First of all, they have the most epic leader screens ever. Almost everyone else is chilling either in the palace or completely alone out in nature, exception of Askia, and to some extent Boudicca. Harald Blåtann, or the hilarious english counterpart Harald Bluetooth, is with his men in a vikingship, ready to plunder. When he dies, he says that you must have had Loke on your side. The Danish-Norwegian empire is magnificent, and I will tell you why.
Now to the gameplay. The fact that you only use one movement point to disembark is just plain unfair. Combined with the no movement cost to pillage, you can cripple the defender in one turn with only five units. How? When you disembark, you stillkeep the embarked movement. If you end the turn right next to where you plan to disembark, you get extra turns when you disembark. Let’s do some math, shall we? If you get, say, 5 movement as an embarked unit, you would have 4 movement, and four possibilities to pillage. If you have five units, you can pillage 5×4 tiles=20 tiles. That is enough to secure that the city will not produce a single unit while it’s under siege. It’s plainly just a walk in the park from now on.
The berserker is an amazing UU, it’s available earlier and it’s stronger than the unit it replaces. It’s extremely important to get these units, especially on Deity. They are just so strong! The Norwegian Ski Infantry is the most awesome unit in the game. I mean, they are wearing skis and shooting rifles.
What else do you want in a unit?
The extra movement in snow isn’t too useful, but the improved fighting in hills, as well as extra movement through hills, makes warfare so much easier. You can leave a city in shamles in only two turns with five of these bad boys, no matter how many hills they’re surrounded by, especially with the pillage on top of that.
Still, when I see every single tier list of civs, they are always ranked in tier 5 or 6. A lot of people put them in last place on their civ tier list, and for the life of me I can’t see why! Their unique ability isn’t just situational like some other ones, like Boudicca’s forest faith, yet Boudicca is rated as a tier 1 to 2 civ! I can see why the ski infantry is situational, but in every single game, there is one or two cities where you get pissed off because hills are annoying and pretty much hindering the victory.
This article was written in complete bias. I played against a friend with Denmark because he challenged me, and i whopped his ass. He’s normally a better civ player than me (Immortal player vs King and occasionally Emperor if I’m feeling lucky). Also am Norwegian, see flair and probably username too. Denmark is probably one of my favorite civs to play as now.
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