I believe the aspect new players struggle with the most in Hexarchy is multiplayer warfare. This guide to playing Vikings aims to demonstrate how powerful a streamlined aggressive strategy can be, and hopefully gives you more experience in the art of multiplayer combat. This is not the only way to play Vikings, but ideally you will learn the value in this specific strategy before going on to experiment with your own techniques.

This specific method focuses on complete and total hyper-aggression. You will be burning the majority of your technologies, while using agriculture to create a surplus of luxuries in order to play your unique Viking cards for free multiple times each turn.

Our main goal with this strategy is to burn the majority of our deck, leaving only 4 key cards remaining plus one technology. This will enable us to play Ulfhendars and then play Frenzy on them with 100% consistency every turn, leading to an unending tidal wave of berserkers starting as early as turn 3. Your ideal hand and deck should contain only 5 cards, and it should look like this:
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

1. Ulfhednar


Ulfhednar is the only miilitary unit we're going to be playing all game, and we're going to be playing it a lot, so get familiar with the MVP of the Viking army.

Access: Most civilizations need to research Mining into Masonry into Metalworking in order to access a reliable melee unit in the form of the Swordsman. One of the privileges of playing the Vikings is that you can completely ignore that tech route. You'll get Ulfhednar upon researching any step 2 technology.

Cost: Ulfhednar's main strength lies in its ability to be played for 2 Luxuries. In an optimal Viking game, you will very rarely have to play an Ulfhendar using hammers. This alternate cost enables us to spam it with complete impunity, as the luxury cost of Ulfhednar doesn't scale when you play it repeatedly in the same turn, even though the hammer cost does.This is also the case for Frenzy. The main reason the Viking strategy works so well is because a healthy supply of luxuries will completely eliminate the cost of playing your cards.

Embark: The ability to embark from any coastal tile is a very versatile effect. The main benefit is that it enables us to trigger our passive ability of drawing a card the first time we embark in a turn, further enabling us to spam our unique cards. For this reason, try to settle your cities adjacent to water if possible. Keep in mind that it always costs 1 hammer to embark, it's a very minor cost, but it can be bad if you use up your hammers prematurely.

Strength: Ulfhednar has a mediocre strength of 8, and even though it does scale as the game progresses, this is has very little impact. Ultimately, we don't care how powerful our Ulfhednars are, because we will be suiting them up with Frenzy to double their power.

2. Frenzy


Frenzy is one of the most powerful combat abilities in the game, and it's the reason that we can freely burn charge and mobilize out of our deck. It combines the most impactful combat effects, Mobilize and Charge, with the most useful promotion of +8 strength. It is by far the strongest enabler for complete unchecked aggression.

The earlygame encompasses the first 3 turns of the game. During this time, we're setting up our deck for world domination. The following cards should basically be burnt on sight. There are only slight edge case scenarios where I would consider playing one of these cards on turn 1 instead of burning it.

Burn Immediately.

• Firewood
  
• Warrior
  
• Strength
  
• Charge
  
• Scout

The following technologies should be burnt unless you have a tile improvement nearby you can utilize. If you do choose to research these technologies, burn every card on them other than the tile improvement card, and then burn that card once you've played it on all your applicable tiles.

Burn Conditionally

• Woodworking
  
• Mining
  
• Fishing
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• Settler

The timing of when to burn Settler varies from game to game. A general rule of thumb is that the more neighbours you have, the less Settlers you need, as you will simply capture your opponent's cities. I rarely play more than 2 Settlers as the Vikings. More can be viable however if you have an excess of food and/or a lot of empty space.

Above is the ideal tech path we'll be following. For this reason, settling our capital near pasture resources is more useful than other tile improvements resources, as we'll be researching pasture naturally. The best possible resource we can start next to is pigs, as we need food in order to fuel our population.

Animal Husbandry: This tech is primarily a stepping stone to greatness. Mobilize should be burned, as we will be replacing it with frenzy. However, you can keep it for a couple turns to play on your first settlers before you get frenzy in your deck, at which point Mobilize becomes redundant. If you have no tile improvements available, pasture can be burned as well.

Agriculture: Another intermediary step before the good stuff. Hanging Gardens can easily be burned, and I will only play farm if I don't already have a food resource tile. In that case, it becomes important to play one farm, as this enables you to increase your population from 1 back up to 2 whenever you need to play an Ulfhednar. The only time I would play Hanging Gardens is if I somehow have 2 stone early, such as through free resources from a hut.

Horse Riding: This tech is purely just to get Frenzy. Everything else can be burned, although feel free to make use of Maneuvers or Double Time if the mood strikes you.

Agrarian Society: This is the economy half of our game plan, these two cards enable us to achieve the pure beautiful spam of Ulfhednars that we dream of.

Winery


Winery is the first card we need to play in order to get the ball rolling. Winery can only be played on flat plains, which makes areas with lots of hills or forests generally weaker for your strategy. You can however place wineries on top of other resources such as Horse tiles which can be worthwhile.
Winery gives 3 gold yield to a tile, making it worthwhile to move your population to work it if you don't have other improved tiles nearby. The automatic worker placement seems to ignore wineries half of the time, so you will often have to do this manually. Also, despite removing the food yield of the tile, it keeps other yields such as gold and culture. This means it is more worthwhile to place a winery onto a tile that originally had a yield of 1 Food 1 Gold than a tile that had 2 Food. The end result is your winery will have +1 gold from the original gold yield.

