Building strategy as the Nervii?

[kpagcha]

Total noob here, playing my first Barbarian campaign as the Nervii with a hard difficulty.

I found this campaign challenging yet fun for the same reasons, and am finally managing to do a bit better. However the Barbarian buildings throw me off completely. I am so lost trying to figure out what to build, what to research, what are good building combinations in a province to maximize its bonuses while keeping food, public order, etc under control. I find the mixed civil and military bonus buildings confusing. I can't manage to reach a good harmony.

I read going military as the barbarians is a good idea so I rushed the Oathsworn tech and bad idea. My economy just can't afford recruiting and maintaining them.

Any advice?

Thank you!

[Alwyn]

Have you seen the Nervii building chain here?

You mentioned keeping food and public order under control. I haven't played much as the Nervii - someone else might be able to offer better advice - but I have played as the Iceni who have similar buildings.

For food, I rely on fishing ports and farms, as you would probably expect. If you are used to previous Total War games (before Shogun II) you might expect to upgrade everything to its highest level. However, that will cost a lot of food or public order (particularly for higher-tier buildings) - it's usually necessary to choose carefully which buildings to upgrade and when. It's worth bearing in mind that food is shared across your empire - it doesn't matter if one province has -10 food, if your empire as a whole has +20. (Unless another faction invades the regions producing your food, of course.)

For public order, I like the Horn Maker line of buildings (Artisan's Lodging, then Horn Maker). They improve public order, provide money and add garrison units.

You mentioned the problem of affording high-tier units. If you can do so, I suggest specialising one or more provinces to food production and producing wealth. As a barbarian faction, you might want to consider creating trade partners by occasionally using the 'liberate' option when you capture cities. In my experience, liberated factions are usually willing to trade and can provide a useful defensive buffer against enemies.

You mentioned going military as the barbarians. That makes sense; you might want to experiment more with using low-tier and middle-tier units, since they are cheaper. If you haven't already found them I recommend the Rome II tournament commentary videos by Maximus Decimus Meridius (on YouTube) as he provides useful tips on making the most of units. Even humble Levy Freemen can play a useful role, absorbing enemy charges and using their spears and precursor javelins to provide a defensive screen against enemy cavalry.

(I'm sorry if I'm telling you things that you know).

[RollingWave]

The Nervii start is probably one of the hardest of all faction (certainly top 3.) at the very start just focus on money, you'll barely be able to maintain even one good army anyway, and your positin is one of the hardest to get to a port so trading will be very sparse for a long time.

Oathsworn seems useless for them, they don't really lack good swords unit.

Once you get rolling though they're awesome, as one of the only Celtic faction with chariots if they can secure the horse resource they can easily produce gold cheveron chariots with huge charge bonus , combine with other gold calvary you'll run over a lot of armies easily and score huge kills.