TLDR: This clan requires micromanaging and opportunity cost, for very little (if any) benefit. They’re annoying to play, and feel weaker compared to other clans.
I’m writing this review in march 2024, Shiro might (hopefully) change this clan and this review may not be accurate down the line.
PROS:
You get Valkyries, which have 10 attack 14 armour and 75 hp (pretty strong). Though you can only have 1 (2 with a lore). And they’re also reasonably expensive, at 3 wyrd and 120 krowns. But they don’t require warband. Pretty good.
Valkyries and warchief regen in a zone with a horgr.
Your fishers are better (20%).
You can fish on the coast. So you’ll have at least 1 fish zone available immediately.
High-tide creates fish in zones with water without fish. Situational, but decent.
You have no downside of having negative happiness (wyrd) other than not generating new villagers.
You get ghosts as extra military units per horgr, but need negative wyrd (happiness) to make them spawn. The ghosts don't decrease your happiness while they're in your zones.
At 200 fame, any zone with a ghost in it has 15% increased production. Which is good, but is more micromanaging.
At 500 fame, some of the units you kill turn into ghosts. But as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t happen that often and they spawn back at your base and not in the fight.
The ‘Near the Sea Spirit’ lore gives you a lot of building slots and pretty good krown income, but requires you to have ghosts to then consume them to put high-tide on zones.
MIDS:
Troops are cheaper but slightly weaker than if you had the default weaponsmith. You also get a extra warband per military building. This benefit only really shines later in the game.
You get to see events earlier than other clans once you're at 200 fame, which is mostly useless apart from when there's a blizzard coming.
Valkyries can instantly colonise a neutral or enemy zone, but it kills the valkyrie and has a 12 month cooldown. It's very rarely useful in my experience.
The weapon upgrade for valkyries gives them either healing for units in the same zone while out of combat (it heals pretty slow, but is useful), or move speed and slightly more damage (not great), depending if your wyrd is positive or negative. The problem is, if you're actively engaging in combat, you probably want negative wyrd to generate ghosts, which means you don't get the healing.
At 200 fame you get free feasts when the kraken event happens, which is basically a useless bonus unless you have the clan's relic.
CONS:
Wyrd frequently requires micromanaging, or prior planning, which is a waste of time and effort. Only female villagers can work in horgrs, meaning you either need to make the effort to make sure that you have male workers in jobs that you’re unlikely to take them out of, and female workers available as villagers (prior planning), or when you try to put your villagers into horgrs and realise you had a bunch of male villagers, you then need to look around for females in other jobs and swap the males into those jobs to then have females go into the horgrs. And because the villager icon in your selected units are all male, regardless of their actual gender, you need to manually cycle through them to find the female ones. Or actually click on them manually in each zone.
Because you get benefits from having both positive or negative wyrd, you’ll have to swap people into and out of horgrs occasionally, depending on your current needs. Which then potentially causes the above issue to come up again.
High-tide mechanic is only a downside without the lore. With the Lore, it’s decent, but is annoying and has the opportunity cost of having to consume ghosts, which in turn means you need to spend time at negative Wyrd which you don’t necessarily want to be doing early game.
Without high-tide on a zone that's not next to the sea, colonization costs and building costs are increased by 50% and attack power is reduced by 30%! Why?
Have to micromanage having ghosts in zones for bonus production.
You don't get sailors. At all.
You get the 'knowledge from beyond' lore, which replaces the default ‘coinage’ lore. It seems like it’s only there to try and negate the downside of not having sailors. It's also on the same column as the high-tide upgrade, which is powerful, meaning you pretty much have to choose between them. It also 'reveals' neutrals by just marking them on the map, and not actually 'revealing' them by scouting the zones, which is stupid. It’s also missing the 'merchants generate 20% more krowns' from the default lore.
So this lore shows you where neutrals are, and to get any use out of it, you need to go and scout them, then trade with them, to then get a little bit of lore income from it, and less krowns than you’d normally get vs if you had the default lore. It doesn’t even show you what kind of neutrals they are before you scout them, and your enemies could just kill them and then the lore is useless.
The clan's relic causes the next event to be the kraken, BUT, it’s an ability on the relic and not automatic. So you need to remember to use the ability each year, on cooldown. So again, more micromanaging. So yeah I guess this relic is pretty appropriate to the clan. ALSO, if you think about it, at best, this is just an annoyance to the enemy clans and is pretty much the fame bonus from Goat clan but less flexible. And at worst, if they have a lighthouse on their main dock, you’re feeding them free fame because they’ll have sailors out during the kraken event.
If the devs read this review, I’d suggest a few simple changes to make this clan more enjoyable to play.
Just make all the villagers female. It solves the micromanaging problem while still keeping them thematically interesting.
Change something about the downside of no high-tide in inland zones, it’s too big of a downside for it having no default upside. OR give it an inherent up-side. Maybe replace the 15% increased production with a ghost in the zone to the same bonus but if the zone has high-tide. Which also means less micromanaging, two birds with one stone.
At minimum, the ‘knowledge from beyond’ lore needs something done to it. An easy change would be to get a free scout on the neutral faction zones and they get bonus defense while you’re trading with them (kind of similar to the Squirrel clan ‘rumor-mongering’ lore). Ideally though, I’d suggest changing it to not be reliant on neutrals at all, so something like your loremasters generate % increased lore when your Wyrd is positive, and your merchants generate % and trade routes generate % increased krowns when your wyrd is negative. Would that be good? I don’t know. You’d then also need to change the lore that’s available from lore stealing effects like snake clan, Endless tides would be a good substitute.
Just make the relic ability automatic. Realistically, you want this activated on cooldown. Maybe also give it the effect of being able to target docks that have a lighthouse, to negate the fame thing.
I don’t know what this clan was like before, but reading other reviews, it seems like the rework that was done a while ago wasn’t a good one.