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One of the most satisfying aspects of Frozenheim is the city building. Watching your settlement grow from a single Jarl’s Home into a thriving village filled to the brim with life never gets old. Throw in some military buildings to keep everyone safe, and you should be good to go, right?
Well, kind of. Frozenheim is not a difficult game per se, it’s just a game that rewards efficiency. You can build a hodgepodge village and it will probably do fine - unless you properly mess up and people burn you at the stake. As with most things, sort out the little things, and the big things fall into place.
Neighbourhood Bonus
Happiness is one of the most important systems in Frozenheim. The your higher Happiness, the quicker your population grows. This lets you assign more workers, expand at a faster rate, and recover from military blunders and defeats quicker. Happiness makes the world go round, and Houses are the foundation of it all.
Houses are pretty miserable by themselves. They have no happiness modifiers, they just exist. The moment you place another house nearby? Things start getting interesting. This is the Neighbourhood bonus. The more houses that are near other houses, the higher their Happiness - to a cap of three. Try and dedicate a medium-sized chunk of land to building up your neighbourhoods. Keep them away from resources and large buildings to make it easier.
Generate Even More Happiness
Neighbourhoods are all well and good, but that spicy +3 Happiness modifier can only get you so far. You are going to need to build more buildings if you want to make the most of the population growth. Thankfully, there are plenty of buildings that interact with houses.
Wells are the easiest to set up, but throw in things like Elder Halls, some Altars for Religion and an Inn, and your people will love you. As with everything, you will need to plan where you set up your houses and make sure you have ample land to place these additional Happiness generators. Bigger buildings cover a larger area but are also more difficult to place.
Effectively Place Production Buildings
If you want to thrive as a Jarl, you need to place your production facilities near the resource you want to gather. In some cases, like Fisherman’s huts, you don’t get a choice when placing, but for everything else? Location matters.
If you can place a single Collectors guild near multiple sources of Stone or Bog Iron (or a combination of the two), you can effectively harvest resources without having to place multiple guilds. The same goes for Woodcutter’s Huts. View these buildings as temporary, however, and delete them for better-placed versions as resources get depleted.
Building Facing Is Important
An aspect that is not well explained is the concept of building facing, and why it’s so important to the success of your village. Most buildings have an entrance, and this is marked on the blueprint when you are placing your structures. You always want to have your building facing in a way that reduces time spent moving workers between resources and the Jarl’s Homestead/Warehouse.
You can rotate your buildings by using the ‘R’ and ‘T’ buttons, and this gives you full control over your building orientation. Furthermore, you can move a building blueprint near another building and press ‘Shift’. This will snap the orientation to match the building it is near, and even snap-fit the building reducing the need to fiddle with the exact placement. This is especially handy when building houses.
Defensive Structures
Being able to defend your village is the true test of a Jarl. You can pour as much time as you like into building the perfect Norse Utopia, but if you don’t have a way to prevent the bandits and invaders from messing with you, you’re going to have a short career. This is where Defensive Structures come into play.
Watchtowers are the backbone of any unmanned defensive operation. A Watchtower can be set up, and they will rain arrows down on anyone who dares encroach on your lands. Multiple watchtowers can do this job even better. They even provide great vision, allowing you to spot enemies from further away. Keep your borders safe, and you’ll be fine.
Strategic Walls
Watchtowers can’t do all the work, and a dedicated attack force could break through your sentries and that just won’t do. This is where walls - or palisades - come into play. At the cost of a lot of wood, you can build these wooden walls to cut enemies off from your people. There are multiple ways to do this, but the most obvious would be to surround your village.
This would be a mistake in most cases. This is far too expensive. Instead, you want all of your important buildings - such as your Jarl’s Homestead - protected to prevent enemies from coming in and burning it down. You can also place walls in natural chokepoints, to block a valley entrance. Place Gates and Watchtowers and you can hold back most raiding parties without having to sacrifice the lives of your men.
Upgrade Your Jarl’s Homestead
If you want more land to work with, then upgrading your Jarl’s Homestead is the way to go. Each upgrade will increase the buildable area in which you can operate by about 10 percent. This, over four levels of upgrades, is a substantial increase. Throw in Clan upgrades, and that can go as high as 50 percent.
The more land you can build on, the more resources you can exploit, which allows you to build larger armies and more efficient production lines. If you can upgrade your Jarl’s Homestead, then there is rarely a reason to not do so immediately. The benefits are simply too great.
Expand With Outposts
Your village is undeniably a work of art - a production powerhouse the likes of which the world has never seen before. If you want to get spicy and increase your production - and therefore power - then build outposts. These are built using Settlers, which can be recruited from the Jarl’s Homestead.
An Outpost is like a miniature Jarls’ Homestead. It has a building radius, it has workers, and it allows you to set up smaller villages wherever you like. If you find a resource-rich location - by which we mean plenty of wood and minerals - then consider claiming that land. You can double - even triple your production by doing this, and it also gives you a greater hold on the map as a whole. Just don’t expand too far without protection.