Cultivate


Once we have our winery up, cultivate becomes the better option to play, although we will still continue playing wineries. It's better to stack lots of gold yield onto one single winery tile so that a population working that tile will yield a greater amount of gold. It also helps that cultivate costs a hammer less, making it generally more convenient to play. Also, despite saying '3 max', this card can actually get one winery up to 4 luxuries. What it really means is 'plus 3 max'.

So you've followed the tech path and your deck contains only the sexiest cards possible. Now what? Well, it's time for war. Warfare with Vikings is fairly straightforward. Play as many Ulfhednars as you can, Frenzy them, and attack. There are still some tips to streamline your play.

Forward Settle: One of the biggest drawbacks to this streamlined strategy is that we haven't researched Logistics. This means we don't have Barracks for additional movement range on our units. For this reason, we need to be very aggressive with our settlers. Aim to settle your cities within charging distance of your opponent's cities, meaning 3 flat tiles away, or 2 tiles away if one contains rough terrain (or 1 tile away. It can be done, sometimes).

Manage Food: In order to maintain our constant stream of Ulfhednars, we need to make sure our food resources are up to par. If your cities have plentiful food tiles around them, this will not be an issue. However when you are in a generally food sparse area, take careful note of how much food you need to buy and produce in order to reliably reach 2 population to pump out units.

Flank Attack: It goes without saying, but you should always be attempting to attack the same city from different tiles in order to get a flank attack bonus. One unique way to achieve this can be done using an Ulfhednar that is already adjacent to an enemy city. You can play Frenzy on an Ulfhednar that is adjacent to an enemy city, but instead of simply attacking the city, you can move it one tile to the side, maintaining adjacency with the city. This will cause the unit to move, and then charge into the city from a different tile. This is generally necessary against cities that have established defenders.

Embark to Draw: The first time you embark in a turn, make sure that you don't have Frenzy in your hand in order to capitalize on the free draw you get. Often an effective way to recur Frenzy reliably is to play your first copy of Frenzy on an Ulfhednar that you have played adjacent to the ocean; after it embarks, you will immediately get back the Frenzy you just played. This is also why it's important to burn Charge and Mobilize, otherwise they will muddy your draws.

To Raze or not to Raze: Your raze bonus as a Viking is very potent, so you should always be looking for opportunities to raze cities. However, it's also important to maintain a healthy number of cities to continue spawning Ulfhednars from, especially after you burn your settler card. Capturing a city can be very potent, as it enables you to immediately play a new Ulfhednar in the captured city, and then frenzy it on the same turn.
Usually the main reason to raze a city is that you are unable to defend it from counterattack by its original owner, or it is an extremely small city with no improved tiles. AI opponents will rarely counterattack, however human players will generally hound nearby cities until you have no choice but to relinquish them back to their original owner, so raze is a much safer bet. It's also worth noting that the more cities you capture, the more luxuries you'll expend on keeping their happiness topped up, which can negatively impact your economy.

Top up your Ulfhednars: Due to the extremely streamlined nature of your deck, it should be easy to repeatedly play one copy of Frenzy on your Ulfhednars every turn. You should aim to do so, as an Ulfhednar without Frenzy is very weak. It's worth palying Frenzy just for the +8 strength each turn, even if the Mobilize or Charge effect aren't relevant. Keep in mind that you can only play one copy of Frenzy on each Ulfhednar each turn.

Finally this brings us to our lategame strategy. The reason we hold onto Writing for most of the game is so we have a way to gain VP through wonders after we've run out of steam razing and pillaging our friends. It's optimal to hold onto Writing without researching it, as we don't want to dilute our deck while we're on the war path. Once you have gained a solid lead however, it's time to consider cracking open writing and plundering its contents for those sweet endgame VP that will sneak you over the 100VP line. It's ideal to use your hoard of stolen gold to buy Stone and Marble from the market in order to play these wonders cheaply.

One other noteworthy aspect of writing is that you can diversify your military using Catapults, Barracks and Expeditionary Force. Also Holy Warrior is a highly effective defensive tool against Muskets. Generally I don't think it's worthwhile researching these early on, as you will get more value out of having a highly efficient deck. That being said, there is a lot of versatility in how you approach each game, so these tools are always worth considering.

S Tier Wonder

• Arc De Triomphe: This is the best wonder to play, as it will probably be worth 8 or more VP depending on how prolific your murder spree has been. I generally consider this a must play wonder for Vikings.

A Tier Wonder

• Mosque of Djenne: This one can net a lot of VP, so definitely think about playing this if you've gained 2 or more Holy Sites. The main downside is that it is extremely expensive to play.
  
  
  
  
• Hagia Sophia: This is overall strong for maintaining your VP from hexes. However you can only realistically play this wonder with marble.

The Other Wonders
All the wonders in this list are more or less equivalent. There is some nuance to them, but for this strategy they tend to just be 4VP each, with negligible effects. I recommend simply playing whatever ones you have the right resources for.

• Statue of Zeus
  
• Temple of Diana
  
• Parthenon
  
• Chichen Itza

Hopefully by utilizing these tactics you'll find success in your multiplayer matches. I highly recommend trying this strategy out in single player first in order to get a feeling for the ins and outs. Generally the AI is very bad at warfare, and you should be able to easily roll the hardest difficulty AI without a sweat.

The main thing I hope you can learn from playing Vikings is the complexities of warfare in Hexarchy. I find that new players are generally unaware of the fact that they can lose their capital as early as turn 3. By turn 5 in this game, you should already be anticipating sneak attacks from your opponents, and any city near your own can easily represent a Charged and Mobilized unit bearing down on your doorstep. Good luck finding your bearing, and try to take the lessons you can from both your wins and your losess.

Finally, if you're looking for more generalized advice, feel free to check out my other guide on multiplayer strategy here.