300 vikings

The limiting factor from having awful lot of people in a Northgard game is food. As you have more and more people, the food demand grows more than linear as a mechanic against snowballing. Here is a test I did by intentionally killing my people in the “capture all map” save. Don’t worry, I reloaded the save, so the genocide never happened:

Because of that, I realized that it would be impossible for me to reach 300 villagers with the wolf clan, despite having 240 on that save. So I started a new game (Huge, no AI, hard) with the goat clan, thinking that food won’t be their problem. As it turned out, it is still a hard limiting factor and I almost lost the attempt in literally at 299 people, because I got rats in the summer and then Blizzard in the winter:

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The problem is not food production, but food maximum. Even if I can fill the coffers at the summer, a nasty Blizzard winter can burn it down. As you could see, I had 1100 consumption, which means 16K food eaten during the winter, while the maximum capacity is 8500.

But luckily sickness didn’t kick in before the winter was over, I could blow a (free) feast and reach 300. Then I built the Altar of Kings to formally win the game. Here is the map and my summer productions:

As you can see, most of my people are healers. Why? Because food producing people are limited by food areas (farming land, game, fish), so I can only produce more food with villagers. But healers with medicine knowledge gather food like villagers, but their iron upgrade gives +15% production and if they are in an area with granary, its 20% bonus also applies, as they are specialized workers. So they can produce 5.5 food, which is great. The downside is that they stop doing it when healing. It’s usually not a problem as there isn’t much to heal anyway. Except when rats come. Sickness slowly eats away the health of the people, occupying healers for the whole duration of the effect. If I have so many people, I can get 30+ sick, which can take away most of my healers. When I saw the rats coming, I reassigned the healers to be villagers, but this still cost me production as villagers produce less and they produce nothing when running to buildings.

Could I go higher? Possibly. In the total map domination game I got more food areas: 10 farms, 8 game, 8 fish (26 total). In this game I got 4 farms, 2 game, 10 fish (16 total). The difference is that every player gets two guaranteed food zones near his town hall. In the domination game each 7 AI players got their guaranteed spots, now I only got mine and whatever randoms shown up. So first thing first: play against 7 AI, kill them all.

Secondly, despite their insane food production, Goats are probably not optimal for the project, because they can only colonize at full cost. With 16 granaries, I can have 8500 maximum food, allowing me to capture no more than what I’ve captured: 39 areas. The next would cost 8580. Sure, with 26 food zones I could get 13500 max, which would allow me to capture a few more zones. That’s important, because I fully built my land. Not a single building spot was spared. I had 38 healer buildings and 38 upgraded houses with only 39 zones. Ergo, practically every single zone had a healer and a home, leaving 1-2 spots for other buildings. Namely: 16 food buildings + granaries, 21 brewers, 9 money buildings, 4 woodcutters and sheepfolds. All other clans can capture more land, either because they have the -30% food talent or can capture with other means.