think its a bit busted. I played a standard map against some very hard AI and it was obscene how quickly I could expand and take over everything. A small army of these guys wiped the floor with everything from Throne Indie armies to full enemy armies. The only faction I fought and lost anything to was Muspelheim, but that's easily understandable since they have natural fire protection. I won that game in a little less than two hours while just mindlessly attacking regions.

Sure, it is feasible that in longer games with larger maps and more factions present or against very skilled players that they will fall off in the late game since I could only recruit from my cap, but it doesn't really matter because your own mages are also nothing to sneeze at.

awesome looking sprites! looking forward to trying

Yeah clearly porting the nation before the Dom Inspector was a mistake. I'll look into them. Certain things clearly didn't port well.

Oh, also, there is a national spell Ljostursar Fortress (blood level 8). This seems to be an error of some kind, given the nation.

The Call Down Strike Force spell also doesn't function atm. What happens is two battles, one with the warriors where they auto route due to not having a commander, followed by a battle with the commander alone.

Finally, in a test game the 'repair Svalinn' spell appears to do nothing, even with sunder Svalinn spell having been cast. I still got the water gem events, the water gem site did not appear to be removed, and I couldn't tell if anything happened with heat scales for the most part.

I'm a little unclear on what the effects of the Sunder Svallin spell does. Given that there's another spell purely to undo it that might benefit from a clearer description.

Also, it's somewhat unclear to me which giants are meant to have some amount of awe, or which ones are/aren't. For example, both the Stellar Architect and the star thrower have the line 'the sheer brilliance of their projectiles somewhat protects them from enemy attacks", but only the latter have sun awe (and stellar architects currently throw boulders, not stars).

Right, my bad. I forgot to update the itemslots of them. The old values are no longer valid and defaults to full slots. I'll push out a fix alongside some typos. Indeed haven't been able to reproduce the fort issue but I'll look a little longer.

Is the Idol of the Sun supposed to have full item slots?

The fort summoning spell works properly for me btw.

Hmm I'll take a look. Now the inspector is out it's a whole lot easier. And thanks, feel free to post any balance suggestions.

The Summon Ljostursar Fortress spell seems to be bugged, but other than that, great mod. The sprites are gorgeous.

cool look, will give em a shot!

They seem pretty interesting!