I’ve been playing all civs at a reasonable rating and Norse is the only one that feels overly complicated compared to other civs. Learning any Norse build order is a headache of how much complicated the opener always is. Things that might contribute to the issue are:
Quite a few gimmicks during the openers of all Norse civs, such as chopping straggler trees, hitting herdables to gather favor, using Dwarves to gather wood and a couple of other unnatural stuff, making the transition from Archaic to Classical unnatural;
We have to constantly micromanage the production of 2 different types of workers and also micromanage their ox carts;
Favor generation is unreliable and unpredictable.
Of course stuff like favor generation have been that way since game was released and can’t be changed, but I strongly believe that Norse should have it’s opener simplified just like Atlanteans had with theirs.
Having different openers is good and I like Norse immensely. You are saying “you have to micromanage oxcarts”, but they actually move with the resources as long as you assign them to them, and are much less micromanagement than building traditional gathering sites since they always stay on top of gathered hunt or trees.
Also build orders that require chopping stragglers trees and such in archaic age, are only doing it to squeeze in 20 resouces at most. If you are struggling to manage your villagers, you are probably playing at level where those 20 resources don’t matter, and you might as well play in more comfortable fashion. Yes, Thor is slightly more difficult than other gods, but it is still comparable to egyptian pharaoh management.
I’ve spoken to quite a few players around my elo of 1200 mmr, norse mains and people who don’t main norse, and its a consensus that norse openers are far far more convoluted than other civs.
This video is the perfect example of what I am saying. This is the standard Thor build and notice the amount of gimmicks Magic needs to do to open properly in the first couple minutes. As I said in OP, Norse unreliable favor generation and complicated openers are the root of this issue.
I’ve had a similar thought, and I sat down to try to come up with a relatively more straightforward plan. I’ve recently come up with the Universal Norse Build Order, which you can use with any Norse major god. It requires some drop-off, but I think it’s fairly straightforward (especially after you’ve given it a spin). Let me know what you think!
Well it’s not so difficult but I would like to have a second rally point on the forum for the dwarf only, it could be more easy for sure than to have to manage everytime
